/lit/ - Literature

>reading 'Canterbury Tales'
>after every story the teacher would play a rap based on it

>>7246091
AP English 4, which was exclusively for seniors at my high school, assigned literary analysis essays weekly and read East of Eden, so maybe you just went to a shitty school.

>>7246120
Please tell me more about these Canterbury Raps

I had advanced courses
>>7246138
AP mostly

that were full of hard-ass teachers preparing us for college, giving us tons of reading, essays, and homework. Our ability to convey our thoughts properly and expand on deep themes and ideas was drilled into our heads every single day. Our classes were pitted against each other and rivalries formed, and our math/reading levels were college-level since 7th grade really
Then there's the general public, which rolls around in shit like you've described.

Sorry you didn't get accepted into the real classrooms.

>>7246146
>>7246120

>>7246091
men do not have the necessary qualities to teach anyone properly. Any good male teacher is an outlier

>>7246161
oh yeah?

>>7246164
All my best teachers were men, tbh.

they have a mandate to make sure every student graduates an academic curriculum while many students lack the intellectual ability or inclination (there's nothing wrong with that, really), so they dumb it down very considerably.

>>7246152
>went to normal classes instead of AP
>Still make A's in any literature class I take in college because it doesn't take a genius to critically read.

>>7246138
>>7246152
Woah, watch out for Ender Wiggin over here! His super-brain will show us all what's what!

>>7246164
>>7246169
THIS

male teacher best teacher

1)get respect from students
2)more organized and respectful classrooms because the teacher doesn't take shit from degenerates like your typical sjw female teacher
3)better lessons because men are far better public speakers are are not so easily distracted or offended.
4)usually a good sense of humor so the class doesn't feel extremely campy like it does with every female teacher.

>12th grade English honors
>the final project was literally a scrapbook of our favorite memories

>>7246173
>>7246178
calm down Tyrone, you too Eduardo

no need to project your feelings of insecurity on properly-educated folk

I took AP Literature classes in high school and it was nothing like that. There was a shit load of critical essay writing and analysis coupled with graded classroom discussions where we were really pressured to contribute substantially.

I went to a pretty typical public school, too.

>>7246191
Suck on my 5s on the AP, kiddo. Just because your 'advanced' English classes taught you how to read Cat in the Hat doesn't make you a prodigy.

>>7246198
yeah and I got straight As my whole life and I'm an engineer making 300,000k and hour with a hot wife and a beautiful white family.

stop lying Eduardo

>>7246197
It only seemed that way to you because you're a dumb fuck.

>>7246208
oh I don't know, experience? Personal preference? The fact that a man can control a room better than a woman? Because all of these things are relevant.

>>7246164
and you base this on what, exactly?

>>7246164
You're crazy, I can only see that being applicable in elementary schools. Maybe.

>>7246214
I replied to the wrong post.

>>7246184
I had female English teachers for most of my schooling. The one male teacher I had was a really cool, down-to-earth guy but he clearly didn't care that much about the subject.

>>7246091
>tfw libertarian lesbian teacher for senior english
>required reading was 1984, Escape from Camp 14, No Ordinary Man (Rwandan genocide bio), and the Alchemist
>V for Vendetta was required watching in class
>weird amounts of time spent watching TLC programs off of the projector

>>7246209
Did you have a bad day or something, pal?

>>7246222
That's part of the appeal. Male teachers are masters of making you go through this exact mental process

1)this guy doesn't give a shit
2)I'm gonna fail this test unless I give a shit
3)I have to give a shit because he's not going to give a shit for me

and then you perform at your optimal level. All my best teachers-all men-gave off a vibe of not giving a shit that forced the students to take control of their lives. Even common delinquents would become respectful and contribute to the classroom when it was a good male teacher at the podium.

>>7246152
The school I went to was so poor that they never even offered AP classes, except for AP English for one year. Even though I pretty much unilaterally failed my classes I was allowed in. Never did a lick of homework or a single essay and I still got a five.

>Read Canterbury Tales for 12th Grade English
>Have a discussion after every fucking tale about "how does this reveal Chaucer's views on women in medieval society?"

>>7246207
I have the oddest feeling that you're a student at Lehigh University.

>>7246236
Yesterday in History we were discussing the Indian caste system, and when someone asked why it was women didn't "rise up" against the system's bonds on them, someone unironically responded with "internalized misogyny".

>>7246236
>Wife of Bath's Tale
>the protagonist is literally a rapist
>at the end he's rewarded with a beautiful and loving wife
>mfw the level of SJW butthurt in the class

>>7246165
Oh, I put them in the wrong order. I meant to say that I also want to hear about them.

>>7246236
Our teacher made us write an essay about the role of women in Beowulf. It was torture.

>>7246236
But each tale is designed to reveal some trait or attitude of the character telling it, not necessarily of Chaucer.

>>7246268
the poeple who used too tell beowolf were hateing on womenn cuz there arent even a lot of femaele charactors in it and the olnly reely cool ggirl was grendals mom adn she was reely evil insted of good so thats why they hated women.....


a essay by: joel brennan grade 12

work cited:
-beowolf
-me
-my mom

>>7246164

That's absurd, all my best teachers were old men. Nearly all women at the college level would either go point by point through some online curriculum with no capability of explaining it, or spend lectures talking about irrelevant pop topics with poor humor interspersed.

They make great elementary and early high school teachers, but very rarely have I seen one handle advanced subject matter well.

>>7246222
Mr. Bassler?!

>>7246415
No.

>>7246091
Most American teachers are bottom-of-the-barrel state school education majors. Literally the dumbest, least curious (they studied pedagogy for four years. that shit is not interesting) people from the least prestigious schools, teaching the next generation. Education as a major should be abolished, tbh.

>>7246422
Darn.
He was a pretty cool teacher but he spent almost half the class chilling in the teacher's lounge. I spent more time in class arguing about Star Wars with the guy who sat next to me than working.

It's not much better in the UK unfortunately. But I can dream...

As someone who has previously taught in secondary school here in the UK (for non UK that's kids ages 11-16 plus sixth form 17-18) I had a glimpse into English teaching from a friend in the English department. I personally didn't teach English but I was working in the same environment. His views were that the entire method of teaching English was backwards, instead of doing tons of reading to gain a well rounded knowledge base then working out your opinions and dissecting the texts the students are taught a cookie-cutter approach to evaluating literature which is ultimately superficial and means nothing to the students when they're done. Apparently the reason the system is the way it is is purely down to being able to standardise any kind of test, rather than to give the children an appreciation for literature or a well rounded scope of reading.

My personal opinion (which, although my friend didn't 100% agree with for his own reasons, he still respected) is that English in secondary schools should not so much be taught as a means to an end (exam) but rather as almost a monitored leisure period. Students should be given a reading list of western canon texts and be asked to read either the entire work or, more likely, excerpts of the works, considering most children can't read particularly fast, have other things to do, and most canon texts are fairly substantial. Then the allocated time slots for English lessons are then used as class discussions about the texts.

1/2

>>7246461
The reading will be encouraged to take place in the student's free time and would roughly follow a reverse chronological order, starting with the more recent 'classics' seeing as teaching would start when the kids are 11 and they would definitely require more accessible books. Then as the students get older they can progress through more challenging books, or texts devoted entirely to philosophies (possibly) and eventually ending with the canon ancient classics as the students become adept readers. I realise this may be counter-intuitive but these are my ideas after conversing with my teacher friend over our views on the matter so they have been amended somewhat to better suit the reality of teaching children.

Examination would be more challenging than it currently is, however if you truly wish to teach literature then you have to accept this; you can't just whip out standardised tests (which are known to be unreliable when testing more abstract knowledge such as opinions on literature, which in most cases aren't even the student's own, but rather the 'official' opinions that the teachers are required to impart). My idea would be a short 1 on 1 session between the student and the teacher, the student is asked to summarise the text and answer simple questions on it's subject matter or actual content. The the student is asked to give a short explanation of their own views, whatever they may be, and a justification as such. The teacher can mark the student according to the validity of their views, their arguments for and recognition of those against and their understanding of the content itself.

Obviously I know instigating change on this scale, particularly with the educational-political complex as it is right now, is essentially a pipe dream but really I honestly believe that some form of change for the better is needed so I'll take whatever little steps towards it I can take.

2/2

>>7246152
This kek
>be dumb enough to do poorly in fucking middle school
>bitch on a weaboo lepidopterist forum when they throw you in the dumbfuck "pls dont drag down out rate of graduation" classss

>>7246273
This
Its like some people can't understand that a writer can write without using it to project his own personal beliefs unto to the reader.

>>7246188
Ducking Christ, this was called fantasia at my school. I rejected it, and instead turned in a very unsettling slideshow of myself in a child's astronaut costume holding up a toy spaceship. My grade dropped from an A to a C because I didn't follow the secret grading rubric that the teacher didn't show to anyone until my grades were finalised.

>>7246461
>>7246462
agreed, US schools have the same issue of focusing on passing tests instead of learning subjects.

>>7246852
post slideshow and we will judge

>>7246852
>>7246188
Kek we did one of these. One of my friends, who was an ugly as fuck short dude with a speech impediment but a wicked sense of humour, made his full of super awkward (like /r9k/ cringe thread stuff) from his childhood and super upbeat captions about how cool and popular he was. Girls and the female teacher gave him these pitying looks and talked about it behind his back like they just couldn't conceive of self-mockery, but most guys thought it was the funniest shit ever. Really wish I had some pages from it.

>>7246091
Sucks to be american
Some of my highs reading:
Madame Bovary
Poe shorts
Flowers of Evil
Candide
Crime and Punishment
The Overcoat
Inferno
Petrearch poems
Decameron
Anna Karenina
Hero of Our Time
Illiad
Metamorphosis by Kafka
Suffering of Young Werher
Hamlet
Midsummer Dream
Antigone
Oedipus Rex

A bunch of national literature.
No one except me read all of them in my class.
Still, feels good since I've had a good knowledge of basic by era literature from highschool.

>>7247082
I don't think you understand my man, there were only like 5 pictures and it lasted for 3 minutes. Shit went uncomfortable to funny back to really uncomfortable.

> AP Lit, highest testing public high school my coast of the USA on SAt and APs, everyone is fucking rich
> nobody reads
> teacher says that Harry Potter should be accepted on AP exam because of "dark themes"
> everyone gets a 5

Sorry your fives don't impress me

>>7246091
I feel bad that your parents didnt have citydata.com test result, median income, and tax info to determine the best school system and where they want to raise their kids. I know I did, and my school system is 7th in the state, and they place ivy in their first 25 positions.

I grew up in a "1" out of 10 school system, and only the first quartile actually went to college....

>tfw my school librarian would order books because I wanted to read them
best feel man

>>7247135
I read almost all of that in my shitty blue collar town honors program. AP was short story focused though.

>>7246268
>Not writing a brilliant piece on "women as the enemy" and positing Grendel as the beta male and Grendel's Mother as the matriarch destroying the heroic masculine.

Ah to be in hs bullshitting my way to a gentleman's B again.

>>7247179
Where? Stuyvesant? Thomas Jefferson?

>>7247187
In my case I lived in rural Alabama and the best options were tiny Jesus-freak private schools. Believe it or not, not everybody can just up and move without losing a lot.

>>7247213
I know a woman I went to hs with who is stuck like that in Texas. But presumably your parents decided to live and work in an area at a young age. And then decided where to have children.

I had this old, slightly psychotic feminist for an English teacher, who must have put at least 500 kids off of reading books in her decade at the school.
We had to cover five poets for our exam, and she insisted on spending a month each on Dickinson and Bishop, and two months on "her favourite poet in the history of forever", Sylvia Plath. We got folders of notes on feminist themes, and we had to cover Yeats and Larkin within a single month.

It was well-known around the school that if you handed her up a feminist interpretation of Lear or Gatsby, no matter how desperate and contrived, you would never get back less than a B.

I'm still in touch with a bunch of my classmates, some of them are very well-paid engineers, some of them are studying for their Masters and their Doctorates, but all of them still believe that Sylvia Plath is the greatest poet of the 20th Century, because that's what they were taught in school.

Guys, your opinion.

Is it better to paint your children's teachers to your kids as flawed, biased human beings and offer counterpoints with the garbage they bring home, or do you want to encourage them to respect their elders as presumably authorities in their given fields.

inb4
>having kids

We are discussing school after all.

>>7247250
>>7247234
Good example. If my daughter came home and said Sylvia Plath was the best anything literary in the 20th century I would deconstruct that shit as fast as possible, but my child probably would pay the consequences.

>tfw this happened in my home town

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20140502/NEWS04/140509752&template=mobileart

I am more offended by teaching Jodi Picault then I am by content

>>7247233
They inherited a very lucrative business, actually. Pretty much any other move would have resulted in way less financial security.

>>7247254
Plath is a paradigmatic writer calm the fuck down

>>7246461
>>7246462
>not going to a grammar school where actually reading and thinking about texts is encouraged

Of course comprehensives aren't going to run that strategy. Maybe 1 in 10 of those pupils would read the book, the other 9 would look it up on sparknotes. You can't get kids engrossed in something they don't want to do.

I do agree that the exam structure is bullshit though. Why not just make it all coursework? That would make a lot more sense considering all critical analysis of texts outside of secondary education is in a coursework style

>>7246236
had to do literally exactly this

>>7247272
Greatest
Poet
of
the
20th
Century

>>7246146
>>7246161
I'm not the OP, so I don't necessarily know what he was referencing, but I do know that one of my teachers would show the following:
http://music.bababrinkman.com/album/the-rap-canterbury-tales

>>7247250
This may be because I'm young but fuck letting my kids believe in appeals to authority. I want them to be the best they can and letting them think something that clearly isn't right won't help them.

If they want to claim Sylvia Plath is the best 20th century author they better be able to back it up and not with "because my teacher said so"

>>7247250
Children grow out of the "adults are infallible" at about six, so they'll have doubts either way.

I'm not going to let my children accept bullshit. I'm going to raise my kids to think about what they're told and what they read- asking for their opinions without punishing them for them.

But I'm also not going to let them flunk out of school, so I'll teach them to pander to the teacher, but to not forget their own opinions and to learn of their own accord.

Hopefully this won't fuck them up too bad.

But I'm legitimately terrified that my kids could be stupid and uncurious. I don't know if I could deal with knowing that my kids just don't care. What if they don't want to read? What if they don't want to learn? WHAT IF THEY GROW UP TO BE BORING PEOPLE?

>tfw my teacher junior year didn't even teach us literature
>class was literally about writing research papers and reading essays
>field trip was to play about le opressed black man in the 50s

>when it comes to English
Its not just english, its science, math, social studies, history, geography, etc

The only subject that we might excel is Art. The criteria for art is so subjective, its useless to base any information.

>>7246152
Yeah that's not how AP classes work. I went to a wealthy school and our AP classes were generally glorified Honors-level shit. The teachers tried, but when you're in a classroom of 30 students, at least half will be intelligent rather than extremely gifted.

What we should do is isolate the real smart ones. They're all that matters tbh.

>>7247331
>at least half will be intelligent rather than extremely gifted
Do you really think fucking literature is so intense that you need to be a legit genius to study it productively in high school? I have an IQ around 150, but anyone with a little motivation and an IQ of at at least 100 can contribute meaningfully to a high school lit class. I don't get anything out of rolling my eyes at them. Get over yourself, dude.

i remember 10th grade we were doing shakespeare and we were being taught by a young male student teacher and every 30 seconds of reading he would stop to say "OK SO BASICALLY [character] IS JUST GOING 'YOOO [paraphrase of whatever we just read'"

>>7247341
It doesn't, but a smart person can only get so much. They'll never be a writer, never be a researcher worth shit. They'll just be a good worker somewhere--so why bother teaching them with the best of our society?

>>7247331
AP classes were a waste of time anyway. They only serve to prepare you for AP tests, but anyone can learn the material on their own much quicker than in the classroom and sign up for the tests themselves.

This is assuming your high school was shit and the teachers uninspiring, which is true for most people.

>>7247346
How did you see your class as? Smart? Dumb? Average?

The teacher probably saw it as average if not dumb. He had to reiterate the points in order for others to make connection.

>>7247355
>waste of time
Here in amurrica they can save you a shitload of money

>>7247250
Teach them to respect actual authorities not to take things for granted.
The Roald Dahl school of learning

>>7247310
>But I'm legitimately terrified that my kids could be stupid and uncurious. I don't know if I could deal with knowing that my kids just don't care. What if they don't want to read? What if they don't want to learn? WHAT IF THEY GROW UP TO BE BORING PEOPLE?

Gonna be your own fault then bruh.
Nature or nurture, it's all you :^)

>>7247355
>>7247366
They only really let you sign up for AP tests if you'd taken the class at my high school, so it saved shit tons of money in the long run. I took 11 APs, and now I am graduating in 3 years, so it was more than worth it.

As for the teachers, some were good, some shitty. The good ones still couldn't do shit, though, because there were so many idiots who found their way into the classes.

>>7247348
I think it's fine in high school. It's good for people to be able to focus well enough to enjoy literature instead of TV and internet, if nothing else. A more educated populace is more likely to demand media that appeals to educated people, so that's a plus for me too. Additionally, since it's so hard to tell just who's going to be a quality artist (loads of artists are of average intelligence) it may make sense to hedge one's bets by allowing a lot of people to try it out.

>>7247384
Dude! Dude! Don't freak me out!

>tfw I remember my dad sitting in his office reading for hours in his love seat
>tfw being extra quiet so I don't bother him
>tfw I loved reading and I would sneak into my dad's office to find books because I was 6 and didn't have any books of my own yet and the first book I ever read was a book he read when he was a kid.
>that pure, incomparable feel reading as a child, just absorbing information at an insane rate.
>That pure unadulterated joy

>>7247399
In which case they should have literature based classes, not stick them in the accelerated classes and slow it down to make it even.

>private school in Europe
>read and translate Caesar, Cicero and Terence
>read Baudelaire, Zola, Flaubert, Rimbaud
>read Racine, Corneille
>read Camus, Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre
>read Goethe and Hölderlin
>read Shakespeare, Wilde and George Bernard Shaw
>extensive courses on geography and history
>advanced courses in mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry

It's too bad there wasn't any course on philosophy, though.

>>7246091
Ayn rand is not required reading in all of america

>>7247417
I'm also saying that AP Literature isn't a very difficult exam and the bar doesn't need to be sky-high to take advantage of the classes geared to it.

I was a National AP Scholar (8 exams with no 3s or lower and more 5s than 4s) and Lit isn't even tough as the APs go. Environmental Science is a total joke though. Apparently at a lot of schools it's geared to the dumb kids who can't handle Chem and real Bio and that dragged the rigour of the test down.

>>7247416
>>7247384
I'm excited to have a kid or two. My parents seemed to genuinely love raising us and I can't wait to introduce my kids to all the things my dad introduced me to.

>>7247442
Oh yeah, AP courses were fucking jokes. The only one I had any difficulty with was Physics C, because I fucked up and signed up for the wrong tests (my class didn't involve using calculus in our equations; the test did), but I still passed, which is saying something about the easiness of the tests. All the English and History and Math ones were absolute jokes.

>>7246152
I took 11 AP classes in one of the academically highest ranked counties (Fairfax in VA) and English classes sucked shit. Calculus and Physics gave me solid prep for college, but AP english did nothing.

But now that I think about it, wasn't there AP english and also AP literature, separately? Maybe that was the problem; I didn't take the lit class.

>>7246152
>Our ability to convey our thoughts properly
goddamn I needed that course
I'm not dumb, but I'm such a fucking spastic when I try to explain anything.

>>7246164
Most of the male teachers at the school I taught at flirted with the students and were lazy fuckers... even the ones smart and capable of being great teachers if they could give a shit. Also all dem coaches.

As an ex-high school English teacher, I apologize for those of you who've have bad experiences. Most of my fellow English teachers were absolute idiots. I pushed Animal Farm on my tenth graders when every other tenth grade teacher refused to teach it because the kids didn't get it, or because it was boring.

Fuck all, I teach at university now, at least people here aren't idiots, though the lazy ones are here as well. I just don't have to directly face them as much anymore.

>>7247179
I taught a couple of students in 101 whose AP teacher did jack shit and they all failed. Apparently it does happen.

>>7247460
Yeah one is 100-level comp and the other is 200-level literature. I think the Lit class may be more common. The school I taught at had dual-enrollment 101 and 102, so we never used AP for comp.

>>7246184
The best teacher I ever had was female, she was my English teacher in Senior year, and if it weren't for her I wouldn't be reading literature at all. She saw that I was more intelligent than my peers, and rather than forcing me to stay along with the class in excruciatingly slow and juvenile readings she allowed me read from her private collection and report to her my findings. That's how I encountered Waiting For Godot, possibly the most important book I've ever read, and that's how I found that my life had purpose and passion for something. For the first time, my life had meaning.

I will be forever indebted to her for that, for opening my eyes to something I had not seen.

>>7247460
>(Fairfax in VA) and English classes sucked shit. Calculus and Physics gave me solid prep for college, but AP english did nothing.

Same here. What school? Langley here, '14.

>>7246146
https://soundcloud.com/limy-p-raps/canterbury-tales-rap

>>7247742
lol faggot

>>7248649
got em' coach