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/lit/ - Literature

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2618518 No.2618518 [Reply] [Original]

Say you were suddenly put in charge of completely revamping a school's English program. You can assign whatever novels/plays/poems/etc you like for 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th grades.

What would you choose for each grade and why?

>> No.2618526

"school is disbanded. Go home and browse /lit/ and find what you seek. Ron Paul 2012"

>> No.2618538

>>2618518
more reading.
1 grade - 1 books a month (appropriate size)
2 grade - 2 books a month (appropriate size)
3 grade - 3 books a month (appropriate size)
4 grade - 3 books a month (growing in size)
5 grade - 3 books a month (growing in size)
6 grade - 3 books a month (growing in size)

etc...
Those kids would read and write only.

>> No.2618555

I'd go to /lit/, and then just assign whatever works I see on the front page.

9th Grade:
> The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek
> All Quiet on the Western Front
> Contrast with Storm of Steel
> Journey to the End of Night
> Gravity's Rainbow
> Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

10th Grade:
> Troubles, J.G. Farrell
> Singapore Grip, J.G. Farrell
> Blood Meridian
> Peter Sotos
> Metamorphosis, Kafka
> Teatro Grrottesco, Thomas Ligotti
> 1984

11th Grade:
> Karl Marx
> The Bible
> The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas
> TAZ, Hakim Bey
> The Parallax View, Zizek
> The Subject of Anthropology, Moore
> Alexander Wendt
> Twilight

12th Grade:
> The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
> Temps Perdu, Proust
> A Dance to the Music of Time
> Lost Illusions
> The Red and the Black, Stendhal
> The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Guimarães Rosa
> The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector
> The Dream of the Red Chamber

>> No.2618556

>>2618526

Your karma for ironically adding "Ron Paul" to everything is for Ron Paul to be unironically elected to the presidency and the Free Market to decide that having you make fart noises in front of the Koch Imperial Palace is more valuable than whatever you're doing now.

>> No.2618552

I would force them to browse /lit, and read through the books listed in the Sticky. That would hopefully make them well versed in classical literature, and stray away from a degree in liberal arts.

>> No.2618558

>>2618556
>ironically

hahahaha

Ron Paul poops on you kid

>> No.2618564

9: All of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Donne, Lanyer, Speght, Herbert, Vaughan, Bunyan. All of it, no exceptions.
10: They can no move on to Blake, Burke, Hume, Johnson, Smollett, Sterne, Gilbert White, Austen, Shelly, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.
11: Arnold, Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Mayhew, John Stuart Mill, Whitman, Dickinson, etc.
12: Modernist stuff now, Joyce, Pynchon, Proust, Kafka, Stein, Faulkner, Beckett, Woolf, plus all the major modernist poets, (T.S. Elliot and company), and modern philosophers

I expect my new curriculum, will be the cause of an increase in high school suicides and high drop-out rates, but there's nothing to be done about it. This English program will be mandatory for all students wishing to receive a high school diploma. Kids will finally be reading again!

>> No.2618572

>>2618564
that would kill the fun in everything

imagine sitting in class having to go over this shit with your loser teacher every day

>> No.2618584

>>2618572
It'd only be a couple-three hundred pages of reading a day. I don't see the problem. The English curriculum will be expanded to take over all optional classes and extra-curricular activities. There will be pop quizzes and essays every week. Anyone who doesn't receive a mark over 75% has to retake the course.

>> No.2618587

>>2618584
>300 pages of reading a day
>high school

you may want to tone that down a bit

>> No.2618593

>>2618564

>Kids will finally be reading now

And even the kids who love reading now will despise it.

>> No.2618594

>>2618584
Aah the dream-world of an English lit fascist, with scores the children being forced to enjoyFinnegans Wake

>> No.2618601

>>2618587
On the contrary, I don't think that's enough to get through all the major English authors. Maybe 400 would be better.

This may come at the expense of a social life and fun, but I guarantee you the future generation will be well-read superhumans.

>> No.2618603

>>2618584
>>2618564

This has got to be a troll ... there's not way that anyone could seriously believe this to be a good idea ...

>> No.2618610

What if we applied the idea of laissez faire to schools?

No curriculum placed by the state, no direction from the principals. Each teacher would have free control over what they taught, with the possibility of crowding out those subjects that have less competitive teachers.

>> No.2618609

>>2618603
how do you correctly interpret anything?

>> No.2618614

>>2618601
>well-read
>superhumans
Pick one.

>> No.2618615

>>2618603
I'm dead serious. How else will we remedy the declining literary world. It has to compete with movies and video games. With this programs, kids will have no time for either of those. They will have no choice but to bask in the copious amounts of literary genius they will be ingesting.

>> No.2618619

>>2618564

Learn how to use commas you fucking piece of shit.

>> No.2618627

>>2618619
Learn to use commas, you fucking piece of shit.

>> No.2618634

>>2618610
it would be great

I've heard good things from homeschooled children. Everyone on 4chan should have been. fucking normals

>> No.2618641

>>2618634

I was homeschooled. I don't have the ability to love other people. My social skills are about as good as a rock's. I don't understand social cues, and I will never have a meaningful relationship (not strictly romantic either) with another person.

But hey, I graduated with honors!

I'll probably kill myself.

Don't homeschool your children.

>> No.2618647
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2618647

Not a native Englisch speaker here, so I don't know much about US school curricula.

But I would definitely assign more Romanticism, especially poetry (which, IMO, are the only worthwhile part of Romantic literature anyway).

What's the situation like in the US? Lots of Romantic literature being taught? All I can say is that in my country its definitely getting the short end of the stick, and that's not something to be proud of, as the motherland of Romanticism.

Apart from that - Beckett (!!).

>> No.2618650

>>2618641
If it makes you feel any better, you'd probably have ended up in the exact same situation even if you had went to a public school.

>> No.2618651

>>2618650

I'll never know.

>> No.2618659

>>2618641
I am exactly the same and I went to public school like the other guy said

all school did is wasted my time so I couldn't learn what I wanted

>> No.2618663
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2618663

Another non-native fag here.

How much translated lit do you read on English speaking schools? Interested because I for one haven't read one translated book in literature class ever. Some read Shakespeare, but that's about it. Curious b/c I see Kafka and others mentioned around here.

>> No.2618667

>>2618663
Some, not nearly enough tho. I for one didn't read any, but I know it happens.

>> No.2618668

>>2618615
>Children don't like something
>We shall force them to deal with it as the only factor in their lives; surely they'll come around!
Congratulations, you've just invented a generation of actual non-readers. Also, you cannot absorb meaning and fully appreciate a book, especially philosophy, at a rate of 300 pages a day.

1/10

>> No.2618674

>>2618647
I was in honors/IB throughout my English and here's my curriculum to the best of my knowledge

9th: TKAM, Romeo & Juliet, Of Mice & Men, other things I can't remember

10th: Things Fall Apart, Heart of Darkness, Macbeth, Chaucer, Lord of the Flies, Pride & Prejudice, Jane Eyre some other stuff I can't remember

11th: Fugitive Pieces, The Scarlet Letter, Antigone, Invisible Man, The Bluest Eye, Blood Wedding, Pedro Paramo, some stuff I can't remember

12th: Hamlet, Flannery O Connor, The Trial, some Indian novel about a woman called Dina-bai or some shit, other things I can't remember

>> No.2618690

>>2618668
I wasn't trolling, I was being sarcastic. The complete absurdity should have given it away.

The fact that you were "trolled" by something that wasn't even trolling must say a lot about your intelligence.

>> No.2618695

>>2618674
>>2618674

That actually seems pretty nice. Quantitatively speaking - we've read 2, maximum 3 books in a whole year here.

And yet everybody jokes about the US and its dumb citizens. what the fuck.

>> No.2618700

>>2618695
>here

where?

2 or 3 is what I read in murrica. maybe 4

>> No.2618702

>>2618695
Yeah. I'm leaving a ton of stuff out as well, especially in 9th and 12th grades. I never realized how much I forgot about the readings I didn't actually read.

>> No.2618707

>>2618668
>>2618668

I would agree though. I was forced to read Sorrows of young Werther('s) at 16. Practically nobody in my class liked it, basically nobody understood it. Nevertheless it brought me to literature and it's still one of my favourite books ever.

Kids don't have to like everything. They will actually despise ANYTHING they have to do, regardless of what it is. - Simply because practically no children are being raised intellectually nowadays (yes that used to be possible in the past), thus they will reject anything that has to do with work, and they have practically no incentive at learning/reading something intellectually worthwhile.

>> No.2618711

>>2618700


Germany. The land of "poets and thinkers", yeah obviously. Even now in university, it's a joke.

When I was preparing for my school exams, I had to read exactly 3 books for German class. Nothing above 150 pages. What a joke, seriously.

>> No.2618714

>>2618690
Not the guy you were responding to. To be honest, the meaning of 'trolling' has been diluted to such an extent that the word is used by people every time someone says or does something which is perceived as trying to deceive others and hide their true feelings or intentions.

>> No.2618716

>>2618711

You'll always have Goethe.

>> No.2618724

>>2618711
It's kinda sad that even America has a better literary output than Germany

Germany does have the best composers though, with Russia in a close second

>> No.2618725

>>2618711
>She squirms and wriggles, begging you, "Please don't cover me in cum again...I get so drunk and feel even sluttier afterwards. I don't want to be a slut!"

>> No.2618728

As some others have suggested, I would drastically increase the number of novels that the children were expected to read. *ONE* novel a year? Are you fucking kidding me, Canadian schooling systems?

This is why everyone is functionally illiterate.

>> No.2618738

>>2618725
explain

>> No.2618763

>>2618647
That's really unfortunate :(
I'd have thought being in zee Motherland of Romanticism an advantage, if only to get some Buchner and Holderlin in one's primary education.

>> No.2618767

>>2618690
Say what you want, but there are actually people that stupid and that extreme here. I was only on guard.

>> No.2618775

>>2618728

> *ONE* novel a year?

Is that actually a thing in parts of Canada?

Wow, Edmonton Public Schools was forcing even the non-IB students to read at least three novels, and I fully agree with them.

>> No.2618798

>>2618763
>>2618763

It's nothing but pitiful. I had to learn about anything but Goethe by myself. At the same time we're made fun of by university professors for not knowing anything about Kant or Hegel when we leave school.

For fucks sake, I had to analyze lyrics by Die Ärzte (equal to Blink182) in literature class. What the fuck.

>> No.2618805

>>2618798
yeah bruh that's public school for ya

in America we learned about irony from "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette

>> No.2618826
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2618826

>>2618805

lol. yeah. and "what if god was one of us" by joan osbourne in religion class. COME ON.

>> No.2618837

I'm taking English Comp II for a four week summer course and the required reading is a Shakespeare play, a novel, and some one-act feminist play.

That isn't a lot to me, but I'm kind of surprised they would assign that much for a summer class in community college.

>> No.2618838

>>2618724
I don't know, at least post-war, I think German(y) stayed competitive with their literary output. Thomas Berhard, Peter Handke, Celan until he offed himself, ect.

>> No.2618845

>>2618555
lol. how terrible this would be!

>> No.2618853

>>2618838

Agreed. After Bernhard, there's not much left. And he died in 89 (?). Ffs.

Grass isn't what he used to be either (putting aside hating on teh jews for second here). Jellinek up my ass.

>> No.2618860

>>2618610
Didn't England have Do As You Please schools? Weren't all the graduates morons?

>> No.2618864

>>2618641
Doubtful any correlation between you being a psycho and you being homeschooled.

>> No.2618867

>>2618860
>Do As You Please schools
I think there was just one, Summerhill.

>> No.2618869

>>2618663
Divine Comedy, Rubai of Omar Khayyam. All I remember. Might have been others.

>> No.2618872

The only change I'll make would be making it mandatory for the first 3 years of high school.

Then it's an optional thing.

>chem, physics, math, history, and a few more are mandatory until high school its over
>useless shit like philosophy, english, art are off after the first 3 years

Education level hits the roof and we explore space.

>> No.2618876

>>2618867
Summerhill. That's the one. I think I saw a documentary on it years ago and no one had anything good to say about the experience. Have no idea how objective documentary was.

>> No.2618885

>>2618876
That's depressing. It's one of those sky-in-the-pie things that sounds like it could work out well for all parties involved if it was done right.

>> No.2618941

I would assign all the grades 9-12 to watch movies all day long that way I save the well read students from having to show their power levels.

>> No.2619133

Remove all the mandatory nonfiction from the reading list. Remove all pomo, psychoanalysist, marxist nonsense. Then, i'd wud begin to look much better.