My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, "I love this book, it is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced and you are going to love it as well. Pour over it with a fine toothed comb and write a series of essays explaining just how much you love this book and how brilliantly written it is. Don't forget to profess just how much you have internalized the morals it is trying to convey."
For some students this approach works. But for people like me it turns what is supposed to be a personalized reflection into a sterile dissection.
I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". No, you must profess how elegantly written it is and how you now realize that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals.
I am not knocking anyone who actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby nor am I actually dismissing what the F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to convey. What I am saying, though, is that the heavy-handed approach the English curriculum took in trying to make me enjoy this book had the opposite effect. In fact, I remember virtually nothing about it, despite having read it cover-to-cover and having written a series of essays on it.
I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything.
I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.
For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.
I've tried reading it maybe ten times. The funny thing is that I really enjoy it, I just inevitably put it down and forget about it. I have a hard time finishing books, though I don't have the same issue with audiobooks.
Would be way cooler to assign 2-3 different books and request a critical analysis of competing themes. Or pick you own book, get it approved by the teacher, and analyze that. But some of that is probably too much for younger students
In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though
The book How to Read a Book goes into how to read and evaluate multiple works this way. I'd recommend it to any high schooler, by the way. It also talks more generally about how to read and take notes effectively.
I agree, and the most enjoyable semester of English was one where the professor took this approach. The only downside was that the books to select from were limited and there were no non-fiction options to choose from. However my teacher did appreciate the effort I made in trying to persuade him to allow me to read Meditations instead.
Picking a book getting approached by the teacher then writing a book report has been how I was taught to read since 1st grade. After moving to the US for high school, being forced to read through the American classics was what killed any urges I had for reading fiction outside of school work
The problem is that a lot of the themes and topics in the novel simply aren't relevant to teenagers, and won't be for years. It's why English teachers love the novel and students almost universally hate it. My English teacher also said as much at the time: most of us wouldn't appreciate this novel until well after college.
We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that).
The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)
I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.
My take on it is that a halfway decent teacher will simply want you to notice those themes, not necessarily endorse them. For example, "this book explores the ideas that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. In this essay, I will explain why I disagree with these ideas..."
Personally loved to read until I had to do this to a river runs through it, which may be one of the most boring books I’ve ever encountered. Put me off course books for years.
I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.
"Love" is very loosely used here. The actual assignment is about meaning, plot, structure etc. You don't have to love anything to get value dissecting it.
This, parent comment is telling on themselves, they didn't understand what the class was teaching because they chose to be obstinate instead of curious.
Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.
Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.
When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.
I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.
Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.
I read it close to 20 years ago now, but my recollection was that all of the characters being unlikable and everything they wanted and did (basically, worrying about status) being uncompelling was kind of the point.
Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.
>Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.
That's because most kids are too dumb at that point to understand that reading has multiple purposes, and being entertained and liking the characters isn't what they are trying to teach you in higher level English classes. Teachers often make that point clearly, but students are often half asleep or just in disbelief that reading might have other purposes than to instruct or entertain.
My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text.
If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.
Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that most of the assigned books are chosen by the state, right? Obviously it varies a lot, but I can't recall any teacher actually wanting to teach a book, let alone having the freedom to choose just about anything.
Absolutely disagree. Well articulated analysis of books are generally accepted in high schools and colleges whether they are positive or critical. What you’re probably referring to is dismissive essays that brusquely say that the content doesn’t apply to them without providing a well researched reason. Those usually come from edgy layabouts that spent 10 minutes on the assignment.
From the article: It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience."
I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.
I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.
You’ve misunderstood the pedagogy of Rosenblatt. It is essentially what you describe.
Resonate does not mean mirror, it’s more like sympathy from a personal connection.
You need “resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience” in order to place yourself in the world of “Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly.”
The opposing school of pedagogy would ignore the personal connection and have you focus on style, structure, metaphor. etc.
On one hand I agree with you. But upon reading a bit about "Literature as Exploration" you mentioned, I can't help but agree with her point also.
Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
I read the Great Gatsby in high school. Or tried to. I may have resorted to Cliffs Notes. I can't even remember. I can't remember one thing about that novel, other than the title. The words crossed my retinas but made no impression beyond that. Just could not engage with it at all. And I liked reading, just not the stuff they assigned in English class.
That makes me very sad, it is one of my favorite books. I know an internet stranger is unlikely to convince you, but here’s my endorsement:
It’s the story of an outsider who gives up everything in order to join the “in crowd”, and at the end finds that it was all meaningless. I think this is impactful because it forces the reader (or at least, forced me) to deeply consider what _I_ wanted out of life, instead of what others want, or what seems conventional.
Wow. That’s a really important message. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that at all when I read it. I just read about some dude that wanted to party with the rich kids. And I was trying to pay attention and got good grades. The issue might be that I simply wasn’t emotionally intelligent at the time to understand, and I think that was the case for most of us. Or maybe just me…
I read The Great Gatsby recently for the first time and didn't enjoy it even slightly, probably because of its focus on status. Or maybe because I'm an engineer type from New Zealand? I decided to read the book because it's a classic, and occasionally I find a classic I absolutely love (often when I start with low expectations). Loved Catch 22, love anything by Steinbeck (although I would generally avoid US classic books - maybe due to my colonial background).
Many high school assigned kind of books are really difficult to experience well before you've had a little more life experience, Gatsby is one of them.
I read it a long time ago and like you have very little recollection of it. However in high school we also read Homer and several plays by Shakespeare and remember a lot of details - I think my English teachers did a great job of explaining the context and chairing our discussions about those other works. I was thinking it’s hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in high school but then the other works are separated from us by culture and centuries (though to be fair translations we read for Homer are each a work in themselves)
Homer and Shakespear at least have the advantage of being referred to all the time elsewhere. If you don't at least know the basics of Romeo and Juliet you're going to be confused many times (there's something called Romeo and Juliet laws, for goodness sake).
I can't recall anything referencing the Great Gatsby, but maybe they went over my head because I can't recall anything about that except that the Gatsby was apparently Great.
I remember I loved the use of language, but hated the entirely uninteresting plot & characters.
"Main character discovers that meaning in life can't come from external social success" is a great basis for a philosophy but makes a poor plot for a novel.
My daughter was reading a trilogy when this school year started; she had finished the first book and was excited about it. Unfortunately, her teacher this year demanded a lot of reading, and only from books she approved of, so my daughter never had a chance to read the other books in the trilogy. It's been an endless deluge of assigned books, some she likes, some she dislikes. The teacher made no effort to facilitate students reading things they were personally interested in. Sad. At least now that the school year is ending she can finally read what she wants.
2 Dudes. Girl. One dude becomes rich and throws parties, but is incomplete without Girl. Other dude (the main character, technically) works to make ends meet, but marries Girl. Rich dude connects with married dude to get close to Girl. That's the main motif at least.
A book about what happiness means and how and if you can ever shape and re-shape yourself to pursue it. Only the quote in the afterword really stood out to me, and I later learn that that's not even in the book; it's in the 50's movie adaptation:
>“There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”
The rest was more slice of life details about the roaring 20's. That quickly escalates when the Rich dude lends his car to someone else and he runs over someone. Rich dude takes the bullet in revenge when the husband of the run over person takes revenge.
I think you've missed a person in your account. The guy Daisy marries is not working to make ends meet, he's an old-money racist (Tom mixes up Henry Goddard, one of the most famous proponents of eugenics in the 1910's and 1920's, and Lothrup Stoddard's book _The Rising Tide of Color_ which inspired Adolf Hitler, but liked both, even if he can't remember who wrote what). Tom Buchanan is just as fantastically wealthy as Gatsby but in the understated old-money ways, contrasting with Gatsby's new money extravagance. Tom conducts an affair with a nearby, much poorer woman, but is enraged at the hint that Daisy is having an affair with Gatsby. The combination of his affair and his anger at the possibility of her affair is what drives the novel to its explosive climax.
The guy who is working to make ends meet is the narrator, Nick Carraway. Daisy is his cousin, which is why he gets to hang around these much more wealthy people. Of course, the way he is working to make ends meet is as a bond salesman on Wall Street, but at the time bonds were a sleepy corner of the financial system, it didn't become the ticket to enormous wealth until the 1980s.
Similarly, another reference that made sense at the time but is lost to the modern reader is the book's reference to Gatsby making his money in drug stores- that meant he was a bootlegger. You could get a doctor's order for alcohol so drug stores were legal speakeasy's. Walgreen's in particular did absurdly well under prohibition, growing from 20 stores in 1920 to 400 stores in 1930, on the basis of its medicinal whiskey, available to anyone with a prescription.
the good news is that the book is very short and an easy weekend read and also recently in the public domain. which may be prompting a bunch of online content about it.
I know this is kinda tone deaf to ask in a section about books, but: how was the Leonardo DiCaprio modern adaption? I read the book and was well out of college when it premiered, but I never had much interest in seeing it at the time. Does it do the book justice, or at least the much much older adaptation?
Similar to me, although I know I read the entire thing. The only thing I remember from the entire novel was in the ending. There was a "Swastika Holding Company" run by a guy who was vaguely Jewish, which was not an odd combination in 1925 but was absurd enough to be funny to me a century later.
It's really the difference between reading something because you want to and reading because you're forced to. If I had picked the book out myself, I probably would remember more about it.
You will be cursed with years of calling every pharmacy in town once a month to figure out which one has your medication in stock this time, and once you figure that out, you stay on the phone with them until you walk into the store to pick it up so they don't give it to someone else.
I have a radical insight on this topic: contemporary books and media are good and worth analysing and teaching to students. We are really biased towards old books for some reason and old books have this quality of being completely un relatable.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology - this would sit better with high school students.
We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.
I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.
But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare
> Game Of Thrones
I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.
"often some sort of depressing coming of age story."
I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented.
You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc.
A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.
>These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture.
This, we already lose a lot by not being familiar with the canon that well educated students were learning in the past, we shouldn't shrug off the more recent canon that we share with our parents and grandparents. It's the same reason a lot of irreligious people still take time to learn some of the basic stories from the bible, there is so much christian influence in our society that you miss out if you aren't at least a little familiar with the mythology that things are based on or referencing.
I think Game of Thrones is actually a great example of why we shouldn't be teaching Game of Thrones... I made a historical reference to Savonarola the other day, and when the person didn't know what I was talking about, I said "You know when the religious zealots in GoT take over the city..." GoT is really at it's best if you have an understanding of English history (War of the Roses, etc) such that you can pick up on where all of the references come from - I have no idea if Martin intended Savonarola as his muse, but my point is that historical references and books of the past are the foundation blocks of modern literature and cultural references, so I'd much rather see them taught, as the kids can pick up on modern lit on their own.
Yes, everyone I've talked to about this has said it's all contemporary literature now. One mother was telling me her son is bored in literature class because the books all have female protagonists now. Much like in modern movies, it seems some schools/teachers are trying to make up for there being too many boy-centric stories in the past by making it all girl-centric today. Unfortunate that they aren't trying to find a balance.
One thing that's popular in the schools in my area now could be called "death studies": taking a semester to read and write things about death, even visiting cemeteries and other death-related activities. While I'm sure some of it is very interesting and engages some kids who were bored by the usual material, it seems like it could be dangerous for some teens to spend a lot of time thinking about death for a few months. But the parents who've mentioned it all think it's "cool" and have no concerns about that.
Back when I read Dickens or Gatsby I hadn't read enough history to really understand what was going on because I'd was missing a lot of context that changed the meaning of events in the book. Gatsby could serve as launching point for learning about the history of the automobile, prohibition, traffic safety, attitudes towards Jews, New York development and geography, and a lot of other things.
In college, I took a history class called Shakespeare's Kings where we read through most of the Henriad. It presented post-hoc, editorialized versions of history (the plays) against how we currently see it. It's too bad literature isn't generally approached this holistically.
So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….
What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.
Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.
I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.
Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.
There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.
There are plenty of very good reasons I can think of to standardize a curriculum as much as possible, not the least of which is the demand you're placing on 25 year-olds being paid $40k a year. They can't teach what they don't know themselves and they can't reasonably be expected to read in a level of detail necessary to teach every book every individual student might enjoy and prefer being taught. They can, on the other hand, become experts on an accepted canon that stays largely the same year to year. You're otherwise recreating the JavaScript framework treadmill that everyone here hates so much but for people earning 1/10th the salary.
Back in my HS days, there was a lot of individual choice of books allowed. Effort was tested by writing of "book reports". I read much of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that way.
LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.
This is what teachers told me when my sons were in high school 2004-2010. Any mention of drug use, sex or race would result in complaints from a few parents.
There's an almost religious fight against "popular" books - they won't even consider thinking about reading the Lord of The Rings - let alone modern popular novels.
Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print.
You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.
Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.
>I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable
Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.
I don't think I've related to any other book more. When I was growing up my mom worked for a country club, and my dad was a mechanic who restored cars for the wealthy. They were divorced, so I would split my time between houses. My mom did a little better for herself than he did, so I was with her most of the time so I could go to better schools. I would meet the people who owned the cars my dad worked on, and I would go to my mom's country club sometimes and lend a hand. I was in a haunted house one year, and a part time caddy. Just constantly around this world, and those people, and their haunts, and their toys, and their kids, going to school with them. I understand this isn't all the book is about, but it spoke to the emotional experience of feeling like you have to change who you are and hide where you come from to try and fit in with people who can smell your station and may never (at the time, won't ever) accept you. I felt like I grew up in the valley of the ashes.
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
I was the dork who read every book assigned to me in English class, and proud of it. Of course, this stopped once I got to college. My CS course load meant that however much I enjoyed my humanities classes, the readings were the first thing that fell by the wayside. Still bums me out.
I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.
The purpose of school is to prepare students to pass whatever selection filter top colleges and universities employ. Schools dropping literature means higher education institutions aren't admitting students on the basis of literature knowledge. No point in wasting time studying something if it's not going to help students pass tests.
That could be offset if we moved away from standardized tests. I think I would prefer verbal exams and vibe checks.
Of course, there's a reason we don't do this anymore. It's a weird trade off between "incentivizing studying for test" and "probability of discrimination". And the big point of the last century was decreasing the latter.
I liked Gatsby in school, but I really didn't get it until living outside of America for awhile. To me it's the perfect encapsulation of the American experience: striving to escape the past while inevitably being pulled down by it.
This is, of course, the obvious thesis of the book. But it didn't really hit me until I looked at America from the outside, as this Thing existing with its own rules and ecosystem, separate from but still exerting a massive influence on the rest of the world. Before that point, it was a bit like a fish thinking about water.
Later I found out that Fitzgerald wrote most of the novel while in southern France, which makes perfect sense.
So if you ever find yourself as an American abroad – definitely read Gatsby.
Readit News
For some students this approach works. But for people like me it turns what is supposed to be a personalized reflection into a sterile dissection.
I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". No, you must profess how elegantly written it is and how you now realize that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals.
I am not knocking anyone who actually enjoyed The Great Gatsby nor am I actually dismissing what the F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to convey. What I am saying, though, is that the heavy-handed approach the English curriculum took in trying to make me enjoy this book had the opposite effect. In fact, I remember virtually nothing about it, despite having read it cover-to-cover and having written a series of essays on it.
I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.
In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though
We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that).
The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)
I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.
Both failed to elicit even a minor chuckle once it entered the classroom. Not from the students, not the teacher, and somehow not even myself.
I don’t know what how classrooms are so categorically destructive to the book they purport to teach
Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.
When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.
I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.
Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.
Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.
That's because most kids are too dumb at that point to understand that reading has multiple purposes, and being entertained and liking the characters isn't what they are trying to teach you in higher level English classes. Teachers often make that point clearly, but students are often half asleep or just in disbelief that reading might have other purposes than to instruct or entertain.
What kind of parent lets their kids use an llm to write an essay? It defeats the entire exercise and growth potential for the student.
You could if you have an exam.
If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.
I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn't imagine anything more dire than literature being reduced to a mirror reflecting back the (presumably young and intellectually deprived) readers sad little life back at them.
I was privileged enough to grow up in what I'll call the LeVar Burton school of literary interpretation: books are a window into a world entirely unlike your own where you can be Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly. What’s more interesting: every book being about being a dull little high schooler, or any book being about anything: Farm animals reproducing the Russian revolution, European nobles murdering each other over random points of honor, being totally psyched for war and finding out you’re a giant pussy, navigating the world of being a mentally unstable prep school girl in the 1960s... entire universes of totally inaccessible experiences made possible through the magic of the novel.
Resonate does not mean mirror, it’s more like sympathy from a personal connection.
You need “resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience” in order to place yourself in the world of “Zhuang Zhou dreaming he is a butterfly.”
The opposing school of pedagogy would ignore the personal connection and have you focus on style, structure, metaphor. etc.
Its cool to expose kids to new and interesting world views that they might not come across. But we really really need to validate whether making a kid read books like Moby Dick is worth it? Do kids really need to read intense books or just have fun? What good is introducing a book that is not relatable in the slightest?
To expand the window of relatability, another word for this is imagination.
It’s the story of an outsider who gives up everything in order to join the “in crowd”, and at the end finds that it was all meaningless. I think this is impactful because it forces the reader (or at least, forced me) to deeply consider what _I_ wanted out of life, instead of what others want, or what seems conventional.
The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.
And also about the indifference that generational wealth has towards amusing interlopers that provide fleeting excitement to their women
I love it and want these privileges
I can't recall anything referencing the Great Gatsby, but maybe they went over my head because I can't recall anything about that except that the Gatsby was apparently Great.
Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering more “careless people” as an adult.
"Main character discovers that meaning in life can't come from external social success" is a great basis for a philosophy but makes a poor plot for a novel.
A book about what happiness means and how and if you can ever shape and re-shape yourself to pursue it. Only the quote in the afterword really stood out to me, and I later learn that that's not even in the book; it's in the 50's movie adaptation:
>“There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you’ve never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start over again.”
The rest was more slice of life details about the roaring 20's. That quickly escalates when the Rich dude lends his car to someone else and he runs over someone. Rich dude takes the bullet in revenge when the husband of the run over person takes revenge.
The guy who is working to make ends meet is the narrator, Nick Carraway. Daisy is his cousin, which is why he gets to hang around these much more wealthy people. Of course, the way he is working to make ends meet is as a bond salesman on Wall Street, but at the time bonds were a sleepy corner of the financial system, it didn't become the ticket to enormous wealth until the 1980s.
Similarly, another reference that made sense at the time but is lost to the modern reader is the book's reference to Gatsby making his money in drug stores- that meant he was a bootlegger. You could get a doctor's order for alcohol so drug stores were legal speakeasy's. Walgreen's in particular did absurdly well under prohibition, growing from 20 stores in 1920 to 400 stores in 1930, on the basis of its medicinal whiskey, available to anyone with a prescription.
47,0000 words at ~250 words/min is 188 minutes, or just over 3 hours.
I think because it took us weeks to read in high school, that I have this sense that its a huge dense book.
It's really the difference between reading something because you want to and reading because you're forced to. If I had picked the book out myself, I probably would remember more about it.
You will be cursed with years of calling every pharmacy in town once a month to figure out which one has your medication in stock this time, and once you figure that out, you stay on the phone with them until you walk into the store to pick it up so they don't give it to someone else.
I got diagnosed at 19
I went from having never read a fiction book cover to cover to finishing DFW’s Infinite Jest
I still did remarkably well in English in highschool, because luckily reading skills =/= writing skills
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
I don't want to read a Dickens book or Gatsby, I want to read a book that is relatable, that I can understand, that I can have fun reading. Of course, it should not be too easy in which case there is nothing to gain from it academically. For example, a relatable contemporary book might cover contemporary problems like social media, teen angst, technology - this would sit better with high school students.
We need to think: why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter? What makes them an inherently worse choice than Charles Dickens? Game of Thrones certainly has intricate characters and a nice story line.
That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.
I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.
But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare
> Game Of Thrones
I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.
I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented.
You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc.
A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.
This, we already lose a lot by not being familiar with the canon that well educated students were learning in the past, we shouldn't shrug off the more recent canon that we share with our parents and grandparents. It's the same reason a lot of irreligious people still take time to learn some of the basic stories from the bible, there is so much christian influence in our society that you miss out if you aren't at least a little familiar with the mythology that things are based on or referencing.
I think Game of Thrones is actually a great example of why we shouldn't be teaching Game of Thrones... I made a historical reference to Savonarola the other day, and when the person didn't know what I was talking about, I said "You know when the religious zealots in GoT take over the city..." GoT is really at it's best if you have an understanding of English history (War of the Roses, etc) such that you can pick up on where all of the references come from - I have no idea if Martin intended Savonarola as his muse, but my point is that historical references and books of the past are the foundation blocks of modern literature and cultural references, so I'd much rather see them taught, as the kids can pick up on modern lit on their own.
One thing that's popular in the schools in my area now could be called "death studies": taking a semester to read and write things about death, even visiting cemeteries and other death-related activities. While I'm sure some of it is very interesting and engages some kids who were bored by the usual material, it seems like it could be dangerous for some teens to spend a lot of time thinking about death for a few months. But the parents who've mentioned it all think it's "cool" and have no concerns about that.
So I read Harry Potter (as an adult). The first book, it was ok. Then it went down hill. Harry Potter was or simply became a marketed franchise: Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, ….
What's even to teach in Harry Potter? Yes, reading it en masse is a YA shared experience but that's it. I've never heard a Harry Potter quote. OTOH, I noticed that Careless People alluded to and quoted Gatsby.
Relatable is overrated. Books should be challenging but not too challenging. I remember reading Animal Farm at the perfect age but 1984 a year too soon. I tried reading Catch-22 in 7th grade but didn't get anything. Later, I read it 24 hours straight my first week in college, cackling the whole way through.
I remember the assigned 'relatable' books if slightly. You will relate to this. That is the assignment. I remember them as characters being kind of my age, maybe even in my school. This is the reason I didn't like Catcher In The Rye. OTOH, Winston Smith was definitely not my age, definitely not in my school and unquestionably not me.
Relatable books strike me as engineered epistemic closure. I want to know what the author thinks, not what the author thinks I think.
LLMs, unfortunately, can write you a "book report" on almost anything.
Picking "old books" at least means you pick for some level of quality (usually) because they've lasted that long in print.
You also don't need to get kids to read Harry Potter; they're already reading that on their own.
Gatsby is a timeless story of class division. The upstart nouveau riche verses the entrenched institutionalists. You could write a version of it set in practically any time or culture.
Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for teens book that isn't boring.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
There has been a huge decline in American reading since this focus started.
Of course, there's a reason we don't do this anymore. It's a weird trade off between "incentivizing studying for test" and "probability of discrimination". And the big point of the last century was decreasing the latter.
This is, of course, the obvious thesis of the book. But it didn't really hit me until I looked at America from the outside, as this Thing existing with its own rules and ecosystem, separate from but still exerting a massive influence on the rest of the world. Before that point, it was a bit like a fish thinking about water.
Later I found out that Fitzgerald wrote most of the novel while in southern France, which makes perfect sense.
So if you ever find yourself as an American abroad – definitely read Gatsby.