[Iceblink]

There's just too much work involved doing what I want to do all by myself.

Here's the situation.

Yesterday, I had a disturbing conversation with my students.

Many of them think that the white kids on the other side of town are smarter -- not because of their learning capacities, but because they have access to better materials.... not computers, etc., but books.

Several of my students believe we read old (not physically, but in year of publication) literature because our school can not afford new stuff.

They believe that the white kids get to read exciting books -- ie. whatever they want -- while our school reads old stuff... Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.... anything old.

What I want to do is find the reading lists and/or syllabi from high schools across the nation -- especially those with high scores or those that generally have kids graduate and attend the best universities.

I also want to find reading lists from a wide range of colleges. I've found some, but I especially want them from colleges that have a lot of English requirements for general ed.

I would also like help in proving that it is important to have a good background in literature. Of course there are other things necessary, and I also know that it's important to look at multicultural lit, etc., but what they said about the discrepancy between the better schools and our school was disturbing.

Can you help?

Eep.

[EvanJ]

I went to a smart high school with several members of my graduating class going on to Cornell. In high school, I read multiple Shakespeare plays, Oedipus, Antigone, Dickens's Great Expectations. The university I went to offered two complete courses just on Shakespeare. Literature being old doesn't make it bad. It's not like science where the science that was taught when Shakespeare was alive could be out-of-date and/or proven wrong today. I can't help you by providing syllabi, but I understand your problem and I hope my post helps.

P.S. Here's some books/stories I liked and din't like in high school:

Liked: Death of a Salesman, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Great Gatsby, To Kill A Mockingbird
Didn't like: The Catcher in the Rye, Ethan Frome, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[minorthreat]

I went to a private school in one of the wealthiest parts of New Jersey - and, by extension, one of the wealthiest parts of the entire US. Here's the reading list from that school (although this is purely from memory, so I'm bound to leave one or two things out).

9th grade: To Kill A Mockingbird, Our Town, Macbeth, Huckleberry Finn

10th grade: Othello, Catcher in the Rye, Native Son, Oedipus Rex, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire

11th grade: Twelfth Night, Waiting for Godot, Dubliners, Frankenstein, The Trojan Women, Medea, Lysistrata

12th grade: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, To the Lighthouse, Death Comes For The Archbishop, The Sun Also Rises

As you can see, a lot of 'old stuff' in there.

[Demosthenes]

My high school made the US News & World Report list of the 100 best public high schools in the country. I think we were number 81 or 82. The school is in a very wealthy, mostly white area just north of San Diego.

From memory...

9th Grade: Antigone, the Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities, All Quiet on the Western Front, Lord of the Flies, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

10th Grade: the Catcher in the Rye, Anna Karenina, the Stranger, the Color Purple

11th Grade: Huck Finn, Black Boy (or maybe it was Native Son?), Billy Bud, the Scarlet Letter, the Sun Also Rises, the Great Gatsby, My Antonia, the Sound and the Fury, the Crucible

12th Grade: Frankenstein, Hamlet, the Canturbury Tales, tons of 19th and early 20th century poetry, Heart of Darkness, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, something by Virginia Woolf

[Iceblink]

Thanks, all. This is just the kind of stuff I need.

[Iceblink]

Originally Posted by minorthreat

I went to a private school in one of the wealthiest parts of New Jersey

Like Morristown or somewhere like that?

[Samora]

My experience:
9th grade:romeo and juliet, othello, poems, we didnt read alot
mostly since it wasnt mandatory, but our library had a great collection
10th: 1941, Animal farm,poems, the rest of the year was practicing essays
11th:Great gatsby, crucible, the color purple, and practising essays
12: not one single book......we mostly analyzed and did critique of articles as well as writing essays
however you should try as much as possible, to incorporate reading in your english class since college is nothing but reading and analyzing/critique
our school was in a low to medium income area in the suburbs of san diego
like i said before the main problem was that reading wasnt pushed on us as hard, that and they never taught the proper way to read(annotate, highlight, anylyze)
furthermore, our reading had very little interaction, meaning, we put information from point A to point B, from the book to a piece of paper
without actually thinking, basically it didnt challenge us to THINK
actually no it wasnt the book it was the teacher and the format!
the way it was structured did not allow critical thinking to occur
until 12 grade when we actually started to analyze
im glad reading is part of my life and is a joy instead of a chore

[minorthreat]

Originally Posted by Iceblink

Like Morristown or somewhere like that?

Livingston, but Morristown is quite close.

[minorthreat]

Originally Posted by Demosthenes

the Sound and the Fury

the Canterbury Tales

Heart of Darkness

Like I said, I knew I forgot a couple in there. We did those, too.

Come to think of it, as far as 'old stuff' goes, I'm hard pressed to think of a single thing I read in either high school English or my general ed classes in college that was published after the 1970's. Perhaps Discipline and Punish, but even then, that was published 25 years ago.

[fischerw]

This thread is fascinating. My high school was firmly in the "decent" range--we had lots of AP classes and some excellent teachers, but a lot of terrible ones as well. This was a very diverse school in a medium sized city--there were students from just about every socioeconomic group you can think of.

Unfortunately, for 9th and 10th grade, my education in literature was extremely deficient. I NEVER got the classics, except for a very few. Most of 9th and 10th grades were spent endlessly learning how to use the card catalogue and practicing 5-paragraph essays. Junior year was better--it was Brit Lit only, and Senior year I had AP college English.

However, I missed out on so many of the great works of American literature. To this day I consider myself very poorly read. I read Great Gatsby for the first time this summer (I'm 26). All the Twain I've read has been on my own. Never read any Faulkner, Joyce, very little Dickens...etc etc. I'm trying to get to those now, but I'm a grad student in History with very little time to read for pleasure.

Sigh. I'm glad to see that some high schools are still serving the youth of this country well.