How do you apply to be a mod by the way? i think I'd make a good one. I'm far less corrupt than bigred.
You have to sleep with Huss. It's the only requirement. It's not that difficult, but you smell funny for a while afterwards.
Is there a line? But seriously folks... Taking Wm S out of HS curricula is tantamount to reducing secondary education to the pursuit of test scores, not developing a sense of whence our language and literary traditions derive. I just spent a couple of days in a classroom where the teacher allows the kids to read No Fear Shakespeare's contemporary language version instead of the OG text. In his defense, he has quotes from the OG text and asks kids what The Bard was driving at, but the Benchmark test is MC, not SAE.
Put me firmly in the mixed classics and contemporary camp. The fine English program at my school introduced me to an incredibly varied body of literature that spanned the last 500 years. However, unlike some of the approaches that have been listed, my teachers generally took a periodized approach. This was not sequential, for example we spend the second semester of junior year mostly on Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, then jumped to Shakespeare and then Pope and Johnson for the first semester of senior year. The last semester of high school we were pretty much allowed to read what we wanted with the instructor's approval, so long as we could write good essays on it. She was strict with her standards of merit. Some highlights from our program: Othello Great Expectations Caucasia Jane Eyre Crime and Punishment Slaughterhouse Five Catch-22 The Things They Carried The Glass Menagerie Invisible Man A Tale of Two Cities King Lear I think that reading such works in a periodized fashion was very useful to us, as it allowed me to see the evolution of literature and gave me the tools to judge what I read now that I'm out of school. Knowing about Edgar Allen Poe's struggles, for example, has given me a much better appreciation for The Professor and the Madman, which I just finished. Without having read and studied Poe, that particular contemporary book would have been much less enjoyable.