[HN Gopher] How "The Great Gatsby" took over high school
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How "The Great Gatsby" took over high school
Author : pseudolus
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-05-13 13:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| pseudolus wrote:
| https://archive.ph/kQKvv
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| 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.
| number6 wrote:
| My interpretation is, that he does not want to join the "in
| crowd" but to impress a girl and this is his undoing.
|
| The crowd is only a way to impress her, old sports.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| I think GP is talking about Nick, the book's narrator.
| number6 wrote:
| Ah! This makes more sense!
| DougN7 wrote:
| 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...
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I feel a lot of "literature" reading may reflect
| experiences a high school student (generously) may not
| relate to, or (less generously) may not have the life
| experiences to understand, and may not necessarily gain by
| reading?
| Suppafly wrote:
| >may not have the life experiences to understand
|
| That's one of the things about reading though, it lets
| you experience life experiences you might have been
| exposed to on your own. You still have to met things
| halfway by using your brain a bit, which a lot of
| students really push back against for some reason. I
| suspect part of it is that it's the first time they are
| really asked to read something critically and not just
| for straight forward instruction or for enjoyment.
|
| I think schools are trying to teach critical reading
| skills earlier now, but it's hard because if it's not
| interesting kids won't read it and if it's interesting
| they might not learn the critical skills necessary to
| evaluate it under any other lens than it being
| interesting or enjoyable.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Same goes for "they never taught us how to pay taxes!"
| Often, the kids were directly taught just that, but the
| time gap between when they learned and when it was needed
| means they forgot, even if they at least pretended to pay
| attention.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I think this is it, though for certain works, we spent a
| lot of time in class discussing and acting out and this
| sort of engagement greatly increased my appreciation and
| comprehension of those works, thanks to my English
| teachers.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You may also have already had experiences that formed the
| notion that being part of the in crowd wasn't worth it.
|
| I also read it in high school and I recall spending about
| half the book muttering "oh my God, Gatsby, there are so
| many other women in the world get over yourself."
| jjmarr wrote:
| Reminds me of The Wire, when DeAngelo Barksdake discussing
| the meaning of the quote "there are no second acts in
| American lives".[1] It's a roomful of prisoners that only
| grasped that once their first act was over.
|
| It's a whole show of people dying on the streets by 20.
|
| [1]https://youtu.be/8DOy4hCih7w
| bombcar wrote:
| So many of the "high school" books would be much, much
| better read if the message was emblazoned on the cover.
|
| I don't even care if people agree what the book says, I
| just needed something to look for, because most of them
| were completely ignorable or outright infuriating.
|
| At least today's kids can have an AI or YouTube video
| explain what the teacher wants to hear so they can move on
| to doing something interesting.
| nluken wrote:
| Curricula assign these books to students so they can
| learn to interpret their meanings without needing it
| explicitly stated. Of course, the teacher will offer an
| interpretation after the students have tried their hand
| at it, but the whole point of the exercise would be
| defeated by printing the interpretation at the outset. We
| should not be further offloading critical thinking in
| service of entertainment value.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The kids already aren't learning. Putting the intended
| message on the cover wouldn't make things worse.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Its also about selling bonds, which is still very overlooked
| in retail trader's social climbing schemes. Specifically,
| issuing bonds
|
| 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
| robocat wrote:
| 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).
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Yeah, I totally missed that. I really want to re-read it now.
| Thanks for the short synopsis!
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Your comment has prompted me to add it to my reading list to
| reread, so there's that. :)
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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)
| divbzero wrote:
| > _I was thinking it's hard to relate to Tom and Daisy in
| high school..._
|
| Yes, it seems easier to relate to them after encountering
| more "careless people" as an adult.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I remember not liking the characters and wondering why
| _should_ I read this, but now I have come to appreciate the
| value of understanding the view points of other people in
| spite of how I might feel about their actions and words or
| be distanced from their existence by virtue in this case of
| the wealth and privilege available to them.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| vixen99 wrote:
| OK, that's your experience. On the other hand,
| https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2013/05/07/why-
| the-... offers some pointers as to why a fair number of
| people have a more positive reaction. Although it is, in a
| way, an obvious statement, the very last line somehow
| always stuck with me reading it years ago "So we beat on,
| boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
| past."
| mcphage wrote:
| > I can't recall anything referencing the Great Gatsby
|
| The recent book about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook was
| titled "Careless People", from a Great Gatsby quote.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Homer and Shakespear at least have the advantage of being
| referred to all the time elsewhere.
|
| That's true for most of the works in the canon of works
| that are commonly taught in schools, people that didn't pay
| attention tend to miss them or be confused by them though.
| Every time we remove some work by Dickens or Shakespeare
| from our canon, we lose a bit of that shared culture.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| 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.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| She wasn't allowed to read other books in her free time?
| dev_hugepages wrote:
| You can only read so much before your time or stamina is
| exhausted.
| lmm wrote:
| What free time? If teachers ever heard of a kid having any
| they'd make sure to assign more homework.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >What free time? If teachers ever heard of a kid having
| any they'd make sure to assign more homework.
|
| It used to be like that, but it seems like teachers now
| hardly assign any homework at all.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The assigned reading burned her out on reading.
|
| I'm okay with some assigned reading, but it would be nice
| if the assignments could make room for students to choose
| their own reading. Like, she would have to write down a
| bunch of new words she encountered--she can do that just as
| well with the books she chose herself.
| tisyirkop wrote:
| If you repeat this same message to anyone from USA, you will be
| instantly diagnozed with ADHD with a year's supply of
| medication.
| lmpdev wrote:
| I deeply regret not getting diagnosed as a kid
|
| 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
| mejthemage wrote:
| You won't be given a year's supply of medication.
|
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Plus now a lot of doctors are requiring drug tests to make
| sure you're taking it, but not too much, and not taking
| other drugs, including legal ones.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| briandear wrote:
| The Old Man and the Sea especially falls into this category.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's one I actually liked reading, at least on the
| surface. Maybe I didn't get deep meaning out of it but I
| don't recall that one being a struggle to just get through.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Absolutely you don't need much emotional depth to enjoy a
| story about a man struggling against the ocean and a
| fish. You miss things, but it's still enjoyable.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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?
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The recent burst of Gatsby content is almost surely due to
| its publication date (April 10, 1925).
| gjm11 wrote:
| I wonder whether it also has something to do with the use
| of its phrase "careless people" as the title of a
| currently-famous book about how awful Meta's senior
| management is.
| Balgair wrote:
| You know, I was going to argue with you that it's much more
| than a weekend read, but no, you're right.
|
| 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.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 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.
| mandevil wrote:
| 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.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >reference to Gatsby making his money in drug stores- that
| meant he was a bootlegger.
|
| You don't have to dig that far into it for the reference,
| Gatsby's business associate is a mobster who Gatsby says
| "fixed the World Series back in 1919". Even if you don't
| know exactly what kind of crime he is up to it is kind of
| obvious that he is in a criminal enterprise based on who he
| works with.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I read a fascinating discussion the other week that Tom's
| racism may not be incidental to the plot, but one of the
| keys to unlocking some other deeper/semi-hidden insights
| into it. The innocuous sounding question at the top of that
| rabbit hole was "Is Gatsby white?" It's a fascinating
| question and there's lots of evidence that Gatsby is at
| least _white-passing_ (seemingly no problem in the
| segregated at the time Seelbach Hotel, for instance), but
| that doesn 't necessarily mean white, especially to the
| sort of old-money racist that Tom is portrayed to be.
|
| With Sinners doing so well in cinemas this month, it's an
| interesting time to question if there _is_ a racial
| component to The Great Gatsby that hasn 't been so obvious
| even after decades of (somewhat) close reads by at least
| High Schoolers.
|
| One longer read on the subject:
| https://www.contrabandcamp.com/p/gatsbys-secret
|
| It also got me thinking about the possible reasons why F.
| Scott Fitzgerald dedicated The Great Gatsby to his wife and
| the Deep South rumors that she wasn't white but only white-
| passing.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Oops, you are indeed right. I was mixing in Tom and Nick in
| my memories. Needed to use 3 dudes to properly sell my
| horrible cliff notes.
|
| Yeah, looking back there's a lot of history sprinkled in
| that I didn't appreciate when I was 16 and reading this for
| a teacher I really didn't like to begin with.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| 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.
| bcoates wrote:
| 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.
| simianwords wrote:
| 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?
| dbspin wrote:
| > 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.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I don't think this works.
|
| It's like hearing NPR on the radio because your parents
| turned it on when you're 6... You just don't care.
|
| The vast majority of the content is just utterly
| unrelatable. It could be _great_ content. But it doesn 't
| matter, you won't suddenly start caring about GDP or
| employment metrics or politics. Those things are TOO far
| outside the window of relatability for that age.
|
| Gatsby is the same exact problem - it's busy talking about
| middle-age malaise, which tend to resonate with teachers,
| but is just entirely unrelatable to a bunch of kids in
| their teens.
|
| Those kids are busy day dreaming about the future - they
| don't have the kind of experiences that let the book
| resonate yet, and they likely won't for another 20 years at
| least.
|
| ---
|
| You can't expand someone's mind if you don't have anything
| relevant to present. You just bounce off.
|
| You expand it by having at least _SOME_ content the reader
| can understand and relate to, anchoring them there, and
| then shoving the boundary around it wider.
| bashmelek wrote:
| I think maybe it isn't all or nothing here. Reading about
| something outside of one's familiarity can really expand
| what is relatable to a student, with the help of an
| instructor to fill in context and use things to which the
| student can relate to help them grasp the ideas in the
| text.
| relaxing wrote:
| 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.
| buyx wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| demaga wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| We'll never escape standardized testing. We have mass
| education involving hundreds of students per class as a
| matter of public policy. Tests are the only efficient way
| to assess students. Failing grades and general lack of
| performance can actually turn into political problems.
|
| The best education is mastery education provided via long
| term one-on-one mentoring. Essentially the opposite of the
| current model. Only the rich can afford such services.
| jsnider3 wrote:
| > Only the rich can afford such services.
|
| Fortunately, AI solves this. Unfortunately, it also makes
| humans obsolete entirely.
| fragmede wrote:
| > The best education is mastery education provided via
| long term one-on-one mentoring.
|
| For the up and coming, if you're looking for such
| services, schools that advertise the Waldorf method is
| one such service.
| shrubhub wrote:
| https://pca.st/episode/48e89a05-2812-4f81-99dd-ff18f7819df0
|
| There has been a huge decline in American reading since this
| focus started.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| That's more due to idiotic changes at the elementary level
| than HS curriculum.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| 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.
| jasonkester wrote:
| A quick Public Service Announcement:
|
| Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read
| in high school.
|
| It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you're old
| enough and have had enough life experience to understand and
| relate to them.
|
| I remember kinda liking "The Sun Also Rises" in highschool
| literature class. There were these people travelling around Spain
| and drinking a lot. I could relate. At some point in my late 20s,
| I came across a copy and read it again. Turns out it's an awesome
| book, and about more than just swilling wine.
|
| So the thought occurred that since one of those terrible
| highschool literature books was good, maybe more of them would
| be. I grabbed The Great Gatsby. Awesome book. Whatever JD
| Sallinger thing they had us read. Awesome. Joseph Conrad, Jack
| London, Oscar Wilde. Hell yeah. And all those authors had tons of
| other great stuff they'd written. And there were lots of authors
| in the last hundred-odd years. It kinda kicked off a lifetime of
| seeking out the Good Stuff.
|
| One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that doing
| this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any
| genre. You'll need actual good writing from here on out.
| Fortunately, there's lots of people still doing that so they
| should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can
| read them.
| karamanolev wrote:
| This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If rereading
| those books when you're old enough makes you appreciate them,
| are they ideal for high school? Do they teach you what's good
| writing if you can't recognize it yet? Does it make sense to,
| then, choose different books - books you can appreciate and
| understand more in high school? I don't have the right answer,
| but the question seemed relevant.
| jl6 wrote:
| Fair point, but I also think initial exposure to things you
| don't yet understand is a useful step towards understanding
| them.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Not so sure.
|
| Engaging students' attention, even if they aren't ready to
| fully grasp it, is great exposure.
|
| Forcing them to scan their retinas over black-and-white
| patterns for hours, not so much.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| They have to be able to reach high enough to get some of
| it. It has to repay their time in high school. It should
| also show them there's more to reach for, but they need to
| be able to get _some_ of it.
|
| For me, Gatsby was... not entirely terrible. It was mostly
| a waste of my time, but looking back I can see some of the
| themes were at least somewhat worthwhile.
|
| Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was an absolute waste
| of my time. If Joyce is worth an adult reading (which I
| doubt to this day), then _don 't make high school kids read
| him_.
| bruce511 wrote:
| >> Does it make sense to, then, choose different books -
| books you can appreciate and understand more in high school?
|
| I guess it depends on the goal. My opinion is that reading
| hard books at school simply turns people off reading
| completely. If the reading is fun there's more chance
| students will carry on reading.
|
| So if the goal is "teach kids that reading is fun. So they do
| it. Which means their ability to read goes up" , then yes,
| the books should be more fun.
|
| (We read a Spike Milligan book, which certainly engaged the
| class more than Wuthering Heights did.)
|
| On the other hand if the goal is to understand "literature",
| then books with themes and character development and so on is
| necessary. And of course can put some kids off reading for
| life.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >My opinion is that reading hard books at school simply
| turns people off reading completely.
|
| The thing is, most of these books people are complaining
| about aren't actually 'hard books', especially when read at
| a chapter or two per week with a teacher guiding you
| through all the major themes. The goal isn't to teach kids
| that reading is fun, it's to teach them critical reading
| skills.
|
| There is something to be said about reaching the students
| where they are, but we already dumb down things too much to
| allow the slower students to keep pace. They can learn
| about reading for fun in remedial reading classes.
| hoseja wrote:
| Indeed. It's a giant, unrecognized problem with pedagogy.
| Things are taught from the position of already understanding
| them and the messy confusing process of actually grokking
| anything is mostly ignored and students are left to figure it
| out alone.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| So that when you go back to them, you can look at your
| memories when you were younger.
| aimor wrote:
| How else are you supposed to know that you've grown since
| highschool if you can't reread Catcher in the Rye in a
| different light?
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| It's probably good if the book requires you to stretch a bit,
| and even if you don't totally get it yet. My parents never
| put any limits on what I could read, so I stumbled over the
| Poe shelf at the library at a fairly young age. There was
| plenty I didn't understand, but plenty that I could, and some
| stories still stick with me.
|
| But I remember when my niece told us they had them reading
| Nietzsche. Her main takeaway seemed to be that they were Very
| Smart because they were reading Nietzsche. She didn't have a
| clue what she was reading, so if any of it stuck with her, it
| was probably as likely to be misunderstood as understood.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >This reply rings true, but also had me thinking. If
| rereading those books when you're old enough makes you
| appreciate them, are they ideal for high school?
|
| Possibly, good books hit different at different ages and can
| be appreciated at each of those ages for different reasons.
| bcoates wrote:
| 100% agree with you that it's worth going back and reading The
| Books You Should Read as an adult who can just read them as
| books and not some sort of obligation. That said. some of them
| are still stinkers that only a weird boomer could love. I'm
| looking at you, A Separate Peace & fucking anything by Joseph
| Conrad (sorry).
|
| Half the pleasure of reading these books as they were meant to
| be read (as books, and not at frogs to be dissected in class)
| is that you get to discover it for yourself--a mix of life-
| changing gems and I-guess-you-had-to-be-there meditations on
| being a failson in the twilight of British imperialism
| tshaddox wrote:
| Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
| wink wrote:
| Try Joyce as a non-native speaker :P
| IAmBroom wrote:
| My god.
| SilasX wrote:
| In the YouTube comments for the song "Informer" by Snow
| ("In _for_ mer, <lots of words>, a licky boom-boom now"),
| someone refers to it as "the final boss of learning
| English".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSffz_bl6zo
|
| (Edit: can't find that specific comment, link just goes to
| the music video.)
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker and I felt like a non-native
| reader when I tried to read Ulysses.
| skyyler wrote:
| Moby Dick seems to be very love-it-or-hate-it. Some people
| can't make it through two pages; some people can't put it
| down once they start.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Idk, Dickens and Melville are pretty hard to get through.
|
| If you're reading for just funsies, sure. But none of their
| works are particularly long, even reading a few chapters here
| and there, it'd take a week for each at most.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Do you have a list of books you can recommend? (I was born and
| raised in Russia, so I imagine my school books list is quite
| different from yours; I would, of course, like to read from
| both.)
| lolcatzlulz wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd recommend all of them but the first 20ish
| books on this list are an accurate representation of what I
| was assigned in school.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/478.Required_Reading_in_.
| ..
| wink wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with this. People are different and not
| everyone has to enjoy so-called literature that is not pure
| entertainment.
|
| I have shelves full of books I had read before finishing
| school, and 90% of what we read in English lessons (I am
| German) was ok, and yet I hated 90% of what we read (or
| supposed to read) in our German lessons. Maybe it was the
| selection, maybe it was implicit bias (I also liked English
| lessons and my teachers, and didn't like either for German).
| Just some from memory (annotated Shakespeare was ok, I liked
| Poe, I liked Huxley)
|
| So no, except for a few you would not manage to convince me to
| give them a second chance.
|
| And also no for your last point, some Dan Brown novels were ok
| and I didn't enjoy the rest in the first place ;)
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Do you read books in English in your English lessons in
| Germany?
|
| I'm Polish, longest text we've ever read at English class was
| one page.
|
| At university, by the way.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| We read selections from The Canterbury Tales, in translation,
| as high school freshman. Our genius history teacher made us
| promise not to tell our parents, and let us read one of the
| dirty ones. I was sold.
|
| Later, I learned Middle English, and read the entire Tales.
| He's brilliant. Reliably funny and engaging (except for one
| chapter, obviously written in spite after being swindled IRL!).
| mjevans wrote:
| I loathed Gatsby in high school.
|
| It's RUINED for me. I could never go back and read it. There's
| far too much else I'd rather have cross my eyeballs so many
| other stories in the library. By having a work unworthy of my
| experience and tastes wasted on me at a young age my emotional
| investment in it is already squandered.
|
| Have a big list of OK books. Have some representative excerpts
| from them, and let the kids pick books they're going to enjoy.
| The point surely is NOT to haze / torment the kids with 'bad'
| books that discourage reading generally.
| SilasX wrote:
| I agree with the suggestion to try it, because I've had similar
| experiences myself in a different area: history. Even reading
| the dry Wikipedia articles made the old topics seem much more
| interesting than I remembered them being in school, and did a
| better job at communicating the significance.
|
| However, I wouldn't be so optimistic about your experience
| being universal. As an experiment, I just started re-reading
| The Great Gatsby. While it's much better than I remember, it
| still felt like a slog and failed to hook me in a way that such
| prized "you have to be familiar with this" literature should
| be. And I still think they could have done a better job
| communicating what's so good about it.
|
| Relatedly, I only recently learned that some (most?) people
| actually _like_ iambic pentameter, that it adds to the joy of
| hearing the lines read. This is a revelation, since it ...
| doesn 't do anything for me. But that fact feels like it's
| important subtext that _could_ have been communicated, and I
| could have been pushed in that direction -- that seems like the
| obvious move. And yet it just _wasn 't_. Sure, they taught that
| Shakespeare used it, but only as a dry "oh hey this is one
| thing to note about his works" not in a "oh and this is a big
| part of its appeal".
|
| There are a lot of missed opportunities for teaching
| appreciation of literature.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Couldn't agree more about history. I was a good student who
| couldn't stand history (called "social studies" in my
| school), did the minimum to get through it wth good grades,
| then never took a college history course that wasn't
| required. Then one day in the library I was looking for a big
| thick book to pass a chunk of time, and grabbed Shirer's "The
| rise and fall of the Third Reich." Not only was it
| fascinating on its own, but it referenced so much of the
| history that underlay the events of WWII that it sent me off
| on a hunt to fill in that missing background. And, well, now
| I'm hooked!
|
| (I'm not sure if I didn't enjoy the grade-school stuff
| because of what I now recognize as its jingoism (it's so much
| more interesting to read the history of people making choices
| for human reasons, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes
| just wrong, than of godlike heroes helming countries
| foredestined for greatness!), or just because I wasn't ready
| for it.)
| BeetleB wrote:
| I read Gatsby, Conrad and Salinger as an adult. Not impressed.
| Sorry.
|
| > One minor downside, as long as we're doing a PSA, is that
| doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers
| of any genre.
|
| Thankfully not true for me
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| I read The Great Gatsby outside of formal education, for my own
| benefit, during my college years, in a non-U.S. country. I
| thought it was the opposite of "actually really good", I found
| it to be a resolutely mediocre experience. At no stage did I
| get any inkling as to why it might be considered "a great
| book".
|
| Another that baffles me is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
|
| People can read it if they want, but if they find it dull four
| chapters in, just walk away, sometimes "the greats" are just
| culturally significant, or not your style, or whatever.
|
| There are lots of good books out there though, and I'm glad you
| discovered something above the airport bestsellers. May I
| suggest to absolutely anyone
|
| Hunger, by Knut Hamson
|
| Ask The Dust, by John Fante
|
| American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis
|
| Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk
|
| Porno, by Irvine Welsh
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Women, by Charles Bukowski, I should add
| alex1138 wrote:
| It's kind of interesting how some books, compared to others,
| become classics
|
| Whether it's in the lifetime of the author or not (usually not)
| in which it's appreciated, a hypothetical reviewer of books must
| have had to drudge through some pretty bad ones before getting to
| the good
|
| The old debate over whether music really used to be better
| (honestly yes if only because of less consolidation of radio
| stations) or whether we only remember the good ones because we've
| already assigned the bad ones to the trash heap
| zjp wrote:
| 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.
| albertgt wrote:
| I love this book.
|
| When I first was forced to read it in high school, I didn't get
| it, didn't understand it, didn't have the emotional capacity or
| life experience to grasp it.
|
| I re-read it as an adult after experiencing heartbreak, it really
| resonated. I could understand what Gatsby was going through and
| it became my #1 favorite book (even though I prefer sci-fi
| novels)
|
| Fitzgerald's prose in Gatsby is also almost perfect. The book is
| so short because he kept cutting it down and cutting it down,
| editing away, chipping and refining it. What's fascinating too is
| nearly every sentence is beautiful prose. Most people write and
| it sounds like jumbled nuggets of stuff. Fitzgerald worked to get
| it to sound beautiful. It is an amazing work of art for me.
| keiferski wrote:
| 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.
| pm215 wrote:
| Your experience makes me wonder if it hit the same way for some
| of the US WW2 soldiers mentioned in the article who got a copy
| sent to them...
| simianwords wrote:
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Read your first sentence as: "I have a racial insight on this
| topic", and it still mostly worked.
| mjevans wrote:
| Something nice from a cyberpunk series would work well.
|
| Snow Crash comes to mind as an, offhand, likely safe enough for
| teens book that isn't boring.
| teddyh wrote:
| Maybe if you censored out the underage sex?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| I reread that book recently and that immediately raised a
| red flag where the author makes it seems like the girl
| consents as in "well, I guess this is happening" then
| proceeds to portray her as a enjoying it and not really
| getting into the details of how a person/body may react
| regardless of a woman's (in this case) consent. This is
| much better portrayed in My Brilliant Friend with all the
| complexity of emotion of the victim towards the act and
| their reaction. I really wish if one thing could be changed
| about that book is just simply making the 15 year old
| character an adult.
| novia wrote:
| Yes, you should teach the book that has a sex scene between a
| 15 year old girl and a 30 year old man to high school
| students.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| chlodwig wrote:
| 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.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Also you might want school texts to be relatively short.
| LOTR is not.
| chlodwig wrote:
| That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the
| schools around me, every year the assigned texts are
| getting shorter and with a lower reading level.
| Symmetry wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| chlodwig wrote:
| _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.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| > Game Of Thrones
|
| 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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| peacebeard wrote:
| We teach old books because no one would ever agree on what new
| books to teach.
| memcg wrote:
| 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.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| >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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| > why not teach Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter?
|
| 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.
| ryathal wrote:
| 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.
| jdlyga wrote:
| It's an excellent book that didn't at all speak to me when I was
| in high school.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Same experience as you. I don't know if I was too emotionally
| immature to get it, or it's just lost on people until they get
| to be a certain age?
| Balgair wrote:
| The issue I had was that the book just seemed like a lot of
| wingeing to me back then.
|
| Later on, and after some therapy, it turns out that I was
| just going through a lot of abuse at the time and just kinda
| hid all my feelings. Still do, really. That the characters
| felt anything was, to old me, just a sign that they weren't
| working hard enough. 'Like, come on, everyone knows life
| sucks, right? Just get over Daisy you idiot'. Yeah, no,
| that's not how people work, it wasn't how I was supposed to
| work.
|
| I guess that's why it's a classic. You reread it later and
| see all these tings in you that changed too, but the words
| just stay the same.
|
| I still maintain that 'Cather in the Rye' is just a rich kid
| complaining about nothing though. I hated that book and
| Holden too, seems just overly spoiled to me.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Great comment. I grew up with the "life sucks" and "work
| harder" mentality. Both of them eat you up inside, and I
| lost at least a decade to doubling down on them when they
| didn't work well over time. Sounds like this book will be
| interesting in more ways than I expected.
|
| > I still maintain that 'Cather in the Rye' is just a rich
| kid complaining about nothing though
|
| Teenage me loved it. I'm curious what dad me thinks now.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I've never read catcher, but the standard answer is that
| Holden is the way he is because he was horrifically
| traumatised.
| Balgair wrote:
| Yeah, as someone with that same-ish background then,
| that's maybe something I have to work more on is
| sympathizing with my fellow abused.
|
| Thanks for the hat-tip!
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| 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
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| 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.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| OK, but it's _hard_ to read fiction where you don 't care
| about any of the characters.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| Depends on why you read fiction. If you read it mostly
| for narrative, sure. If you read it mostly to explore
| ideas and to enjoy the artistry, probably not.
| criddell wrote:
| It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable
| characters can be great.
|
| My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the
| shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I
| spend any time thinking about what these characters do or
| say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no
| internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who
| just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video
| game NPC.
|
| Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually
| enjoyed or at least didn't hate.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >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.
| criddell wrote:
| You have to meet the kids where they are.
|
| Prescribing dull books and hoping that by some miracle
| whatever it is you are trying to teach with them is getting
| through is educator malpractice IMHO.
| hellojesus wrote:
| > Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays...
|
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| Busy parents or parents with kids who don't want to talk
| about what they are doing at school.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| "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.
| Suppafly wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Perhaps, but I think it would be incorrect to say that I
| didn't understand what the class was trying to teach me. I
| may be an obstinate person, but I wouldn't attribute a lack
| of zeal for a particular subject as an overall lack of
| curiosity.
|
| I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my
| fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as
| well.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| Balgair wrote:
| 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.
| jiscariot wrote:
| 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.
| ikiris wrote:
| 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.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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.)
| littlekey wrote:
| 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..."
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| LurkandComment wrote:
| Responding to some of the comments in the thread.
|
| 1. The assignment isn't simply to understand the "Great Gatsby"
| it's to be able to read, synthesize your thoughts into a formal
| coherent argument or perspective on the book. If you cliff notes
| or AI, you are missing the point.
|
| 2. [OPINION] The fact that we are still teaching the same book is
| a bit of an issue. There are many well written books you can do
| this with.
|
| 3. [OPINION] at the same time, having everyone read the same book
| across the nation over time does help create the base for some
| sort of collective cultural and intellectual identity.
| sotix wrote:
| The mistake with high school literature in my opinion is that it
| tries to cover too many works. My freshman year, we read
| Shakespeare, the Odyssey, Catcher in the Rye, and more. We should
| have started with Greek mythology and learned who the gods were.
| Then learned about the hero's from the various myths. Then moved
| onto the Iliad, and finally the Odyssey. Instead, I had to read
| the Odyssey and write a paper on it without proper context. The
| people who listened to the Odyssey in Ancient Greece were very
| familiar with the myths and Greek gods. My teacher did a good job
| laying the groundwork, but I still think something was lost by
| not going through the previous works. Ancient Greek literature
| and oral tradition deserves a much more complete course.
|
| The following year we could have probably moved onto Shakespeare
| and discussed which plays were inspired by which Ancient Greek
| myths. Rather than checking off boxes to say we read all the
| great books, we could have developed a more natural ability to
| analyze works and understand influences. Pulls, I believe certain
| books such as the Great Gatsby are probably better appreciated in
| college when the reader is a bit older.
| leoh wrote:
| >Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were
| hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat
| across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential
| houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the
| old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a
| fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the
| trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in
| whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a
| transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the
| presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
| contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for
| the last time in history with something commensurate to his
| capacity for wonder.
|
| >And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought
| of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at
| the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn
| and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail
| to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him,
| somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the
| dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
|
| >Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that
| year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no
| matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms
| farther. . . . And one fine morning---
|
| >So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
| into the past.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| This is the type of content I want to see from The New Yorker.
| sylens wrote:
| It's really as simple as the fact that it's a much easier book to
| read, get through, and relate to than a lot of other books middle
| school and high school students have to read. It's not
| Shakespeare, it's not Dickens, it's not Dostoevsky. For a lot of
| us, it was a breath of fresh air (as was Hemingway's works).
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