Zoomers especially I want to hear from, I'm curious how decadent our education system has become. Title/author, type of school, grade level.
>Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
>Public school
>10th grade
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Fahrenheit 451 is the lowest quality book commonly taught, although I haven’t read to kill a mockingbird and that might be shit too
Although I will say that I did read the handmaid’s tale in highschool, but to be fair They let me choose it from a list and I could have picked something else
To Kill a Mockingbird is almost objectively the worst book that's considered a classic. It's basically leftist fan fiction.
I’m from the South and had similar childhood spending summers with my Grandparents in a small town, so I found it to be kino. Also, Atticus is segregationist and for protecting state’s rights. Secondary literature is full of seething over this and debating how racist he is and whether or not he is a bad lawyer or not. It’s a children’s book about race and southern history, not propaganda just because Atticus doesn’t say “i hate Black folk” or isn’t a card carrying member of the KKK.
My curriculum beat us over the head with holocaust literature: Number the Star’s, Devil’s Arithmetic, Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Night, Dawn, Diary of a Young Girl, How Dark the Heavens, The Book Thief, Man’s Search for Meaning and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. We read at least one a year from the time I was in the 5th grade until I graduated. Sometimes it was summer reading and sometimes it was in class. The school board definitely received some funding from AIPAC.
Honestly it's not even anywhere near the worst of the "Dusty butthole Country" books. It's just bland, but at least it's not Of Mice and Men, another book that doesn't bother saying anything of value or being entertaining.
>Of Mice and Men
how can you be this much of a pleb lmao, a book that takes 4 hours to read about the exploits of a hyperstrong moron and his handler trying to integrate in society
Exactly. It's nothing more than more of Steinbeck's soulless misery porn. Nothing of value to be found. A little, miserable book that both has nothing to say and nothing of interest, making it fail both from an academic and entertainment perspective as a work.
>its sad so its bad
>He has no argument, just snivelling.
Well come on then extol us on either the literary merits or the entertainment value of the work. Unless you want to concede that it's just yet another work that existed to make people feel better about their lives comparatively through misery porn then, now just used as a confirmation of modern homosexuals biases about how much worse the past was.
>prove to me its a good book!
The prose flows nicely and the story, characters and world portrayed are interesting. It examines something from a viewpoint that most people wouldn't and does so by exploring the reactions of different people and different situations to our unusual main characters. I didn't imagine "is life affirming" was a necessary condition for being good literature
>Prose
Steinbeck's idea of prose is to dab paint on a shitstained brick and give up before he's even half done, but alright fair enough that's subjective enough.
>Characters and world
Yeah because "Musty homosexuals in a dusty dead end job with no hope" is such a compelling character archetype and the world of "A description of the rural, nebulously south-west somewhere with no landmarks other than the Dusty butthole Ranch, the Town with some bars and a fair sometimes, and a barely detailed forest are such riveting world building.
>Life affirming
It's not that it's sad that makes it bad, it's that all it is is jerking itself off into the dirt. Downright miserable fricking shit can be good literature, either by having something interesting to discuss or by just being a solid story to tell. Nobody fricking thinks 1984, to use another common, shallow reference pool novel, is a happy book, but for all his problems Orwell knew how to continue an engaging narrative and was able to put in some solid symbolism even if the man might as well have had the pigs from animal farm for fingers with how hamhanded he was with it.
Of Mice and Men, in the meanwhile, is just a big of southern fried misery porn.
What does "dabbing paint on a shitstained brick" mean in terms of prose, it's just a long winded insult. You should write 3 more paragraphs about how "it's sad, so it's not good". You are acting like it's some tortorous book where they spend 4 hours drilling nails into some morons hand, they try to fall in with a few groups of people and fail and then the ending happens. What even are these criticisms "there's barely any forest"? 3/10 lacked forest.
>Anon literally can't into reading comprehension.
Alright Anon I can translate for you.
He's using prose and metaphor to describe Steinbeck's prose. He's saying it's half-assed and lazy attempts to dress up something basic and ugly, but that in the end you can debate it to taste, thus conceding that point.
The later is "The characters are stock and generic, not interesting" followed by him countering your statement about interesting world building by responding that the world is not fleshed out or well built.
All of this however seems secondary to the argument that the book has both no higher level interpretation, it's not trying to *say* anything, nor is it written in such a way to be a "page turner", or entertaining. Anon then compares it to another book to refute the argument that his complaint is that it's sad, by highlighting a work many would consider "sad" or "depressing" that possesses both of the qualities he mentions.
TLDR: He's a noisy homosexual, but you're moronic.
>pretending to be another anon refutal
Nice
>He was using a colorful metaphor to say "I don't like the prose because it's bad" but that's subjective so who cares
>He did not spend hero of our time levels of detail in his small novel describing the country side, so the world building in terms of the characters and their interactions (the entire content of the novel) is worthless
>I am unable to extrapolate any further message about how those who are sufficiently different or unable to understand societies norms might just tragically have no place in that society. The book is actually meaningless torture porn because I said so.
>He thinks only one person could possibly think he's a homosexual.
Gotta love that confidence.
Buddy I've had enough arguments on IQfy to know that no one is going to come to the rescue of two homosexuals trading paragraphs and decide which one is right
I do it all the time in a vain attempt at entertaining myself and teaching chimps to read. It's not very successful at the later but I do get a laugh out of it, and it's not like this literary degree is worth the paper it's printed on anyway so I might as well use it to decipher moron arguments.
>it's not trying to *say* anything,
Duh? Life will likely not turn out the way you intend. And it ain't fair. These are such profound messages, but they are almost entirely wasted on the young. If you think Of Mice and Men doesn't have anything to say then you're under 40 with your fantasies, your distractions, and your coping strategies intact and you are utterly oblivious to what lies ahead.
Ah, I see , you're just a homosexual wannabe nihilist. Life isn't fair and that makes you mad, so you assume that's deep because it managed to pierce the thickness of your skull around that smooth brain of yours.
That's not a theme, dumbfrick, that's life. Get over it and grow the frick up.
"Wasted on the young" my fricking ass. Acting like this is some huge revelation is something homosexual 14 year olds do.
That's not what Nihilism is, you fricking moron.
It's not but then again apparently expecting you to understand the meaning of the word "wannabe" and contextualize from there is apparently too much for your moronic brain. What, did you want a 10k essay on the difference between Nietzsche's philosophy and the actual broad cultural appropriation of the term for common usage as "Depressing homosexualry" or something?
Of Mice and Men is a fantastic book, you're just a fricking moron.
I've never seen anyone get filtered by Steinbeck before. This is a new low. IQfy has fallen, billions must retake sophomore English.
It is an excellent book with several memorable characters. Atticus Finch, wonderful as he is, probably could not have ever existed in the actual south, where being a racist was more or less required to study and practice law.
>Fahrenheit 451 is the lowest quality book commonly taught
frick you
I really, really hate the Puritan time period. I think it's boring as frick. I didn't like any lit we had to read from then, not even poems, and I thought the Crucible was one of the most profoundly boring things I've ever read.
451 has a cool insight but yeah it's pretty low level reading. I'll give it to him that he pumped out a passable novel in a day though, and anyone with an Orwellian consciousness back in peak Americana deserves credit for being able to pierce through monumental levels of bullshit.
Consider that 99% of the people surrounding Bradbury at the time would have never questioned the intentions of their governments.
I have to agree on The Crucible, we spent far, far too long on that shit. I think the only reason was that my English teacher was also a drama teacher and since it's full of morons shrieking and gibbering constantly about literally nothing she just liked it because ACTING or something. I really fricking hated that one.
We dragged it out too but I always assumed the reason was because teaching sucks and my teacher was milking that shit for as long as she could to get paid.
But yeah it was like a fricking month solid on the most boring play I've ever read. Same.
> Fahrenheit 451 is the lowest quality book commonly taught
Filtered
Why was it bad
I went to a ghetto k-12 school and we had to read Roots by Alex Haley
Brave New World is fricking moronic angloid nonsense that only makes sense to merchants
bait
Zoomer here, I remember reading The Hate U Give and some play about rayciss crakkkas preventing blacks from moving into their neighborhood but I forget who wrote it.
I remember reading a blatant ZOG propaganda novel about an African illegal refugee who fricks European women
School is a fricking piece of shit
I'm 22. Pic rel and TKAM are the only books I ever remember everyone in the class having to read. In the gifted/sperg classes and then APs I was in you mostly got to pick from a long list of classics w chill teachers but my freshman year of HS I had a crazed fat millennial woman who would yammer on about how she used to vandalize Bush/Cheney yard signs in her day. She assigned this shit to everyone and I could not have possibly been more uninterested
Zoomer here, years of public school and
>How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
>A Raisin in the Sun
>The House on Mango Street
>Interior Chinatown
>Beloved
>Purple Hibiscus
>Joy Luck Club
I can't choose the worse lol. But they still denying it's all about pushing race struggle/sex struggle, as if contemporary diverse lit is somehow so incredible it btfo everything that came before it.
are denying
We had house on mango in our curriculum but I've never heard of the rest
Yep I also had to read House on Mango Street, that was probably the worst book I had to read in high school. Other contenders include:
>The Giver
>Of Mice and Men
>The Outsiders
>The Pearl
>Brave New World
I did have a great AP Lit teacher who assigned us books like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and crime and Punishment, so it wasn't all bad, though
How were you reading a book by a Russian author in an English Literature class
My teacher pretty much made the curriculum himself, evidently he thought it was worth reading books originally not written in english
>>A Raisin in the Sun
>>The House on Mango Street
I read these too, also The Hate U Give and Things Fall Apart
Mango Street is great. Read it during undergrad for a class on Place and Time. There's a moment where the author evokes the color white (and heaven, by proxy) without ever using the word "white," or directly referring to color or light. It's a remarkable feat.
I liked A Raisin in the Sun
>how come all you college boys where them homosexualy white shoes?
>DAMN THESE EGGS! DAMN ALL THE EGSS THAT EVER WAS!
and then the Black person gets ripped off by another Black person lol
>entire thread of 86IQ edgetard zoomers whining they had to read a bit of minority fiction
>this is what passes for establishing oneself among them
Your generation was a mistake. Genetic castoff, the lot.
OP here, I'm a millennial, hence why I asked about zoomers. There goes part one of your narrative. And it wasn't "a bit of minority fiction", it was 90% of the curriculum in a school that was 70% white. There goes part two.
Hey OP. Its almost 24 hours. Why havent you explained why the book in your original post is bad. Yet you have the time to defend yourself when someone call you a zoomer. As early as the third post someone already asked you
>op is a pseud
couldnt be my IQfy
because i'm racist
>t. op
>a bit of minority fiction
It's 75%. And the crime is the removal of the old moreso than the introduction of the new.
I'm sure these kids would stop b***hing about having to read if they had to read white people instead
I'm a zoomer and we literally read nothing that wasn't about BIPOC. Persepolis was the only thing that kind of wasn't but even that had undertones of the struggle of being Iranian in Europe and feminism.
I hate monkey lovers, they should go and live with monkeys
The Bible
AP Literature & Composition 12, my teacher had us read "Not Wanted on the Voyage" for our final project. This was a shocking betrayal and a truly redpilling moment for me how even "cool" teachers are actually weird snakes. Its lynchian how pozzed this book, like a /misc/tier fanfiction of how some leftist would make their OC version of the bible
>dude, what if Christianity and Noah's ark, but Noah and his family are all old conservative white men and they dont let any brown people on the boat, and Lucifer is a drag-troony feminist freak who is a cool guy and really intelligent and reasonable, and the arc-angel Michael is a moronic homophobic meat-head chud who doesnt like satan because hes trans and gay, and Noah's sons have toxic masculinity and his daughters are abused dikes that turn to Lesbianism and Noah is just an evil schzio because his god isnt real! Also he rapes his daughter with a unicorn horn as well because....Christian man bad!
This all LITERALLY happens in the book, I am not lying. This is in Canada by the way
Just read the summary on wiki. It doesn't sound anything like you describe. I think you are deliberately trying to make it sound more political to be funny
All that is odd, but I was most confused how it turned Noah's daughters raping him around into him raping them with a horn. Like the bible was kind of messed up right there, why are you trying to out do it?
When I was 15 we had to read Night for my freshman English class. When our teacher gave a brief presentation about the book the day before we started reading it, I raised my hand and publicly declared the Holocaust to be a lie in front of my whole class. Probably wasn't the smartest idea to begin high school by outing myself as a Holocaust denier.
get help
nta but the holocaust literally didn't happen
I left my /misc/ phase a long time ago.
i can't remember the book but in 12th grade i had to read a book about how a middle class asian american somehow had it bad because she lived in a white suburb, think her mom died in it or something. sometime that year that class also talked about 'the myth of the model minority'. i had to go to diverse schools so i knew about racial tensions already but i think that class was what got me into learning about race realism online in the first place.
>I got a bad reading assignment in high school, so anyway, I hate Black folk now
i already hated Black folk in middle school actually but now i know why i felt that way. the power of science is truly awe-inspiring.
Imagine liking Black folk. Black folk don't even like Black folk.
I absolutely loathed Ethan Frome, but I read that in middle school.
The only book that stands out to me negatively in highschool was Things Fall Apart, but I didn't hate it just found all the major characters deeply unsympathetic.
(Me)
>Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
>Catholic school
>9th grade
Not a zoomer so I'm not actually answering your question tho...
I just remember being bored by this and the long, run on sentences that would go on for half a page or more.
>tfw reading Rimbaud, Racine, Zola and Flaubert while yankees get shitty ass 3rd-rate juvenile DEI fiction
loooool
I went to public school and the worst was probably
>The Giver in 8th grade
>1984 in 10th grade
>Ethan Frome & The Crucible in 11th grade
I also did Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, and Lord of the Flies somewhere in there, but they weren't as terrible to slog through in my memory. Having reread some of these since, I can say that it was purely the association with school that made them unbearable, especially 1984. Best reading in public school happened when I chose my own books from the library.
Literally Beowulf
I can’t tell you which the worst one was because I simply didn’t read any of the books I wasn’t interested in. 1984 of the ones I did read.
We had to read this because it was written by a black person. I can't remember anything about the story.
>I have a preconceived idea of a text
>I will therefore make no effort at all in reading it
If you cannot remember why you disliked the book other than its author, you did not actually read it.
I read Catcher and The Rye at school, loved it, and could remember the whole thing. If I can remember absolutely nothing about a book I read then clearly I didn't like it.
I'm in Eastern Europe, but the worst book I had to read in school was probably A Tale Of Two Cities
I fricking hate Dickens, moronic moralgay pay-per-word author
>inb4 oof filtered
I read The Illiad when I was a freshman in high school and I don't think any of it stuck. I hated reading Shakespeare. I don't think Shakespeare was ever meant to be read since watching it performed was always a better experience. I had a fricking teacher assign me to memorize all of Macbeths lines. Same neurotic lady would assign constant art projects ruining my favorite subject in school for a full year.
Surprised only one person said Shakespeare. I wish we had studied his poetry instead of his plays, I loved all my poetry classes.
One literature class I had use memorize his soliloquy "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" which was pretty cool. A poetry class where you just read excerpts from his plays would be cool.
But reading his whole plays? It's not a pleasant read for anybody. I can't imagine anyone wanting to go see one of his plays either. I'd imagine if you go watch one there are empty seats all over the places
I mean who wants to read or listen to shit like this for a whole play:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear,
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blessed be the man that spares these stones,
And cursed be he that moves my bones.
or
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly—
And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well ...
But yeah I had one the teachers that ran our theater so he made us go through like 10 of his plays. At the time I was optimistic about it and tried to enjoy it and even had favorites
But then we did Sophocles' Oedipus trilogy and that was AWESOME
BLEW SHAKESPEARE OUT OF THE WATER BADLY
It really does blow that Shakespeare is the one considered the best English playright, had the produced something good like ancient Greece did we'd all be studying that instead. But all England produce was shitty ole Shakespeare so we have to read it because England is where our language came from and that shit is the best they got
I don't remember much of what I read in school, and I also skipped a lot of school. The Giver was quite boring, I guess. I read it around 8th grade. Wish I went to school more often and read more. I haven't read much of the classics, except a few I read in my own time after high school.
Still haven't finished 1984. I think that mightve bored the shit out of me, even in my own time. Maybe I'm just low IQ.
>Still haven't finished 1984. I think that mightve bored the shit out of me, even in my own time. Maybe I'm just low IQ.
You are.
The Great Gatsby. Inoffensive and short = perfect for American high school curriculum. In regards to its literary merit, the prose is overrated, the characters are unremarkable, and the story is unremarkable
After rereading it in my 30s I got the sense Fitzgerald edited the book with a thesaurus propped open. In terms of vocabulary it's a good choice for high school.
Pearl by Steinbeck. It was not good writing and the story was mediocre.
Unironically can't remember a bad book I read in school. Some books weren't for me (Night in particular just seemed like misery porn), but on a technical level they were all good, and most had won prizes.
White Fragility
Between the World and Me
How to be an Antiracist
Indigenous People's History of the US
A Raisin in the Sun
The House on Mango Street
Things Fall Apart
Yes, really
Good God, where did you go to high school?
Do zoommutts really have to read all this now? I graduated in 2018 and didn’t read a single one of those. Grim.
Based on what I can tell from reading teacher forums and watching youtube videos about the profession, all children since the mid 2010s have been solely taught by the sorts of women you see on dating apps, basically complete air-heads who literally do not know anything they didn't learn from "growing up on social media"
All other knowledge, like the stuff they learn in college (which at this point is also just "stuff from social media" but slightly more formalized), is secondary to the "what I learned to take as given based on being on social media since I was sentient." They have nothing else. History teachers don't really seem to understand what history "is," history is more like Marvel movies they half-remember and then use to teach the kids about black gay trannies.
That’s unfortunate. Maybe there’s money to be made in forming a private school
>hardest book i read
the sound and the fury, because how the frick was i supposed to handle all the PoV and timeline changes
>least enjoyable at the time
tie between ethan frome and hamlet, because incredibly boring story and my lit teacher kept bringing up his ex-wife lol and muh archaic english respectively
>most overdone
1984 & animal farm, because duh
>my personal favorite
heart of darkness, everyone in my class hated it but i just thought it was incredibly cool
>worst book by quality
i dunno, probably the outsiders because its just young adult fiction i guess
>most controversial in the class
probably things fall apart because it sparked race discussion, i thought the book was fine though
Zoomer here, probably Siddharta lol. I liked Steppenwolf though
>I recently read it again and I ended up hating it even more.
Skill issue.
my cousin is some type of english major in some NY college and he tells me he has to read a lot of books by 'Toni Morrison' i know nothing about her but i cant help but feel he's paying for propaganda
>not knowing anything about one of the most acclaimed American authors post 1970
Horribly embarrassing
Naked Lunch is the only book I’ve dropped with no intention of giving it a second chance. My opinion of it is so low that I’m reluctant to try other Burroughs. Other than that I don’t finish books that aren’t doing anything for me or ones I’m not liking. Many books I’ve dropped I’ve come to appreciate at a different point in my life approaching them with a different perspective. Don’t think I could do that with Naked Lunch
Anne Frank's Forgery or TKAM
Graduated public school 2022, a list of books we read were
Ray Bradbury The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy The Road, Jasper Jones, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas