Skip Navigation
104 comments
  • If we're going to scrap something from high school to add a tax lesson, let's ditch some literature. Over four years my graduating class studied 5 shakespeare plays and a handful of sonnets. Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest if we still have Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Henry V.

    • Reading comprehension is more important than ever ... And you want to cut the classes that teach it? Why?

      • I'm unconvinced that Shakespeare is a particularly good exercise in reading comprehension given the vocabulary, phraseology, spelling and grammar is 500 years out of date.

        I remember reading Hamlet out loud in class, and that was the last of the plays we studied so we had read some Shakespeare before, and every other thing you're running into a sentence that doesn't work or a word that is NEVER said except in Hamlet like 'contumely" or 'orisons' and you just get a room full of teenagers saying words one by one taking none of it on board.

    • What exactly would you want to remove, and what would you propose in its stead, and why?

      • Surely we could have cut out Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest

        The only subject that was required for all four years when I was in high school was English, and senior year English was all British literature, so we got Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte's, shit like that.

        Honestly I think later high school English classes do more to beat any love of reading teenagers have out of them by force feeding them dire dour old ugly hateful and just plain obsolete shit written by damaged people who lived in a world before the invention of epidemiology so sometimes your neighborhood would die of cholera because someone's pit toilet leaked into the ground water.

        Make English 4 if not English 3 electives rather than required. Replace them with a semester of driver's ed, taxes, fire safety, how to safely refrigerate chicken, I can think of a lot of shit that would benefit the world more than having teenagers read a Skakespeare play they don't get aloud.

104 comments