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[Lord Shonus]

I once failed an English test by answering the question "What purpose did Dickens have when he wrote A Tale Of Two Cities?" with "£1 (149.41 in today's money)" (Dickens wrote the book in twenty installments, and was paid 1 shilling per installment. I hated questions like that.

[Neonivek]

I once failed an English test by answering the question "What purpose did Dickens have when he wrote A Tale Of Two Cities?" with "£1 (149.41 in today's money)" (Dickens wrote the book in twenty installments, and was paid 1 shilling per installment. I hated questions like that.

I don't like the idea of "psychic questions" that ask you to basically infer what someone was thinking from basically nothing.

I mean by what measure is "Getting paid" NOT a correct answer? Ohh that is right because Charles Dickens is some sort of angelic writer who was clearly beyond money DAMN IT SCHOOL!!!

Ok maybe it was just my schools that were terrible with the author worship.

[NJW2000]

The clue would be in the word "english", at the top of the test, one assumes. Apparently Shonus hit upon one of the very few unacceptable yet technically correct answers, by some weird fluke.

[Sergarr]

Shit is getting crazy, yo. Did Tom Clancy cast a spell on the world that turned its plot into one of his novels, or what?

[hector13]

English classes are a bit pointless anyway, beyond teaching the mechanics of the language, though I don't think Inwas ever even taught that properly.

Usually questions asking "what do you think author x meant by using word/phrase/spelling y..." are actually "what were you told to say", though my answer was usually (unfortunately never written) "how the fuck should I know, I'm not the author". It's pseudo psychology.

[Neonivek]

Shit is getting crazy, yo. Did Tom Clancy cast a spell on the world that turned its plot into one of his novels, or what?

I knew he was a Lich!

English classes are a bit pointless anyway, beyond teaching the mechanics of the language, though I don't think Inwas ever even taught that properly.

Usually questions asking "what do you think author x meant by using word/phrase/spelling y..." are actually "what were you told to say", though my answer was usually (unfortunately never written) "how the fuck should I know, I'm not the author". It's pseudo psychology.

English classes are teaching people higher levels of literacy. They aren't useless...

They are just taught in some of the worst sort of ways on the basis of hero worship self-evidence.

Which results in fact that most people have terrible reading comprehension and can't pick up on subtext.

I'll put it this way... English Class in highschool felt like it was dead set on making me HATE literature.

Shakespeare is honestly something I think is taught the worst. It is so spoonfed because English doesn't know how to pace people. Instead of letting people have a basic understanding of the plot then slowly unfolding it... NOPE KNOW EVERYTHING NOW!

[O.Wilde]

Plus reading Shakespeare is basically useless anyway unless you actually enjoy that kind of reading. Just take them to a show, for the love of god.

[Aklyon]

English class is full of excess questions once you get past spelling and reading, I'd say. I don't know why they did x in that book, I wasn't paying that close attention to it (or I just wanted to read the book damnit. Not answer arbitrary questions about it! You're going to go on an unrelated tangent anyways that doesn't explain your answer at all.)

Or its a month of dragging people through shakesphere followed by a couple days of the movie of the play.

[hector13]

That's what I said *cough*irony*cough*

It's all the textual analysis stuff they do, and usually having to teach toward a test. You can't teach a subjective thing to an objective measure. I loved reading as a kid, and I stopped reading pretty much my entire way through high school because of English classes.

PPE: a community college teacher did that for our English class o. Wilde. Didn't necessarily help, but it was better than reading through it all. (As you like it, it was)

[Flying Dice]

Plus reading Shakespeare is basically useless anyway unless you actually enjoy that kind of reading. Just take them to a show, for the love of god.

Except no. Viewing lacks the opportunity to closely examine the text, and slants the whole thing towards the interpretations and stylings of the troupe. This is especially important because you don't get to read the original stage directions, so you don't know what was expressly intended (and what of that was changed by the troupe) versus what was left open to interpretation and improvisation. Not to mention that you generally can't go back and re-watch a specific performance at a later date. Live performances can be useful supplements in an academic setting, but little more.

[Sergarr]

Also, there's a lot of meaning lost in translation from Ye Olde English to modern English. Most of said meaning is dirty, though, so it's understandable why teachers would avoid mentioning that.

[O.Wilde]

But talking about a typical high school setting, where you're barely going to have the time to read it, much less dissect the language and structure? If our goal is to dissect a work and study the language, then I agree with you. If we have the time, that's the ideal, and reading the text is the only way to do that. But for the depth a high school English class aims for, I think a basic understanding is more important. You are not going to be able to get 20 kids to interpret Shakespeare's text in a week. If you wanted to do sonnets or something, you could do that, but the plays are more popular.

Perhaps not a performance, but some setting where they can hear it spoken rather than see it on a page. Dedicate an hour to reading a scene or something.

Also, this:

This is especially important because you don't get to read the original stage directions, so you don't know what was expressly intended

Is not a valid point. Stage directions of shakespeare's works consist of [X enters (Sometimes left, right, or above)], [Exeunt X (Left, right, above, or severally)], and [Exits, pursued by a bear]. That's all we have of the directions.

[itisnotlogical]

I... I actually liked my lit classes.

Being taught about the mechanics of a story, how to think critically about the message of a work, and place a story in its context in the real world has given me a much deeper appreciation of all the fiction that I consume on a day-to-day basis. Sure I ended up reading garbage like A Farewell to Arms and Thousand Cranes, but I also read novels that have become my all-time favorites like To Kill A Mockingbird, Jane Eyre and The Grapes of Wrath. And I actually thought about and contemplated them, at first because I was forced to but later because I was actually passionate about the stories and characters.

So the benefit of lit classes isn't an immediately employable skill, but I still think it's worthwhile. Now I actually like a lot of books, movies, TV shows and games that I would have previously tossed aside as being 2deep4me, because I actually learned how to slow down and really interpret a story.

Also, the fact that literature courses are called "English" is stupid. Besides, I'd say that the majority of people learn how to write English just fine without being told the name of every single sentence structure.

[chaotic skies]

We have 1 and a half hours of Language Arts at school, and the entire fucking time is dedicated to the theme of something.

"What's the theme?" What I'm thinking: WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WE'VE GONE OVER THIS ALREADY. What I actually say: "The theme is "*insert real-life philisophical shitpost here*

And that's what gets me an A.

[Flying Dice]

Also, there's a lot of meaning lost in translation from Ye Olde English to modern English. Most of said meaning is dirty, though, so it's understandable why teachers would avoid mentioning that.

Oh, yeah, his work is bawdy as shit.

But talking about a typical high school setting, where you're barely going to have the time to read it, much less dissect the language and structure? If our goal is to dissect a work and study the language, then I agree with you. If we have the time, that's the ideal, and reading the text is the only way to do that. But for the depth a high school English class aims for, I think a basic understanding is more important. You are not going to be able to get 20 kids to interpret Shakespeare's text in a week. If you wanted to do sonnets or something, you could do that, but the plays are more popular.

Perhaps not a performance, but some setting where they can hear it spoken rather than see it on a page. Dedicate an hour to reading a scene or something.

Also, this:

This is especially important because you don't get to read the original stage directions, so you don't know what was expressly intended

Is not a valid point. Stage directions of shakespeare's works consist of [X enters (Sometimes left, right, or above)], [Exeunt X (Left, right, above, or severally)], and [Exits, pursued by a bear]. That's all we have of the directions.

Ah, we seem to be speaking at cross-points. I'm talking about studying literature and theatre, you're talking about herding a bunch of bored, horny teens through a year of prep work for a standardized test.

Also, you might want to look up what stage directions mean. There's a wealth of nuance, and you literally named the two simplest and least-nuanced stage directions. Aloof/Apart seem like they're the same, but they aren't. Exit/Exeunt are not the same thing. Aside has two different meanings. Trumpet/Tucket are similar, but have different precise uses. Enter/Break in/Brought out all indicate the same general action accomplished in different ways. Tucket/Sennet/Flourish share the same meaning. Adding Torches changes the scene noticably, but you wouldn't know if it was a troupe's own convention unless you read the original. Aside/Within both indicate a character speaking from the stage to an audience off of it, but the audiences are different. Solus clarifies the meaning of entry/exit in important scenes. There are important moments of latitude (see The Scottish Play, there is no stage direction dictating that Lady Macbeth faint, only that she be carried out) and restriction (the common use of asides to separate crucial knowledge into audience knowledge vs. character knowledge). &c.