To: bentway who wrote (246101 ) 3/2/2014 12:23:40 PM From: epicure Read Replies (2) | Respond to If anything, I think most schools are better now. The way I teach, the amount I cover, and the material my colleagues cover, is greater than when I was in school in the 70's. I actually have my work from high school- I saved it :-) And we cover a great deal more. We read a lot of the same books (though now we do a bit more to force students to actually read them- I remember in high school a lot of my friends never read any of the books). We do internet research- all the time, and sometimes in class. We study ethos, logos and pathos, and have a defined list of 88 literary terms students must know before thy graduate (a few are learned in each grade). We have short stories, units of poetry, and non-fiction material that must be covered. And we have grammar (SAT words-300 per year, 150 per term, 20 per week- with time off when weeks are less than 3 days long) and vocab books. In my English classes when I was in high school we had classic literature, very few short stories, and a little poetry. I remember almost no non-fiction. Researching was limited, because you had to go to libraries to do it- so we didn't do a lot of that. I don't remember doing a lot of rhetorical material- not till college- and now we do that in high school. I learned to be an ace English student mostly because I read on my own- the kids who didn't read all the time did a lot worse- but there were still decent jobs for people who didn't go to college, and a lot of the people I went to college with got those jobs (which are mostly gone now.)
