How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school

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My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, &quot;I love this book, it is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced and <i>you</i> 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 <i>you</i> love this book and how brilliantly written it is. Don&#x27;t forget to profess just how much you have internalized the morals it is trying to convey.&quot;<p>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.<p>I don&#x27;t blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff&#x27;s Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can&#x27;t just write an essay saying &quot;The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn&#x27;t get much out of it and I don&#x27;t see why people think it is so amazing&quot;. 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.<p>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.

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.&quot;<p>I sure hope this is dead and buried. I couldn&#x27;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.<p>I was privileged enough to grow up in what I&#x27;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.

I read the Great Gatsby in high school. Or tried to. I may have resorted to Cliffs Notes. I can&#x27;t even remember. I can&#x27;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.

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.<p>I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I&#x27;m still not convinced on their rationale.<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>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.

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t ever) accept you. I felt like I grew up in the valley of the ashes.

It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.<p>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.<p>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:<p><i>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)</i><p>No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies&#x2F;interests as their English-major teacher.

I liked Gatsby in school, but I really didn&#x27;t <i>get it</i> until living outside of America for awhile. To me it&#x27;s the perfect encapsulation of the American experience: striving to escape the past while inevitably being pulled down by it.<p>This is, of course, the obvious thesis of the book. But it didn&#x27;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.<p>Later I found out that Fitzgerald wrote most of the novel while in southern France, which makes perfect sense.<p>So if you ever find yourself as an American abroad – definitely read Gatsby.

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.<p>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.

&gt;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 æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.<p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;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—-<p>&gt;So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

A quick Public Service Announcement:<p>Go back and read all those books you were supposed to have read in high school.<p>It turns out, they are actually really good. And now you&#x27;re old enough and have had enough life experience to understand and relate to them.<p>I remember kinda liking &quot;The Sun Also Rises&quot; 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&#x27;s an awesome book, and about more than just swilling wine.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>One minor downside, as long as we&#x27;re doing a PSA, is that doing this will kill your ability to read Airport Bestsellers of any genre. You&#x27;ll need actual good writing from here on out. Fortunately, there&#x27;s lots of people still doing that so they should be able to crank out new good books faster than you can read them.

It&#x27;s kind of interesting how some books, compared to others, become classics<p>Whether it&#x27;s in the lifetime of the author or not (usually not) in which it&#x27;s appreciated, a hypothetical reviewer of books must have had to drudge through some pretty bad ones before getting to the good<p>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&#x27;ve already assigned the bad ones to the trash heap

It&#x27;s an excellent book that didn&#x27;t at all speak to me when I was in high school.

I love this book.<p>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.<p>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)<p>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.

The Great Gatsby was an unreadable book when it came out, and even Warner Bros. struggled to make it watchable with over 100 million dollars. I think the only lesson we can learn from it is about American pedagogy.

It&#x27;s really as simple as the fact that it&#x27;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&#x27;s not Shakespeare, it&#x27;s not Dickens, it&#x27;s not Dostoevsky. For a lot of us, it was a breath of fresh air (as was Hemingway&#x27;s works).

The only thing I remember from reading this in high school English was everyone got a quiz question wrong because no one knew nor was it explained to us what uncut pages on books were.

Responding to some of the comments in the thread.<p>1. The assignment isn&#x27;t simply to understand the &quot;Great Gatsby&quot; it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.

This is the type of content I want to see from The New Yorker.