I guess I’d argue this:

I don’t see why they wouldn’t try this every election. We already saw it this past election, not just with Trump, but in cases where the gulf in votes was far greater. Literally any election moving forward where a Republican loses can now be called a “fraud” and, if it’s close enough, and if they have the right…

honestly I’m concerned with the fucking dumbass giving the proud boys a soapbox to stand on, especially after telling them on national television to ‘stand by’ as well as the fucking pig police forces basically letting them go about their fucking violent bullshit. I know this is a lot of swearing, but fuck, these…

Fortunately, the next Timothy McVeigh to rise from the muck will be so incompetent that he will bring shame to the memory of the original.

I cannot agree more that trying to make nice with these MAGA fools will have nothing but diminishing returns, and it disheartens me that more is not being done/said to secure those Senate seats in GA. I feel like that has been moved to a back burner in a way, when it should be top of mind for Joe and Friends. One look…

We read a pretty good mix of stuff in my high school classes- yes, there was Dickens, Shakespeare and The Scarlet Letter (which my Honors English teacher sweetened by showing us the Demi Moore film and giving us permission to mock it at will, which we all thought was pretty great), but we also read Native Son (which…

My high school offered a Shakespeare class and the teacher did exactly that. The teacher demonstrated that this “high literature” was largely just raunchy gutter humor and coded shit-talking about the upper classes and royals. It finally got me to see Shakespeare’s work as something other than stuffy and irrelevant.

That is what kills me - is that it tends to be the same old books.  People who refuse to update the list are honestly trying to argue that no quality literature has been written in the last 30 years.

Fucking Hawthorne, man! I made it through Scarlett Letter, but I think I tried House of Seven Gables like six times and finally donated it. I have a Little Free Library and get a huge kick out of seeing what books really move, especially in the kids/YA categories. 

I also think that one of the most important reasons we should cultivate a love a reading is empathy and emotional intelligence. If we provide young people with a variety of literature that allows them to experience new worlds and viewpoints, we create better rounded adults than if we beat them over the head with the…

It just seems utterly bizarre to me to die on this particular hill. Even if they stopped assigning Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, it’s not as if people will stop reading it. And even if they did, who cares? There is a strange sentimental value society places on these specific books rather than embracing the…

I read a few Toni Morrison books in my AP English class and quite a bit of British classics by women writers (Austen, Bronte). We also had Harlem Renaissance periods in our regular high school English classes where your reading requirements were Native Son and Black Boy. Think I read them in 10th and 11th grade…

My first memory of The Scarlet Letter was the movie trailer where I'm pretty sure I saw Gary Oldman's dick and was promised a lot of gratuitous Demi Moore nudity. Somehow it also looked more boring than reading the book.

My high school English teacher incorporated a lot of modern literature into the course. Then had to defend doing so to a pretentious tightass who thought if it wasn’t old and exalted, it was crap.

Not even that. They’re just arguing for actual thought, reflection, and context in the choice of books to assign, rather than reflexively falling back on the same 15-20 books that everyone seems to read in high school over the last 50+ years. To stop and think about what these books actually say to POC instead of just…

The latter, with a side of “maybe the limited number of books we have time to assign in HS should include more books that encourage a love of reading and understanding of diverse lives, rather than just Moby Dick again”. That’s my understanding, anyway.

My daughter’s AP English teacher apparently hates books by old white dudes that are traditionally taught in British Lit. So they’re reading a great variety of mostly modern British lit by a wide variety of diverse authors and my kid (who is not a kid who enjoys reading) is actually enjoying herself. The same couldn’t…

So, are people arguing that a book like Moby Dick should just go away entirely or be moved to college level where it can be discussed in a more critical way than HS students might grasp?