When I started secondary school, we mostly had to read Young Adult novels with morals at the end. We didn't even have to finish them, it was just "hey, here's a book about how bullying is wrong. Have fun". The only real pieces of literature we did were A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations, and we just watched a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations.When we did Merchant of Venice, know what we covered? The fucking caskets. Cause why should we bother with the underlying theme of antisemitism when we can just bring in shoeboxes wrapped in tin foil? On the other hand, when we did Macbeth we got to watch the Roman Polanski movie, which was pretty boss.For poetry, it was basically just a few poets from everywhere except England. Pretty boring, but we got to go see some of them read their poems, and Benjamin Zephaniah showed up which was pretty damn sweet.When I moved to my next school for 6th Form, I figured I'd actually get the chance to read and study actual literature. Instead, pic related actually, I did get to read a lot of cool things like The Glass Menagerie and Songs of Innocence and Experience, but this book was so fucking awful.
Most of the books we had to read we never finished. Whether it was because we devoted too much class time to reading or because most of the students just wanted it read to them like illiterates is a mystery for the ages. I sorta have fond memories of the books I picked out when we had to pick on from the school library. Especially of the books The Island and the White Fox Chronicles.But let me tell you, the worst stories was one about a girl called Cupcake, which after her mother dies of an aneurysm was basically a humiliation conga which, at the point we left off (never finished the story), she ends up pregnant only to get beat up by other prostitutes and the baby ends up a stillborn mess. The whole time I was wondering what sensible high school teacher would seriously think that there was anything to learn from a story like that.The other story wasn't as bad, it was about some outcast trying to get into some secret school club with a lot of influence. It ended up being meh from what we got to read, but I'm probably a bit sour toward it because we could have read Good Omens had the class not decided to vote for that other bookI do recall reading this one story-like poem (one by Joyce I think) and ended up having to take some of the verses and use them to tell a new story. What I ended up with was a nonsensical allegory for masturbation. Good times, good times