They’re still teaching the same books they did when I was at school

[Rapidmama]

DD massively dismayed to see Macbeth on her reading list. She utterly loathed it in year 7.

An inspector calls....I did that for GCSE 20 years ago

Animal Farm - not so bad but done to death by now surely?

Why can’t they inject some life into the reading syllabus?

I had to study Salt on the Snow, and Sumitra’s Story for my GCSE English Lit. They were dire. Thankfully there was some Shakespeare thrown in to liven things up where the 1980s offering failed.

I did The Crucible, A Man For All Seasons, An Enemy Of The People, Far From The Madding Crowd, Brave New World and poems by Robert Burns - lived them all and imagine they are still relevant now.

Death Of A Salesman and All My Sons - not so much

DD did Never Let Me Go for GCSE, which hadn’t been written when I did my O Levels. She also did Much Ado, which I did for O Level - the intervening thirty years are neither here nor there when talking about the relevance of a four hundred year old text.

I also am prepared to forgive Michael Gove at least some of his sins for freeing the Eng Lit syllabus from Mice and Sodding Men.

The new exams seem to want involve memorising lots the text and regurgitating in exams.
The joy of reading is being squeezed out of children.
DD also did Macbeth at Primary school which totally put her off Shakespeare so she hated it for GCSE.Due to budget cuts they don't even get to see them as plays.
She got a 7 but what she didn't learn was a love for literature.

I recently found out that The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime is now used for GCSEs.

Plus a good ‘unreliable narrator’ book. They used to always use Catcher in the Rye for that but the issue is that a lot of GCSE students don’t ‘get it’ from that perspective, possibly because his world is too unrelatable.

OP

Wander over to feminism, it looks to me these have been chosen because they are 'boys' books by male writers and girls preferences and experience do not matter.

Urrgh Macbeth. Both DS and I would have happily given it a miss. I agree with PP it works as a play but for picking apart week in week out the story’s ludicrous

I would have loved to have done Animal Farm. I did Of Mice and Men instead. The set below us did The Catcher In the Rye which seemed much more interesting.

Did Macbeth and An Inspector calls though, as did DS 2years ago.

I'm a teacher. There is quite a wide choice for teachers including texts which really haven't been done to death. Teachers or heads of department tend to choose texts which they can easily teach as they have endless resources, films, schemes of work for etc as they have built them up over the years. It's a lot harder if you teach a new text as you don't have anything and have to create all your own resources, eg, lesson plans, schemes of work, activities, worksheets, mock exams, etc and with a very heavy timetable this is not very appealing. I always wanted to teach something new and fresh but was discouraged by heads of department as they weren't so tried and tested. I also mark exam papers and I can see how many candidates respond to each text. There's usually a choice of around 7 texts and barely any for some while most of the country seem to be studying A Christmas Carol or Jekyll and Hyde.

Also schools are starting gcse texts earlier and earlier, the thinking behind studying Macbeth, the exam text, in years 7 or 8, is that they can become familiar with the story and the characters and then will be at an advantage when they come to study it for gcse in years 10 or 11. I think that's a bit lazy but the emphasis is on results rather than fostering a love of literature and a lot of schools think this works.

I don't think anyone can argue that we don't need to study Orwell at this point in history 🤔

Sorry - not very clearly phrased. By that, I mean that it's crucial that we heed the warnings of the writers of dystopian fiction before we simply find ourselves living in it.

I did Macbeth for 'O' level in 1968 😄
I think we did Lord of the Flies too. I reread that a few years ago and can't imagine why they inflicted it on generations of schoolchildren.

Does Eng lit not have to be English literature? Interested that someone said they did Zola and the OP is suggesting Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Did a handmaids tale and return of the native (Thomas hardy) for a’level. Carol Ann Duffy and Keats for poetry units. Think they try to get a balance of classic and more modern.
An Inspector Calls is wonderful. And I’ve literally just read brave new world for the first time and loved it.
As a pp said Shakespeare is a massive part of our history and culture. So much of our language comes from his work if nothing else!

How does it work? English lit is a compulsory subject but history/sociology/politics /religious studies aren't so how can the curriculums cross over? Genuine question.

@bookmum08 - I just mean that during English students are also taught about the author's background and what was happening socially and politically when the book was written, to give it a context and to enable wider discussion and a better understanding of the book and why the author chose to write it.

1990s
KS3: Romeo and Juliet (Accompanied by the Franco Zepherelli film, pre Leonardo DiCaprio ), Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry, Judy Blume, sci-fi (remember listening to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and writing my own story based losely on the Demon Headmaster.

GCSE: Jane Eyre, Macbeth, Diaries (Anne Frank, Zlata, Adrian Mole) WW1 poetry. Other classes did An Inspector Calls and Of Mice and Men.

A-Level: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (newly published) The Winter's Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Chaucer: The Miller's Tale, Disutopias: A Brave New World and lots of extracts from others (1984, Farenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale) so that we could pick our own to study and compare, Emily Duckinson's poetry, The Return of the Native.

There was quite a varied mix in there, some more enjoyable and influential to me than others. Ultimately the curriculum, resources and the need to teach for results will drive choices (or lack of) Setting may also affect some variations, so my top set, female heavy group really got into Jane Eyre (especially while watching Colin Firth being Mr Darcy on Sunday evening as there was a good boom in that kind of costume drama at the time), whereas other classes would have found it too long and slow.

Not all Shakespeare was created equally from the point of view of a modern teenager trying to analyse the written form, so the same core of plays do tend to crop up. At A-Level, I found it much easier to get my teeth into The Winter's Tale than Much Ado About Nothing. Adaptions help, and we were fortunate that the RSC put on The Winter's Tale at the time. We also went to see Macbeth at GCSE, but adaptions of the more popular, well studied plays are easier to come by especially when you aren't convieniently located to a specialist theatre.

I do agree that repeatedly studying the same text is dull, especially if you didn't warm to it at the first time.

I did mine 20 years ago. Romeo and Juliet, of mice and men, an inspector calls

I did Julius Caesar, Jane Eyre, Kes and a modern poetry anthology called (I think) This Day and Age. 1987.

Does Eng lit not have to be English literature? Interested that someone said they did Zola and the OP is suggesting Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Agreed! I studied several Garcia Marquez & Lorca novels/plays at school but as the literature component of my Spanish classes (up to A level), they’re not English literature!

I do think we should be encouraging a broader diversity of authors though - more women, more people of colour, more from countries other than UK & USA (English being a global language and all) - but on the condition that we are studying original English texts, not translations.

theunrivalledjoy yes that does make sense. Although I remember doing some Irish play and the teacher said something like "you all know about the potato famine don't you?" and half the class mumbled "yes" and half the class was "the what?" and that was it! I was in the 'what' group and the fact I can't remember what that play was shows it didn't have much impact on me. The cross curriculum idea would work better in KS3.
I really don't understand why English Lit is compulsory for gcse. English language definitely but I think at age 14 you either have an interest in literature or you don't. Forcing the indepth study of a handful of books puts a lot of people off reading novels for life which is a shame.

My DC did Macbeth, the Crucible, Grapes of Wrath and An Inspector Calls. I think their sub-texts, expediency of leaders, influence and power, populist hysteria, the powerlessness of women and violence towards them, poverty and disadvantage and class influence on justice all have deep relevance to today!

I forgot Chaucer and Handmaids Tale - i did these for A Level. DS didn't do English Lit for A Level but he did do drama and they chucked in a Shakespeare, Streetcar Named Desire, and they had to do a play about drugs and child sexual exploitation but I don't know what it was called. They also did musicals based on literature so Cats, Les Mis, Phantom, but that wasn't examined, it was more contextual.

Is Eng Lit compulsory to GCSE? When I was at school Eng Lang was but not Eng Lit. Has this changed now?

S1-S2 - The Cay, The Trial of Anna Cottman and Spit Nolan, and a midsummer nights dream

S3/S4 - Mice and Men, Mockingbird, An Inspector Calls, Romeo and Juliet, Lord of the Flies , Merchant of Venice, some of shakespeare’s poetry (shall I compare thee...) and another called Trio about Glasgow in Christmas?? Can’t remember it well

S5 - Jane Eyre, and I can’t remember at anything else ... despite knowing I must have studied more than that ...

S6 (advanced higher) specialised in Jane Eyre/Rebecca/Wide Sargasso Sea but also did A Streetcar Named Desire and a few another Tennessee Williams, Thomas Hardy (Tess and Return of the Native), Edwin Muir and Bill Bryson oddly enough - to learn how to write for the reader’s pleasure

I ended up doing an English lit degree .... I’d read Shakespeare again compared to the Faerie Queen ...that was a headache ...

We got dragged to the merchant of Venice in the cinema I remember ... two top set classes in third year . The film needed subtitles . Was absolutely dreadful . The only bonus, if you like, was that the two teachers taking us were besotted and didn’t give a shit that we weren’t really watching the film at all !!