My take on the average American high school English curriculum is this: Your teacher approaches the class and says, "I love this book, it is one of the greatest works of literature ever produced and you 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 you love this book and how brilliantly written it is. Don't forget to profess just how much you have internalized the morals it is trying to convey."
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.
I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". 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.
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.
I re-read Gatsby about 30 years after high-school and came away thinking that it was one of the most well written books I'd ever read. FSF's command of the English language is truely amazing in the book. When originally forced to read it in high school, I'm sure I hated it, like I hated everything.
I would recommend a re-read later in life for anyone who didn't like it the first go around. It's less than 200 pages, so not much of a time comittment. Teacher's do assign you a lot of crap in HS, so it can be hard to tell what is worth your time.
For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.
I've tried reading it maybe ten times. The funny thing is that I really enjoy it, I just inevitably put it down and forget about it. I have a hard time finishing books, though I don't have the same issue with audiobooks.
Would be way cooler to assign 2-3 different books and request a critical analysis of competing themes. Or pick you own book, get it approved by the teacher, and analyze that. But some of that is probably too much for younger students
In my high school English we used a 2-volume “anthology” of American lit that had entire books and short stories but was mostly very long excerpts of maybe a couple hundred novels/stories/poems, and we took a comparative approach. Most of us had already read all the top 25 classics (gatsby, Harper Lee, Salinger, grapes of wrath etc) by the time we got to that class though
The book How to Read a Book goes into how to read and evaluate multiple works this way. I'd recommend it to any high schooler, by the way. It also talks more generally about how to read and take notes effectively.
I agree, and the most enjoyable semester of English was one where the professor took this approach. The only downside was that the books to select from were limited and there were no non-fiction options to choose from. However my teacher did appreciate the effort I made in trying to persuade him to allow me to read Meditations instead.
Picking a book getting approached by the teacher then writing a book report has been how I was taught to read since 1st grade. After moving to the US for high school, being forced to read through the American classics was what killed any urges I had for reading fiction outside of school work
The problem is that a lot of the themes and topics in the novel simply aren't relevant to teenagers, and won't be for years. It's why English teachers love the novel and students almost universally hate it. My English teacher also said as much at the time: most of us wouldn't appreciate this novel until well after college.
We weren't forced to write a series of essays explaining how much we loved the book or how brilliantly written it was; that would have earned a D at best in any of the college-bound English classes in my district (and generally, in most other California school districts as well). We did have to write essays engaging with the themes and substantive content of the book (i.e., what ideas the book was conveying and how it did that, or tried to do that).
The point of Gatsby was too see how (relatively) modern books engaged in the same sort of symbolism and symbolic discourse as "classical" works like Dickens. AP English classes were permitted to use more modern novels, and most did (the most recent novel we read as part of the course was the Shipping News.)
I read Gatsby in high school over 40 years ago and don’t recall the assignments around it being quite so heavy-handed. It’s a novel that certainly invites thematic analysis and truly there’s only so much you can say about that; but the paper I ended up writing dealt with the symbolism and craft of the text and how that supported the theme. It’s odd because practically every other HS English assignment felt obligatory and unmemorable, but that one apparently did not.
My take on it is that a halfway decent teacher will simply want you to notice those themes, not necessarily endorse them. For example, "this book explores the ideas that the American Dream is largely a facade and that greed is what undermines our ideals. In this essay, I will explain why I disagree with these ideas..."
Personally loved to read until I had to do this to a river runs through it, which may be one of the most boring books I’ve ever encountered. Put me off course books for years.
I don’t care how profound the meaning, no one needs 30 pages of how to cast the perfect fly fishing cast.
"Love" is very loosely used here. The actual assignment is about meaning, plot, structure etc. You don't have to love anything to get value dissecting it.
This, parent comment is telling on themselves, they didn't understand what the class was teaching because they chose to be obstinate instead of curious.
Perhaps, but I think it would be incorrect to say that I didn't understand what the class was trying to teach me. I may be an obstinate person, but I wouldn't attribute a lack of zeal for a particular subject as an overall lack of curiosity.
I suppose not finding a subject worthwhile is partly my fault, but some responsibility falls on the curriculum as well.
Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.
Gatsby was one of the books we had to read and I didn't like any of the characters and couldn't care less about anything they wanted or did.
When I was around 30 I decided to read the book again to see if it landed differently and nope. Still thought it was awful.
I did enjoy a few of the assigned books. Canticle for Leibowitz, Brave New World, Lost Horizon, Frankenstein, and Day of the Triffids are a few I remember positively.
Teachers know kids will use AI to write essays and I bet more than a few teachers use them to grade, so there's probably no point in assigning a single book for everybody anymore. IMHO, the best chance to get a kid to read and write about a novel is to let them pick something of interest.
I read it close to 20 years ago now, but my recollection was that all of the characters being unlikable and everything they wanted and did (basically, worrying about status) being uncompelling was kind of the point.
Emerson tells you not to care about what other people think. Fitzgerald gives you an extended opportunity to experience not caring about what other people (particularly "high status" people) think.
It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters can be great.
My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I spend any time thinking about what these characters do or say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video game NPC.
Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually enjoyed or at least didn't hate.
Depends on why you read fiction. If you read it mostly for narrative, sure. If you read it mostly to explore ideas and to enjoy the artistry, probably not.
>Sometimes I think high school English courses are designed to make kids hate reading.
That's because most kids are too dumb at that point to understand that reading has multiple purposes, and being entertained and liking the characters isn't what they are trying to teach you in higher level English classes. Teachers often make that point clearly, but students are often half asleep or just in disbelief that reading might have other purposes than to instruct or entertain.
Prescribing dull books and hoping that by some miracle whatever it is you are trying to teach with them is getting through is educator malpractice IMHO.
This mindset is why literacy rate is so low in America. I enjoyed reading so much when I grew up abroad and got to pick the books i have to read and write a book report about. Though it has to be approved. After moving back to the US, being forced to read many of these boring classics just taught me to avoid reading in my free time
My take on the average American high school English curriculum is I have no idea what the average is because I only experienced one run through two high schools and you didn't experience much more than that, either. My experience did not match yours at all. I cannot recall any instance ever where a teacher expected me to love what we were reading. They expected we could suss out some sort of thematic relevance and defend our theses with examples found in the text and that's about it. We weren't training to be professional critics that evaluate quality and make recommendations about what others may or may not enjoy consuming. It was more demonstrate you know how to pay attention and extract some level of meaning from a text.
If you instead memorize and regurgitate what is in the Cliffs Notes, that seems like a fast track to becoming the kind of person who is always told to read the manual because you clearly didn't. While they surely don't do a great job at it, American high schools as far as I can tell are mostly just trying to create adults that don't become brain vampires expecting their better educated peers to be free question answering services because they never learned how to learn.
Yeah, I was gonna say that I think that most of the assigned books are chosen by the state, right? Obviously it varies a lot, but I can't recall any teacher actually wanting to teach a book, let alone having the freedom to choose just about anything.
Absolutely disagree. Well articulated analysis of books are generally accepted in high schools and colleges whether they are positive or critical. What you’re probably referring to is dismissive essays that brusquely say that the content doesn’t apply to them without providing a well researched reason. Those usually come from edgy layabouts that spent 10 minutes on the assignment.
Higher up the Venusian atmosphere is surprisingly earth-like. Interestingly though, once a probe gets deep enough into the atmosphere a parachute becomes unnecessary because the atmosphere has gotten so thick that a probe can simply soft-land.
AMD's competitor to CUDA is ROCm. Historically, AMD has been hobbled by the quality of their drivers and because they sold less performant hardware. AMD has traditionally been the budget option for both CPUs and GPUs. Things have changed in the CPU space because of Ryzen, but sadly AMD has not been able to realize an equivalent competitive advantage in the GPU space. Intel has also entered the GPU market, but they are even farther behind than AMD. The same problems I am about to describe apply to them as well, to a higher degree.
Rewriting CUDA programs to run using ROCm is expensive and time consuming. It is difficult to justify this expense when in all likelihood the ROCm version will be less efficient, less performant, and less stable than the original. In the grand scheme of things, AMD hardware is indeed cheaper but it's not that much cheaper. From a business standpoint, it's just not worth it.
Knowing what I know about how management thinks, even if AMD managed to make an objectively superior product at a much better price, institutional momentum alone would keep people on CUDA for a long time.
AMD has been hobbled by the quality of their drivers
I always hear this and I believe it, but I've never been able to find any insight about what exactly is holding them back.
Given the way nVidia is printing money, surely it absolutely cannot be a lack of motivation on AMD's part?
This is a very uninformed thought as I have no experience writing drivers, nor am I familiar with the various things supported by CUDA and ROCm. But how is AMD struggling with ROCm compute drivers, when their game drivers have been plenty stable as far as I have experienced? Surely the surface area of functionality needed for the graphics drivers is larger and therefore the compute drivers should be a relatively easier task? Or am I wrong and CUDA has a bunch of higher-level stuff baked into it and this is what AMD struggles to match?
and because they sold less performant hardware.
Does anybody have and insight into specifically what part of compute performance AMD is struggling to match? Did AMD bet on the wrong architectural horse entirely? Are they unable to implement really basic compute primitives as efficiently as they want because nVidia holds key patents? Did nVidia lock down the entire pool of engineers who can implement this shit in a performant way?
I mean, aside from GPU compute stuff, it sure looks to me like AMD is executing well. It doesn't seem like they're a bunch of dunces over there. Quite the opposite?
I cannot believe how slow and laggy even the most basic of Microsoft applications are on Windows 11. Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in. What could it possibly be doing to warrant such a long load time? The 'classic' calculator on previous versions would appear near instantly once clicked.
I am also baffled as to how something like the new right click context menu can have items loading in and then changing the order of icons once they do finish loading on every single click. For example, why does Skype need to have its menu item load every time the context menu is opened? Why not pre-load this on boot? The classic context menu had no such issues.
Rather than go on and on, I sense Product Owners at Microsoft no longer care about fast and performant code.
The Windows app development situation has become such a mess even Microsoft devs want to use Electron style containment for everything. That is the result.
Edit to add: I'm sure other people can chip in with more, but what I was told was the .net teams and Windows teams pulled in completely different directions. WPF/XAML was really widely liked by many developers for quite a while, then they put it on ice for no apparent reason (supposedly because the core Windows team had better ideas), and their on/off stance on this ever since has just driven everyone away.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was with Outlook. They replaced the regular desktop Outlook app with "New Outlook", which is just a wrapper around Outlook.com, which is horrible and slow and buggy and even shows ads to the user. I guess they think it's a waste of money to develop a proper mail client app.
I also copied over the 'old' windows photo viewer. The delay in loading simple screenshots was such an annoyance that I couldn't stand it. Folks on forums suggested turning off any analysis plugins, such as those meant to identify faces in photographs to speed things up. It barely made a difference.
I've noticed this as well since our company laptops updated to Windows 11. Launching everything is slower but especially the built-in Microsoft apps like calc, notepad and mspaint. It's incredibly frustrating.
> Launching something as simple as the calculator takes a second or two to load in.
You can get this feature on Linux if you use flatpaks or snaps on an older computer. I got used to bearing with it because it allows me to have a stable core OS combined with modern applications that have been released today. It's a price I'm willing to pay. Nevertheless, I don't know how slow it is on a more modern machine, I guess it is probably quite fast.
Also, gnome-calculator is not an application I would install through a flatpak or snap.
When my laptop is on energy saving mode, the calculator crashes when opening. The snippet tool breaks the drag in the middle and delivers a partial screenshot. The system generally feels like slideshow.
These didn't happen under Windows 10.
Few weeks ago I also had my share of problems under Debian and I'm really thinking about getting the cheapest Mac Mini M4 and re-learning every possible computer habit I have including shortcuts because I hate the current status in any non-mac os/hardware so much.
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.
I don't blame anyone that resorts to using Cliff's Notes just to get past the assignments. There is only so much that can be said about a certain book, and you can't just write an essay saying "The Great Gatsby was alright but I really didn't get much out of it and I don't see why people think it is so amazing". 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.
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.