“Today, students, we are going to learn about Carcosa.”
Ah yes, a nice short story about yellow wallpaper.
Not a short story but I recall we read Call of the Wild in school. Some nice animal cruelty for kids to think about.
Flashbacks to when only the teacher and I understood A Modest Proposal and not being able to explain to anyone else in that class that i was appreciating that he was sassing the english NOT the actual idea of eating babies. 🙃
Either I have a higher tolerance than most or my English teachers were pansies.
Though we did read the play version of The Diary of Anne Frank when I was in 8th grade.
Wait…you read the play version of a book? The fuck?
I don’t know that I’ve ever read the Diary in it’s entirety, but I’ve heard that there are some rather explicit parts, especially pertaining to Anne’s puberty, so maybe they did it to avoid that.
Those parts were not released by Anne’s father, they aren’t in any official edition.
Y’all are taking about the girl with the green ribbon, my first year college lit teacher had us read a short story where a kid fist-fucked his mom and I’m feeling like maybe my education was problematic.
Terrible!
Tell me the title so I can shun it!
Oddly enough, Google is not turning up the story but it’s coming back with a lot of results
I’m assuming Reddit
Ray Bradbury “The Pedestrian”
My dad read “All summer in a day” to me when I was 5ish. I think I was being mean to another kid and he was trying to teach me a lesson. That story still sucks me up.
Maybe try a poem.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
I think that was the inspiration for the B-17 scene from the animated movie Heavy Metal, which fucked me up as a kid.
Holy fuck who wrote this?
I should have attributed, sorry.
Randall Jarrell, published in 1945.
Bomber ball turret gunners and tail gunners had the shortest life expectancy of any combat occupation in the war, as these were the first targets of incoming fighters. I found one site that said tail gunners’ combat life expectancy was four missions.
Ball turrets couldn’t reload in flight. The ball was too small for parachutes, and the mechanisms jammed or froze often. Typically they put small, young, single guys in them.
The Great Gatsby is a great novel about the immobility of class in America, despite the country’s claim to the opposite. I didn’t realize this in highschool when I read it, but damned if it wasn’t a warning of things to come.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge has entered the chat
9th Grade English, got assigned Invisible Man by Ellison. It wasn’t science fiction like I thought it’d be 😅
Nobody going to mention a Cask of Amontillado? Maybe not the most mind-bending example, but the tale of leading a supposed friend to their own horrific murder was not a thing I expected to be reading in school.
That story still haunts me, and I’ve been trying to remember where it was from for over a decade.
Was that before or after the school-shooting lockdown drills?
I grew up in a small town in Canada. We never had any kind of lock down drills.
Dang, things must be pretty good up in Canada. People are sending their children to first grade with ballistic-shielded backpacks down here.
After the hide under your desk from nuclear bombs drills but before the active shooter drills.
Nuclear attack drills? I don’t think we ever did those, I’ve just heard about them from older people. How old are you? I thought those stopped in like the 80s or something.
“For the love of God, Montresor!”
The reply to that just being “Yes, for the love of God,” was cold as ice.
Funnily enough I did in on a similar post a month ago.
i remember that post, was actually hoping to find it again as there had been some great recommendations! glad you mentioned it here.
Wasn’t even required reading for me. I was just flipping through my textbook one day and found that in one of the sections the class was never going to reach.
This thread unlocked an old memory of a poem we read Sophomore year about a frog getting killed by a lawnmower.
Lots of great nightmares fuel here, but I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned The Lottery yet. The end of that story still makes me feel absolutely nauseous.
I had this one used by 2 different teachers for different grades.
I had blocked that one from my memory; I remember now. Thanks. ಠ_ಠ
I still can’t figure out why this is taught to children. What value does it offer, other than being generally well written, which a lot of other less disturbing stories also are? Did the teachers just hate us?
The theme I remember is that if established in a community and reinforced by tradition, any violence could be perpetuated and even endorsed.
