Replies

My wife (60) teaches AP lit and honors British and American literature in Las Vegas. Last Spring, her students had a 91.7 pass rate on the AP exam where the Clark County average was less than 50%. One of the essay questions was from a woman AND Black author, she told me, but it was excellent literature.

Eileen attended NJ public schools and went to a Catholic HS. She earned a BA at Smith in Mass. She went on to earn her Masters at UNC Chapel Hill, taking a Black Lit class from Blyden Jackson and getting an A. Her continuing ed classes include seminars at the Steinbeck Institute in CA and at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Needless to say, all the students want to get her. One of her female students received a $120,000 ACADEMIC scholarship from Stanford last year. A male got a similar award at BYU.

The senior textbook has a picture of Nelson Mandela next to the poem "Invictus" by Henry David Thoreau and there are lots of liberal propaganda woven in as the author of this thread attests. The District high school curriculum is mostly crap, and the average students suffer especially because of the subject matter and poorly educated teachers.

In the honors classes, the teachers and curricula are better, but the teachers in their twenties and thirties are mostly the product of Liberal State colleges who major in Education. One English teacher who majored in Health and coaches the football team.

I would advise parents of HS students to inquire about the educational background of their English teachers. Many parents are now opting to send their kids to Community College HS or to take their English classes online.