I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I feel like you answered your question, why assign Gatsby, with the rest of your post: because it’s well written and inspired a huge section of subsequent American literature. Also probably because it introduces many many concepts like the unreliable narrator, American class, and intertextuality to name a few. Though I think many teachers are assigning more contemporary works by a more diverse group of authors these days.
I would hope so, on the more teachers are assigning more different things. This all came up because someone's kid was reading it for school, and then it seemed like a lot of people's kids in the group were. I am not anti-dead white men classic works of literature being assigned in school, but this is... maybe not one I'd pick. I would absolutely teach Macbeth.
A friend recently had her class spend three weeks just on the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet (including having them read it aloud). She figured she'd rather have them read a tiny amount of actual Shakespeare than any amount of dumbed down version.
I enjoyed reading your thoughts. I feel like you answered your question, why assign Gatsby, with the rest of your post: because it’s well written and inspired a huge section of subsequent American literature. Also probably because it introduces many many concepts like the unreliable narrator, American class, and intertextuality to name a few. Though I think many teachers are assigning more contemporary works by a more diverse group of authors these days.
I would hope so, on the more teachers are assigning more different things. This all came up because someone's kid was reading it for school, and then it seemed like a lot of people's kids in the group were. I am not anti-dead white men classic works of literature being assigned in school, but this is... maybe not one I'd pick. I would absolutely teach Macbeth.
A friend recently had her class spend three weeks just on the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet (including having them read it aloud). She figured she'd rather have them read a tiny amount of actual Shakespeare than any amount of dumbed down version.