Books part of the curriculum during Sophomore year (US high school)

Google sophomore high school English curriculum

If you want a particular era, add that era

sophomore high school English curriculum 1980s

This varies by school, or district if public, not state.

My sophomore reading list included The Fountainhead or Tess of the fucking d'urbervilles -- one was soph, one was jr., don't remember which way it went, Macbeth was our sophomore Shakespeare (did one a year -- Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Midsummer), and a bunch of short stuff, poetry, etc. I know a school does Moby Dick, poor kids.

Public vs. private makes a difference, too. In my experience (sophomore English teacher at a private school), private school teachers get a lot more freedom in creating their syllabi, although probably not at a religious school. The more traditional picks that I teach are Much Ado About Nothing, Beowulf (some years), 1984, and Pride and Prejudice. I also do Peter Pan, Good Omens, Never Let Me Go, and a crap ton of poetry.

My class is British literature, but when I went to school in the 90s in South Carolina, 10th grade was American lit. There's a lot of variety from school to school.

cornflake said:

Tess of the fucking d'urbervilles

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Ugh, I'm still furious that I had to read this book. The senior English teacher in my department teaches it, and I shamelessly badmouth it to the kids. Not sorry.

Public high schools often have a school-district assigned curriculum, and that may include not only the reading list (in terms of novels, for instance) but a specific series of textbooks.

And there may be three different "tracks": college prep, non-college prep and AP.

AW Admin said:

And there may be three different "tracks": college prep, non-college prep and AP.

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In the private high schools where I've worked (and at the one where my husband works), there are college prep and honors only. The assumption is that every student in private school is preparing for college, and that honors usually leads to AP. I taught at a very large private high school that also had an option for students with learning differences, which had a different title. So there were three tracks there, but they were all college prep.

ETA: And at my current school, which is quite small, there is no tracking in humanities. It's just English until you choose to take AP or not. Size matters!

I just noticed that you were interested in essay topics, too, OP. Feel free to PM me. I can give you a variety of essay prompts for any of these scenarios.

At my library, we pull the required reading books onto a special summer reading shelf. Some stay the same from year to year; others come and go. Likewise, any student can read anything from a higher grade, but they're discouraged from reading things from a lower year. I don't know if the schools do essays or quizzes to see if they actually retained anything or not. The teachers probably tell them to choose x books, because I don't see how anyone could read all 26 books on the list in three months, even if they were a gung-ho champion reader. A year, maybe, if they were overachieving maniacs.

A few of the standbys include Orwell's Animal Farm, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson, The House on Mango Street by Cisneros, One Day in the Live of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, The Education of Little Tree by Carter, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway, The Pearl by Steinbeck, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, A Prayer for Owen Meany by Irving, and Wuthering Heights by Bronte.

Some of the new ones that cycle through are Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather; A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway; the KJV version of Genesis; Giants in the Earth by Rolvaag; The Color of Water by McBride; Medea by Euripides; Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Richard III by Shakespeare. Oh, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

albrock said:

Ugh, I'm still furious that I had to read this book. The senior English teacher in my department teaches it, and I shamelessly badmouth it to the kids. Not sorry.

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Heh, also still mad.

I hated The Fountainhead, but I get the point of assigning it. Tess... gah.

We did Scarlet Letter in freshman year and a bunch of stuff, including Canterbury Tales, in sr., along with the aforementioned Shakespeares, short things, poetry...

Otoh, at least I didn't go to the school that does Moby Dick.

We had to read Brave New World, Great Expectations, Lord of the Flies, A Doll's House, and I think a few others.

Quite a few of them, now that I think about it (not all sophomore year, but high school in general):

Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Iliad and Odyssey - Homer
Macbeth - Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet - Shakespeare
Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorn
The Yearling - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Canterbury Tales (selected stories) - Geoffrey Chaucer
Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

I remember my friends reading:

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

My kids in the late 2000s read Number the Stars by Lois Lowry in addition to others not yet study-worthy when I was in school. I just can't remember which ones.

I also had a class called Individualized Reading where we could choose from about 200 books spanning the spectrum, which is where I discovered Kurt Vonnegut and Evelyn Waugh, and read my first Stephen King (Eyes of the Dragon; I loved it!). The selections also included Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig), The Hobbit (Tolkein), The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath), Sticks and Stones (Lynn Hall), and the oddly memorable I Am the Cheese (Robert Cormier).

As for the essays, in the lower highschool grades we mostly had to summarize the plot, while in the higher grades we had to identify recurring themes, motifs, and in some cases explain what certain parts would have meant to people at the time.

My HS was very bad, so I got Hiroshima and Old Man and the Fish. Also Death Be Not Proud and The Pearl. All short, awful books.

cornflake said:

I hated The Fountainhead, but I get the point of assigning it.

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I do not. Never assigned, if it was I was close enough to dropping out at that point I would have jumped a train and run off to the circus. *Only mild sarcasm*

The Common Core State Standards has a recommended reading list in its index. You can Google it.

Elle. said:

I understand the list might vary from state to state

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The list might vary from school district to school district. There is no standard. And has been mentioned, private schools are completely independent and make their own choices.

Second, by "English" literature, do you mean literature by writers from England, or literature written originally in English. As I recall, back in the olden days when I was in high school, most of what we read was by American writers (Twain, Steinbeck, Cather all come to mind).

caw

Kjbartolotta said:

My HS was very bad, so I got Hiroshima and Old Man and the Fish. Also Death Be Not Proud and The Pearl. All short, awful books.

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Mileage may vary.

caw