If you’re not sure if you’re being asked out, just drop an unmistakable hint into the conversation referring to your heterosexuality.

Mention that you don't understand what's wrong with mixing plaids? Emphasize that you hate show tunes?

The chronological plan sounds a bit too much like the standard eng lit survey -- although, given your audience, it may be stuff they haven't yet come to see as standard. I like the genre idea better, especially since it opens the door to stuff (funny! scary! risque!) that's more fun than what they might expect from school reading.

(HoYay: A History may just have to wait for college....)

Mention that you don't understand what's wrong with mixing plaids? Emphasize that you hate show tunes?

Maybe this? If you're a man, just say, "Tonight after work I'm going to Hooters. Yessiree, I loves me some Hooters waitresses." Then howl loudly like a wolf.

I'm with amych. I LIKE English Literature, and almost died doing the Survey classes for my major because it was frontloaded with stuff that was hard (for me anyway) to read, like Chaucer and Beowulf and The Faerie Queen. My favorite and best classes all had literature from what I like to call the "readable" period of English Literature.. around 1850 - 1930. I realize that other people rpobably have different "readable" periods.

Perhaps a an explorations of all the different things that one might consider literature-- poems, plays, novels (of all kinds of genres), comic books, movie scripts, etc. Based on my (theatre) background, I tend to be really interested in how something goes from page to screen or page to performance, which I think would be interesting for kids who watch a lot of movies/TV.

I remember enjoying a unit I did in a high school English class where we did compare-and-contrast of very old and more recent works--I read the Oresteia and Sartre's The Flies, for instance. That might be a bit much for ESL students, though.

Probably the best class I took in grad school was a seminar on the memoir. We read The Education of Henry Adams, Lillian Hellman's An Unfinished Woman, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Vladimir Nabokov's Speak Memory, Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery. It was particularly interesting to talk about how people shaped their lives into a story, and how their version differs from reality. They're all pretty accessible books, except for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Henry Adams is too long, but, as much as I hate to admit it, it's pretty easy to lift exerpts from it. Since then there have been some other great memoirs, like Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.

At my high school our senior year we toook a different English class every grading period, our junior year we got to sign up for the classes we wanted.

The two classes that filled up first were a class called something like Lyrics as Poetry and looked at song lyrics from different genres and decades as lyrics. I wasn't able to take the class.

I took a sections on Young Adult Lit, World Lit, and Literature of American West (although that class turned out to be a dud, we basically just read Lonesome Dove).

The books I most remember from HS were Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Dante's The Inferno, and various Shakespeare.

I think something that covered recent literature would have been interesting. It seemed like the most recent literature was from the 19th century in my HS classes.

Edit: Yeah Sinclair was 20th century, but just barely.

I'd have to say that the two books from high school that made the biggest impression on me were Mann's "Death in venice" (for AP English) and Camus' "The Stranger," which wasn't really assigned, but my creative writing teacher lent me a copy of, expressly stating I should read it even if it wasn't on the syllabus. And he was right. Both were 20th century novels. And French at that!

Probably the best class I took in grad school was a seminar on the memoir.

This sounds really good for HS students. Or even just autobiographies in general. To me they seem more accessible and discussion-generating. Plus just stepping into someone else's shoes at that age can be very illuminating.