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.

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

Say, "I don't understand why people think Judy Garland was so great. Sang like a bullfrog with asthma, if you ask me."

Dear Lord, you guys were reading some high falutin' books in high school while I was reading The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Our Town and The Heart of Darkness!

Erin, if you have free choice, pick an area that you know really well. The problem with doing a specialized seminar that you don't know inside and out is that you're going to add a ton of research and reading time to prepare and teach it well. It can be worth it (what I learned while prepping for my African American Lit. class was amazing), but I think it's easier and more fun to design an elective around one of your personal passions. If I could teach anything, I might teach a seminar like Memoir, African American Lit., Women's Voices, Creative Writing, 20th Century Literature, etc. because those are my passions and areas of expertise. Think about yours and I bet you'll come up with something great!

I think The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was probably the book that impacted me most in High School. Well, unless you count the discovery that Billy Budd is a universal cure for insomnia.

One fun thing was that AP Senior English became Men Are Pigs 101 since our teacher was going through a bitter divorce at the time.