But no one in college expects a student to have read Carly Churchill. The longer I've taught, the more I've realized that high school is about giving the students a foundation that can then be built on in college. Believe me, there are plenty of 20th century authors, not just playwrights, that I feel were very influential and are undertaught, but in the end I have to do what is best for my students. I would hope that if they took a class about 20th century lit or plays in college, they would get Churchill. I try to expose them to a variety of work and push them outside the normal box, but they also need to know the classics, even if those classics are only perceived as being so important. (I would argue that Shakespeare is that important.)

And in Italy, wasn't opera for everyone?

Caryl Churchill I think would be pretty difficult to teach in a lit class setting (IIRC). I think that's more drama class stuff.

Though who knows, if playwrights like Churchill were discussed in mainstream classroom applications, then it would probably be much more accessible.

Perhaps my bias shows toward incorporating performance as the best way to analyze drama text, YMMV.

Yeah, my issues with what is taught continue into university.

Brecht is another one that's tough to analyze in a purely academic way.

It is, frankly, hard enough to teach the majority of students in your basic public high school setting the basics -- I'm not even arguing Sh. as a basic here, I'm talking sentence structure, 5 paragraph essay, letterwriting, the basics of plot, compare and contrast, elements of persuasion -- that arguments about whether Shakespeare should be supplanted or deeply supplemented with other playwrights or authors is, sadly, fairly moot.

I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about it, cause we should. IJS, that in my teaching experience, it is pretty theoretical for the majority of English teachers.

Huh. "Elements of Persuasion" would make a good Regency romance title. Someone should use it.

I was a theatre and an English Lit major, in college, and I did read a lot of plays for the English major as well, but it may be because I gravitated to classes that taught plays. In lower schools we read The Diary of Anne Frank, 3 Shakespeares, Our Town, and The Crucible, which was a pretty good selection, frankly. I would say that more modern and "harder" plays and authors got neglected equally in my school. Of course, I read a metric shit-ton of plays all on my own-- I was particularly fond of Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg and, weirdly, JM Barrie.

ETA- I can't imagine most of my fellow students in high school going beyond thatany more than I would be able to go beyond precalc- It would be great if high school could actually succeed in teaching the foundations.

I did like it, even though we weren't reading the books at the time, when we discussed authors of different periods in social studies, because it is all connected-- why certain books an certain plays and certain art was created at certain times, and they seem so hard to separate.

I loved Shaw. And reading some of the plays that haven't survived the years can be pretty interesting, too. Yeats did a bunch of plays for the Irish Theater that are influenced by a combination of Noh theater and Irish mythology. (Plus contemporary politics, of course.)

In the class I would be teaching (if I get the job) it'll be all stuff outta a Glecoe text plus Elie Weisel's Night, which is fine, and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which kinda bores the fuck out of me. At least it's not The Pearl

I should go look up the Glencoe sophomore text, just to see. We had that text, but I never taught out of texts -- I would just copy the occsional story or poem out of them.