Books you read in high school

But was Shakespeare the real author? Or was the true author Sir Francis Bacon? Or even Christopher Marlowe?

Well, while literally a thousand books have been devoted to this topic, it just doesn't really make sense.  Marlowe, for example, died in 1594, at which time only a handful of Shakespeare's plays had been presented.  Hell, Hamlet was first produced after 1600, and he (or someone ... haha) continued writing Shakespeare's plays until a few years before his retirement, move back to Stratford, and death in 1616.

And that's another thing, while ol' Willie Waggledagger spelled his name a few different ways, a great deal is known of his biography--married, two daughters, etc.  The other two main candidates are Francis Bacon, a well-educated and prominent author, and Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.  A central question is why either of these guys would hide their authorship of some of the most successful and celebrated plays of the time.  What motive?  It's not like being a playwright was somehow scandalous--quite the contrary.  Lord Chamberlain's Men and all that.

Or maybe Marlowe didn't die, but faked his own murder, moved to the Continent and kept writing his plays.  I'm simplifying a bit, and there was a bit of a subculture around Lizzie's court of being secret poets to avoid incurring her wrath in case you wrote the wrong thing.  But Shakespeare never got in her bad graces, so ...

The real reason for this attempt to deny his authorship is simple: classism.  Father an uneducated glove-maker, a country bumpkin--he couldn't write so wonderfully, so majestically, he must have been a stand-in for the Earl of Oxford or Derby.  Just like we see today, most of the best writers are dukes and earls of long lineage, amiright?

But was Shakespeare the real author? Or was the true author Sir Francis Bacon? Or even Christopher Marlowe?

or emilia bassano? 

Now that we've got the Boyz in the Hood aspect of this thread behind us,
I think the three books that stood out for me were:

1984
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird

Really? Your high school sounds like a war zone. What a sad place to go to school and learn.

You're talking pretty standard American mixed-income mixed-demographic high school. Yeah, kids in high school do drugs. If they're in high school, someone is going to sell them drugs. If people get busted with drugs, fights with cops can happen. Kids of different racial backgrounds will fight. You cram 2500 kids in overcrowded condition. Kids form gangs to try and look tough. One of them took it pretty extreme. High schoolers drive to school. High schoolers also like to do things like blow money on car stereos. Car stereos in unsupervised parking lots=cars broken into.

I don't know why this sounds like a "war zone" to anyone. I dunno, this forum does seem to have a lot of Canadians it seems who grew up in Nowhereville, Manitoba and thus find all of this implausible/"Like a Warzone" when anyone who grew up in a decently-sized, diverse U.S. city is just like "Yeah...and?"

It's not our fault some of you grew up as hayseeds.

Now that we've got the Boyz in the Hood aspect of this thread behind us,

F off with that noise. You started it with your whole "Shakespeare is for sissies" act (including what appeared to be a tacit approval of bullying- as an English teacher  ) You got called out for trying to sound tough but instead just made yourself look like a joke.

Watch out the hooligans at SPQR's high school might give you an atomic wedgie! What a bunch of scalliwags they are!

You're talking pretty standard American mixed-income mixed-demographic high school. Yeah, kids in high school do drugs. If they're in high school, someone is going to sell them drugs. If people get busted with drugs, fights with cops can happen. Kids of different racial backgrounds will fight. You cram 2500 kids in overcrowded condition. Kids form gangs to try and look tough. One of them took it pretty extreme. High schoolers drive to school. High schoolers also like to do things like blow money on car stereos. Car stereos in unsupervised parking lots=cars broken into.

I don't know why this sounds like a "war zone" to anyone. I dunno, this forum does seem to have a lot of Canadians it seems who grew up in Nowhereville, Manitoba and thus find all of this implausible/"Like a Warzone" when anyone who grew up in a decently-sized, diverse U.S. city is just like "Yeah...and?"

It's not our fault some of you grew up as hayseeds.
F off with that noise. You started it with your whole "Shakespeare is for sissies" act (including what appeared to be a tacit approval of bullying- as an English teacher  ) You got called out for trying to sound tough but instead just made yourself look like a joke.

You're talking pretty standard American mixed-income mixed-demographic high school. Yeah, kids in high school do drugs. If they're in high school, someone is going to sell them drugs. If people get busted with drugs, fights with cops can happen. Kids of different racial backgrounds will fight. You cram 2500 kids in overcrowded condition. Kids form gangs to try and look tough. One of them took it pretty extreme. High schoolers drive to school. High schoolers also like to do things like blow money on car stereos. Car stereos in unsupervised parking lots=cars broken into.

I don't know why this sounds like a "war zone" to anyone. I dunno, this forum does seem to have a lot of Canadians it seems who grew up in Nowhereville, Manitoba and thus find all of this implausible/"Like a Warzone" when anyone who grew up in a decently-sized, diverse U.S. city is just like "Yeah...and?"

It's not our fault some of you grew up as hayseeds.
F off with that noise. You started it with your whole "Shakespeare is for sissies" act (including what appeared to be a tacit approval of bullying- as an English teacher  ) You got called out for trying to sound tough but instead just made yourself look like a joke.

Watch out the hooligans at SPQR's high school might give you an atomic wedgie! What a bunch of scalliwags they are!

Watch out the hooligans at SPQR's high school might give you an atomic wedgie! What a bunch of scalliwags they are!

Well, I am Canadian and grew up on RCAF bases. My father was a Chief Warrant Officer, I gather an equivalent rank in the USAF would be an E-9,  a Command Chief Master Sergeant.

So, very privileged and spoiled. Not exactly a hayseed.

The thing is, we didn't do bad stuff as you mentioned because of: (A) parents were responsible for their kids' doings with potential career ending results if it was very bad (drugs) and (B) there was every single type of activity you could possibly want to do completely organized & supervised with brand new equipment (nothing was ever fixed it was replaced) and it was all free.

So, not a hayseed. If you know about military bases you'd know that air force bases are la creme de la creme. My school bus growing up in Europe was a Mercedes with a bathroom in it.

So yeah, your experience sounds like a warzone to me. But I'm Canadian eh! :-)

Watch out the hooligans at SPQR's high school might give you an atomic wedgie! What a bunch of scalliwags they are!


Well, I am Canadian and grew up on RCAF bases. My father was a Chief Warrant Officer, I gather an equivalent rank in the USAF would be an E-9,  a Command Chief Master Sergeant.

So, very privileged and spoiled. Not exactly a hayseed.

The thing is, we didn't do bad stuff as you mentioned because of: (A) parents were responsible for their kids' doings with potential career ending results if it was very bad (drugs) and (B) there was every single type of activity you could possibly want to do completely organized & supervised with brand new equipment (nothing was ever fixed it was replaced) and it was all free.

So, not a hayseed. If you know about military bases you'd know that air force bases are la creme de la creme. My school bus growing up in Europe was a Mercedes with a bathroom in it.

So yeah, your experience sounds like a warzone to me. But I'm Canadian eh! :-)

Haha, we used to sneak onto the naval base in Victoria because it had cigarette
machines and BEER machines.

I'm pretty sure those are gone now.

You're talking pretty standard American mixed-income mixed-demographic high school. Yeah, kids in high school do drugs. If they're in high school, someone is going to sell them drugs. If people get busted with drugs, fights with cops can happen. Kids of different racial backgrounds will fight. You cram 2500 kids in overcrowded condition. Kids form gangs to try and look tough. One of them took it pretty extreme. High schoolers drive to school. High schoolers also like to do things like blow money on car stereos. Car stereos in unsupervised parking lots=cars broken into.

I don't know why this sounds like a "war zone" to anyone. I dunno, this forum does seem to have a lot of Canadians it seems who grew up in Nowhereville, Manitoba and thus find all of this implausible/"Like a Warzone" when anyone who grew up in a decently-sized, diverse U.S. city is just like "Yeah...and?"

It's not our fault some of you grew up as hayseeds.
F off with that noise. You started it with your whole "Shakespeare is for sissies" act (including what appeared to be a tacit approval of bullying- as an English teacher  ) You got called out for trying to sound tough but instead just made yourself look like a joke.

Watch out the hooligans at SPQR's high school might give you an atomic wedgie! What a bunch of scalliwags they are!

Yeah, I went to a small private Catholic high school and a lot of this stuff went on. At that time it wasn't very expensive, by the standards of private schools now, and there were a significant number of kids on scholarships from the local diocese. That's not to say that the "lower orders" were the cause of the problems, just that the demographics were more diverse than what you might assume.

We had the drug-sniffing dogs visit the student parking lot at twice a year and someone ALWAYS got caught (but if their parents were rich, the punishment was usually pretty light). Some guy got suspended for a couple days when they found a gun in his car (but he was allowed to come back after that relatively mild punishment - yikes!). Vandalism and theft were regular occurrences. A major (as in everyone knew about it) fight happened every couple of months but I don't remember many "brawls" with lots of people involved, usually just two guys. A few teachers got assaulted by students or had their homes and cars vandalized. Sex on campus, sometimes during school hours, wasn't exactly widespread but not unheard of, either. A couple of those sexual encounters would certainly be classified as rape these days, but back then was generally shrugged off as the natural consequence of saying no to a certain type of guy. That said, one student at my school actually got expelled and went to juvenile hall for raping and assaulting a girl from another school.

Again, this was fairly standard stuff for an American high school in a mid-sized city in the 90s. Some schools undoubtedly had fewer problems, but plenty were much worse.

A lot of parents who forked out tuition for our school would have probably been just as well sending their kids to one of the better public schools in the area, but I guess they bought into the marketing that private school was some kind of elite and sheltered experience with core Godly values.

...
1984
Lord of the Flies
To Kill a Mockingbird

My inital reaction to this was: "of course"... but then i imagined the multitude of social media the last decade, the daily reading of much less considered, pondered, crafted, lasting words. And how a new generation won't know and won't care. History is dead, right? Ugh.

Edit: To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic "saw the movie, didn't really read the book", and numerous copies could be found in used bookshops, back in the 90s when bookstores were still a thing.

The Sporting News, "the Bible of Baseball"

May be of interest to some in this thread:

https://slate.com/culture/2023/05/shakespeare-woman-authorship-question-truthers.html

And this is why trutherism is so pernicious. While doubting Shakespeare’s authorship isn’t nearly as dangerous as climate change denial, or anti-vax beliefs, or questioning Obama’s citizenship, the rhetoric and strategies of all of these forms of trutherism are quite similar: Question the qualifications of the authorities. State some assertions we can all agree with, like “We don’t know much about the life of Shakespeare,” or “Some people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 die from the disease.” Ask an escalating series of questions about the consensus view, shifting ground whenever you would lose the point being debated. Deploy shaky evidence that requires tendentious interpretation. Claim that evidence that disproves your theory in fact supports it. Needle those in power who refuse to engage with you. Use the contempt with which your position is treated as evidence that you must be on to something. Whenever possible, fall back on saying you’re just asking questions.

Autobiography of Terry Fox

Autobiography of Terry Fox

Hahaha...I bet van islander still hasn't read it

Hahaha...I bet van islander still hasn't read it

He's the world record holder for most lifetime marathons run by a one-legged Fox. Facts don't lie.