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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m an English teacher. Yes, I have taught Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm, and an extensive collection of his essays

…and I’m saddened by OP’s question. There are so many works out there. So many. This teacher shouldn’t be criticized because she isn’t familiar with one of them.

I had a parent call me out for not being intimately familiar with Tolstoy. I recall being horrified that my 20 years of successful teaching were being erased because I wasn’t ready for an impromptu discussion about Anna Karenina. Somehow that became such a fault, as if I couldn’t teach a proper thesis statement because Tolstoy was absent from my nightstand. 
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You should not be teaching

Orwell is 100 percent required reading for a competent English teacher [/quote]

I wrote that I’ve taught Orwell. One can assume, therefore, that I’ve also read it. Can I keep my teaching certification? Is that okay with you?

Now what about Fitzgerald? Morrison? Whitman? Hawthorne? Elliot? Faulkner? Salinger? Hurston? Vonnegut? Angelou? Baldwin? Poe? Bradbury? Kerouac? London?

Which authors are required reading for “competent” English teachers? Let’s get that list compiled so we can start firing right away. I mean, there’s a TON of people out there begging to try out the workload of an English teacher. We should give them a chance (as long as they’ve read Orwell). 
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This.  Anyone who's studied English will tell you there is no "cannon" that everyone has read.

And that's also not a terribly helpful way to look at the study of English.  It's not about having read a certain list of books.  It's about teaching how to read, to recognize how authors are employing certain tactics, and how to write about literature.  No AP English test just grills you on random books, it's a test of analysis.

I was actually discussing this with my mom, we studied literature in college (she majored, I minored) almost 40 years apart and our experiences were actually very different.  We both read Moby Dick, for instance, but my mom's class approached it as this very serious book whereas my class fully embraced pointing out the humor and sex jokes.[/quote]

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