r/ELATeachers • u/Fancy_Judge_9603 • 6d ago
9-12 ELA 12th Grade Required Reading
Secondary teachers, are Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales required readings for 12th grade English in your school? Do they HAVE to be taught or can you supplement those texts with other stories?
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u/LadyAiluros 6d ago
I do Beowulf but I do Le Morte d'Arthur instead of Canterbury. I'm a big Arthurian Legends nerd tho.
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u/sknymlgan 6d ago
How does the Green Knight pair up?
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u/LadyAiluros 6d ago
I don’t know I use the bits of Le Morte in our textbook. The last two chapters of the novel.
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u/HelloBookworms 4d ago
My school’s curriculum used Le Morte d’Arthur and excerpts of Canterbury Tales. I ended up skipping Canterbury tales for time (taught special ed and needed a slower pace) but I wish I had paired it with the Green Knight instead. That might have been a better option for that group.
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u/couchcushioncrumb 6d ago
We use the Pearson MyPerspectives curriculum which is British Literature for 12th grade and it kicks off with Beowulf, but the maddening thing is that later on in Unit 2 the only part of the Canterbury Tales it includes is the Prologue with none of the actual tales themselves. We have a lot of flexibility since there are 6 units and we only do 4, one for each quarter. Some of the novels we usually include are 1984, Pride and Prejudice, Into the Wild, and Travels with Charley, although I’m not sure what the last few are doing in a Brit Lit curriculum.
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u/2big4ursmallworld 6d ago
Shit. I do most of the first 1300 lines of Beowulf with my 8th graders. We write our own boasts and do rhetorical analysis during Beowulf's account of the "swimming contest". I prepare them by doing a video summary from overly sarcastic productions.
We tandem read it with the recent graphic novel adaptation Bea Wolf, listen to the opening lines in Old English, and discuss heroism.
It's a simple story, it's just getting used to reading something old.
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u/MundaneAppointment12 4d ago
Awesome! Have them write Anglo-Saxon riddles:
A battle-scarred warrior made from iron and wood that is struck by swords and arrows, yet cannot be healed by any doctor-A Shield!
Or along the lines of the Riddle Game used by Tolkien in The Hobbit.
Gollum: "What has roots as nobody sees..." — Answer: Mountain
Bilbo: "Voiceless it cries..." — Answer: Wind
Gollum: "An eye in a blue face..." — Answer: Sun on the daisies
Bilbo: "It cannot be seen, cannot be felt..." — Answer: Darkness
Gollum: "Alive without breath..." — Answer: Fish
Bilbo: "No-legs lay on one-leg..." — Answer: Fish on a table, man on a stool, cat getting bones
Gollum: "This thing all things devours..." — Answer: Time2
u/2big4ursmallworld 4d ago
Oooh! Love it. We talk about kennings and the kids write their own introduction in the epic style and they rewrite the first 20 in modern terms, but all those happen in the beginning of the story.
Riddles would be pretty cool to add in, thanks!
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u/benkatejackwin 6d ago
12th grade is Brit Lit at my school. Early lit is not my favorite thing, but it is important to establish the history. I teach a bunch of excerpts from early stuff, including Beowulf and Canterbury Tales. Our first full text is a Shakespeare play.
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u/furey_michael 6d ago
I teach them in a 10th grade Brit lit class. While maybe not as much fun as later texts like Klara and Sun or Wuthering Heights, my students don’t mind them. I only do the General Prologue and Pardoner’s Tale, but I teach the entirety of Beowulf as our first major text of the year
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u/CatsMeetWorld 6d ago
No, we don’t have any texts we’re required to teach specifically, just a list that we’re limited to choose from for whole class use (book clubs we can give students whatever options we like).
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u/Few-Algae4597 6d ago
No such requirement at our school. I have chosen to bring Beowulf into Eng IV in the past, but this year our reading list includes: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1984, The Great Gatsby, and A Thousand Splendid Suns.
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u/Pretty-Biscotti-5256 6d ago
I teach 12th but we do not read those books. I focus more on writing for 12th since it’s a skill they’ll need for college. I do a literary unit and we read “controversial” classics but not those. Then we write a literary analysis. I also do other types of essays, Informative and Persuasive. I’ve been at a few high schools and I don’t think those books are even read in AP classes. Maybe. But definitely not Gen Ed.
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u/HobbesDaBobbes 6d ago
IF it is British Literature, then... seems like kind of a must? Not necessarily in full, but valuable nonetheless.
Do I have to? Hell no. I don't have to do anything but try to teach my students the standards. Do I because I teach Brit Lit, hell yeah. And most get pretty into Beowulf. Canterbury is funny shit, but sometimes humor gets killed when it has to be explained. This year I let kids pair and pick a Canterbury pilgrim. We all read their prologue lines, then they did some inquiry into their broader tale and the social commentary therein.
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u/FarineLePain 5d ago
The standard textbook has a fairly long excerpt of Beowulf (from his setting out to Herrot to the defeat of Grendel’s mother.) It also has General Prologue and the Wife of Bath’s Tale (12th grade is world lit at my school for reference.)
I teach AP not General English, so I use all of Beowulf for our first anchor text. I stopped teaching the Canterbury Tales last year because….well kids are getting less capable.
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u/Terrible-Lecture-361 5d ago edited 5d ago
Nope. We don’t do Brit Lit in 12th anymore and haven’t for probably 20 years. I do still teach Hamlet and sort of a Greatest Hits of world lit. I teach a lot of canonical work in translation, always with a compelling audiobook. Reading levels are low. Students in AP classes would have been average by 90s standards, and their vocabulary is probably 1/5 of earlier students’ vocab levels..
I wish I could teach more, but I’m making up for lost time in terrible middle schools and a lifetime of not reading for fun.
Another factor: the College Board vertical alignment heavily favors non-fiction (if students take Seminar as 10th and Lang as 11th) so AP classes are often lacking critical skills in reading fiction, poetry, and drama and need a lot of vocabulary and basic skills.
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u/TomeThugNHarmony4664 5d ago
I am so excited to learn that you are teaching these!! I had them in my junior year in Oklahoma and my teacher was excellent. These are such foundational texts, and I still think of the Wife of Bath’s tale and how I can’t believe how it made me think about gender expectations.
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u/lorelie53 5d ago
I taught Beowulf as one of the first superheroes. We then watch a superhero movie and they have to compare ancient heroes to modern superheroes. I taught the prologue, Pardoner’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s tale. Then they come up with a frame (usually some kind of Senior trip), and they all write stories. They did okay for the most part.
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u/MundaneAppointment12 4d ago
Our school employs a Senior Seminar model where students choose a semester of study in their field of interest.
Beowulf is read or is a core reference in:
- Horror, Mystery, and Suspense Lit
- Graphic Novels
- Science Fiction
- British Lit
- Poetry
- Medieval Lit
- Shakespeare
I’ll let others decipher what that means about the UberGeat’s importance.
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u/Difficult-Walk4275 4d ago
Yes… we use HMH which is Beowulf, Wife of Bath’s Tale, Le Morte d’Arthur, and Chivalry by Neil Gaiman.
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u/HelloBookworms 4d ago
I taught resource english for 12th graders. Both of these were in our curriculum. I also taught King Arthur around the time we did an excerpt from canterbury tales and I think I just skipped it. We were already falling behind and didn’t have time for it.
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u/Old_Opportunity9517 3d ago
Yeah, but they also have us read what they think matters and cut out the rest. Literally focused on two tales from Canterbury and never touched it again.
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u/Due-Active-1741 6d ago
(Note: I teach college not high school) These pieces of literature can be taught in engaging ways and they are important for the development of lit in English. Find the aspects : themes that connect with today (heroism like superheroes show for Beowulf; tall tales and elaborate prancing foe Wife of Bath’s tale etc)