Annie Abrams

@annieabrams.bsky.social

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NYC public school English teacher; NYU American lit PhD; author of Shortchanged: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students (JHUP 2023); currently thinking about the high school canon

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these numbers are insane, AP is eating intro history sections and the rubrics incentivize awful writing habits, we should fund public higher ed instead

“Reading worked best, the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus insisted, when it was conducted with pen in hand and notebook at the ready; the goal was not simply to commune with the past but to translate its idioms and ideas into one’s own.” www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Livelier Than the Living | Catherine Nicholsonwww.nybooks.com In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.

I think about this a lot.

If you must construct the edifice you plan to knock down in your lit survey course, because none of your students read a single “great work” cover to cover in high school, then how powerful can the gesture of knocking it down really be?

End of feed.