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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if, in future generations, schoolchildren will write their own formulaic pop-songs as today they write their own sonnets.

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In all seriousness, where is this happening? I don't remember being taught to write sonnets in school. If this is something relatively recent, maybe education has improved a little.

I wrote a few sonnets in 11th (iirc, may have been 12th) grade English class (public school, prior to the standardization craze apparently). We did half a year on English Renaissance drama, and wrote some sonnets while we were learning about Shakespeare. I assumed this was relatively typical.

It was pretty fun, I think one of mine was about bears on the moon. We basically just learned the rhyming scheme 'abab cdcd efef gg'.

I was taught to write sonnets at school (and most of the other obvious verse forms, from clerihews to iambic pentameter), but then my school also taught Ancient Greek and Latin.

In my high school Spanish was the only foreign language (even though lots of students were central/South American so that was an easy pass for them). The closest we got to writing poetry was a haiku.

In all seriousness, where is this happening?

It must have been public school.

Nah, I did it in a regular public school in a rural area. The variety of quality you would get from different public schools is pretty extreme (or at least it use to be). Had I lived a few more miles away I probably would have ended up in a school that got sued for refusing to not teach creationism. Big differences even in the same state in the same sort of area.

It's trendy to slam public schools, but I think the only thing that really is (or was?) systemic about public schools is inconsistency.

My English class (not an "advanced" one) in 9th or 10th grade had us practice writing sonnets and other rhyme-pattern-based poetry when we studied Shakespeare. It's possible that this was due to an awesome teacher, rather than being generally true of our area's curriculum, though.

Nooooo...Speak of the spring and foison of the year!

I curse you seven times for reminding me of those foul exercises.

I wrote sonnets as part of the English curriculum in high school, and I graduated relatively recently (2007).

I recall being assigned to write an epic poem with heroic couplets back in high school in the 1970s. I wrote mostly about the heroic struggle against boredom that students in our high school's computer science class had to endure.

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