Here's what your 10th-graders will be tested on under Common Core: Ovid

[dmallind]

102. How will the test takers know about the 50 rapes that are not in this sample?

You keep switching complaints between obscurity and obscenity. They can't be true at the same time. If they are unfamiliar enough with the text to deem it obscure they won't know about the rapes. If they know the book well enough to know about the rapes (which are far less graphic than on broadcast TV) then they will hardly find it all that obscure.

Which is the real problem? that a 2000 year old text includes some bowdlerized sexual violence (which is apparently worse to you than the graphic torture and slaughter of both sexes in The Hunger Games) or that kids don't understand imagery any more and get frustrated at words less faddish than "l8er"?

Here's an example of those terrible rape scenes by the way folks...

"The sun was high, just path the zenith, when she entered a grove that had been untouched through the years. Here she took her quiver from her shoulder, unstrung her curved bow, and lay down on the grass, her head resting on her painted quiver. Jupiter, seeing her there weary and unprotected, said ‘Here, surely, my wife will not see my cunning, or if she does find out it is, oh it is, worth a quarrel! Quickly he took on the face and dress of Diana, and said ‘Oh, girl who follows me, where in my domains have you been hunting?’

The virgin girl got up from the turf replying ‘Greetings, goddess greater than Jupiter: I say it even though he himself hears it.’ He did hear, and laughed, happy to be judged greater than himself, and gave her kisses unrestrainedly, and not those that virgins give. When she started to say which woods she had hunted he embraced and prevented her and not without committing a crime. Face to face with him, as far as a woman could, (I wish you had seen her Juno: you would have been kinder to her) she fought him, but how could a girl win, and who is more powerful than Jove? Victorious, Jupiter made for the furthest reaches of the sky: while to Callisto the grove was odious and the wood seemed knowing. As she retraced her steps she almost forgot her quiver and its arrows, and the bow she had left hanging."

Yep - that horror is apparently a valid reason not to include a poet who has endured for over twenty centuries on a literatire exam.....