Reply #5: in 1990 when I was a senior in high school in a Dallas suburb,

[MrsBrady]

the Irving ISD issued new English books that year. They were very nice. Brand new books. Big, huge, almost took up my hole backpack.

The senior honors English class, which I was in, was focused on English lit from a historical perspective in the development of English as a language.

But did they start with Beowulf? No. It started with "stories" from the Old Testament from the bible, yes the bible. In an English class.
If they were going to use the Bible in reference to the development of English, you would have thought they would have put that in like the Renaisance period, when the King James version was written, but it was FIRST.
So, you can kind of see where the school board was going with that.

I have no idea what they are using in Irving today.

The teacher was working on her Doctorate in Humanities at the time. She was pretty cool. We read though them, but I think I remember she didn't really focused on that and went to Beowulf.
But she had us read through them, I think so she could at least "say" that she went over them.