That's a fascinating concept for a high school English class. Is it reasonable for you to dig up the entire reading list?
I found the list, it may be missing some poems but this is largely what we covered:
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr
Arcadia - Tom Stoppard
Dulce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Kindred - Octavia E. Butler
Life of Galileo - Bertolt Brecht
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
Suicide in the Trenches - Siegfried Sassoon
The Beekeeper's Apprentice - Laurie R. King
The Lady's Not for Burning - Christopher Fry
The Mortal Immortal - Mary Shelley
Authors in the above I have not heard of: Laurie R. King, Christopher Fry
I'm not saying these are bad but the list focuses on what's well known, not what's obscure and perhaps better. In that sense it's gutless. It invites you down the well trodden paths where there's no risk of upset, all carefully vetted. And it makes me sad because it seems to want to usher people into conformity, of not being open to new ideas. Don't scare the horses.
I don't have time to list books I'd find interesting, but this is depressing for me.
(I suppose it could have been down to me not offering an alternative reading list, but I don't think that's all of it)
The teacher decided that we should focus on works that had interesting implications for science.
Arcadia is one such work because it talks about what knowledge is, why it matters, and how historians bring their own biases to interpreting the past. We see characters in the past do one thing and characters in the present misinterpret it several times. We see a child prodigy discover math concepts before anyone else, and then have a historian dismiss the evidence of that because she had the ideas “too early,” even though her discoveries were basic and from first principles. The historian is trying to prove his incorrect pet theory but is blind to something even more significant because he doesn’t expect it. (All of this is from memory years later)
Other books we read in this class include A Canticle for Liebewitz and a book about Galileo whose name escapes me.