Since August, my 10th- and 12th-grade literature students have read about pre-adolescent boys who bully and murder one another; a man, fearing shame and betrayal, who smothers his wife and commits suicide; and another man who hangs himself as colonizers pulverize his culture. They’ve also read about a woman who kills her baby daughter so she won’t experience the physical and emotional horrors of slavery. They’ve been introduced to a man who shoots a guy on a beach because the sun is in his eyes, relishing, as he later marches to the gallows, the prospect of incurring society’s hatred.

These stories should be familiar. My colleagues at public, charter, and private schools also build study units around Lord of the Flies, Othello, Things Fall Apart, Beloved, and The Stranger. A 1990 Center for Teaching and Learning survey identified the 10 most commonly taught texts in high school; 1990 was a long time ago relatively speaking, but all but one of the texts are still taught at my school today. Pearson Education, Inc. advises that high-school students read more than half of the texts I am required to teach in a year. And Appendix B of the Common Core Standards lists fiction “exemplars” that hedge toward personal, political, and societal tragedies like The Great Gatsby, The Bluest Eye, and The Scarlet Letter. All this is to say that high-school students don’t exactly do a lot of light reading.

English teachers don’t teach these important stories because they want to batter students with the darkness in human nature. Or because they want to remind them of history’s hideous chapters or emphasize the absurdity of existence. Academic goals aside, fellow teachers told me they want to help students cope with real life—even when portions of that reality are unpleasant and disturbing. In the right hands, the important stories, grim plots and all, do that. Researchers who have studied emotion and cognition extensively, Patrick Hogan of the University of Connecticut and Keith Oatley of the University of Toronto, further suggest that literature can play a vital role in helping people understand the lives and minds of others, and that individuals and communities can benefit from that ability along with literacy and analytical prowess.

“It’s easy to see the trends of death, war, destruction, and oppression in our current society,” said Ray Ramirez, a friend of mine from graduate school who teaches high-school English. “There’s a certain level of honesty reflected in art which deals with the psychological, social, and emotional fallout of such violence.”

Such themes may also make art better. “Good writing tends to focus on difficult-to-deal-with themes because those are the themes difficult to understand,” said Jeannine Thurston, a coworker who has taught long enough to have been one of my high-school English teachers. “Emotional complexity translates into an artistic value.”