The Hatchet when he kills the rabbit.

"A modest proposal" by Jonathan Swift, I still occasionally think about it

I had to read "Speak". It was basically a short story about a girl getting SA'd and then treated like crap by everyone till the last couple pages. I do not think it had the intended effect they were going for.

Not short stories, but I have two books that I read in high school that have stuck with me more than most:

1. Where the Red Fern Grows
2. Fahrenheit 451

The Library of Babel by Borges melted my brain as a teenager.

It wasn't a short story, but a book that told a story in poems. The mc struggled with writing poetry and then he watched his dog get hit by a car and that made his poetry good or some shit. A room full of 5th graders wept. Book is called Love that Dog

We also read Old Yeller and cried collectively.

My 5th grade teacher loved that reoccurring theme, I guess? Dude was weird as hell.

"The Darkness Out There" by Penelope Lively.

In short, a "nice old lady" tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.

I think it was there for the "the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy".

During online school we had to read about the "Edmund Fitzgerald" and there was a cringy song too. We were constantly being accused of skipping classes because zoom was under too much load and never loading, or would make 2 separate calls for some reason. Whole society under collapse and we had to uproot all of education just so we could learn that a fucking boat sank. THATS ALL THE UNIT WAS. Just a stupid boat sinking.

It wasn't in English class but I will never forget a book we read in another class I can't remember the subject of that class for some reason. The book was "A Child Called It" that just describes horrid child abuse.

I’ve been trying to find this ridiculous sci-fi story I read in elementary school. I thought it was Ray Bradbury but then I recalled it was, I believe, from a collection edited by and/or with a foreword by Bradbury.

The scenario was that people in the future had become so dependent on mechanized transportation that their legs atrophied. Walking around normally was seen as very strange as everyone used these hovering personal transport devices. I think the story basically just described the protagonist walking around town and taking strolls at night and how odd everyone else thought it was.

The one I remember is the one where the kid gets chiffed that his manager at the general store told off some girls for wearing swimwear in the store and quits his job.

In my fifth grade English class the four term themes were Civil War, Holocaust, dog books, and choose-your-own. For the first three units, my parents read all four options ahead of time and had me assigned to the least traumatizing. For the last term I picked Julie of the Wolves, a dog book disguised as a Wolf book; I'd always wondered why my second grade teacher suddenly stopped reading it to us at story time.

The two short stories that have really stuck with me are the Ray Bradbury one about the automated home and the Edgar Alan Poe one about the beating heart

I was assigned The Westing Game no led than three times from K-12

My favorite report I wrote was when I got to pick Terry Pratchett's Night Watch in my dual-credit community college English course and the red pen in the margins of my report was all compliments

Wow a lot more diverse than I was expecting, I figured 50% of these would be the tell-tale heart by Poe

Alan and Naomi by Myron Levoy

It's a novel, but not a very long one.

I was a senior in high school when we read the short story "Rape Fantasies" by Margaret Atwood out loud in class. I was 18 and still not ready for it.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce.

Fall of the House of usher

I remember reading The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty sometime in late middle school, I wanna say.

teacher let us know after that it was about the Irish civil war, and that things similar to the story had actually happened.

"The Cold Equations" kinda fucked me up not gonna lie.

“The Savage Mouth” by Komatsu Sakyou, which involves

Or “Cogwheels” by Ryuunosuke Akutagawa, which

To Build a Fire by Jack London

how about steinbecks the pearl

scarred for life from a 7th grade shortish story

Is no one going to say they don’t have this experience? I can’t remember a single short story I read in any English or literature class ever. I can barely remember any of the books I was forced to read. On the contrary I can remember numerous books I was not forced to read, like Hitchhikers guide.