English teachers, here’s one to pass on to your students. In celebration of his blog’s seventh birthday (quite impressive!), Neil Gaiman is going to post one of his books online for free for a month. Readers vote on which book they want to see. It might be fun for book clubs or classrooms to participate in a literature circle or perhaps even create student blogs to discuss the book.
Category Archives: Teaching Literature
Book Glutton
Book Glutton might be my new favorite website (via Classical Bookworm). Here’s a demonstration:
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I can see all kinds of exciting potential for literature studies. Literature circles would be great on Book Glutton! I love the proximity chat and annotation features. Caveats: the site is still in beta, and according to Sylvia (Classical Bookworm), only works in Firefox (though I admit I didn’t test the site in other browsers, nor could I find information on the site that states the site doesn’t work in other browsers — still, I thought it prudent to pass the warning along).
The first thing I wanted to do was dive in and form a reading group with my students. Social reading networks. I love Web 2.0.
Memorizing Literature
Did you ever have to memorize literature for English class?
I did.
My luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June
My luve is like the melodie
That’s sweetly played in tune
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I
And I shall love thee still, my dear
Till a’ the seas gang dry
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my luve
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun
I shall luve thee still, my dear
While the sands o’ life shall run
And fair thee weel, my bonnie luve,
And fair thee weel a while
And I shall come again, my luve
Though it were ten thousand mile.
If you check out Bartleby, which I did after typing this from memory, you will see I don’t have it 100 percent, but I learned it in 1990 — 18 years ago now — in my 12th grade British literature class.
I know it’s considered passé, but I do ask my students to memorize literature. When I initially make the assignment, the reactions are all pretty much along the lines of What’s the point of doing this? This is crazy! This is impossible! I can’t do it… no, you don’t understand, I really can’t do it.
After my students figure out I mean it, they buckle down and start memorizing. My students who read Macbeth last semester memorized “Out, out, brief candle.” My students reading Romeo and Juliet are in the midst of memorizing (some recited today, and others will tomorrow) Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, and my students studying Hamlet are memorizing “To be or not to be.”
Once they realized it wasn’t going away, I really admired the way my 9th grade students reading R&J attacked the text. They made sure to tell me what they thought of Mercutio’s delivery of their lines when we discussed the play yesterday. One of my favorite moments in the play was when Mercutio paused dramatically on the line “And in this state she gallops night by night / Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of…” One of my students impulsively called out “love!” The good-humored actor playing Mercutio pointed and nodded at my student and agreed, “Love!”
Years ago when I last taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I asked my students to memorize Titania’s “Set your heart at rest.” The next semester, one of my students showed me the speech, written decoratively and inserted in the cover of her binder. She was really proud of having memorized it, and that speech displayed on her binder was her way of saying she owned that piece of literature.
Ultimately, that’s what memorization does. It’s a gift of ownership over literature. It’s being able to say that poem, that speech, that monologue, that soliloquy is mine. I have read and taught Romeo and Juliet so many times that I have many of the lines memorized, and it makes me happy to be able to recite. Please understand I don’t mean that as a boast. I mean that reciting literature, rolling those words around without having to look them up, makes me feel power over them. It makes me love them and understand them. It makes me feel like a part of the literature as much as the literature is a part of me.
And maybe I’m old fashioned (and that’s OK), but that’s a gift I want to give my students. I’m not naive enough to think all of them accept this gift and keep it, the way I did with the literature I have been required to or have chosen to memorize, but if even one student can say in 18 years “That Queen Mab speech? Yeah, I own that,” then I’ll be satisfied. Of course, I hope more than one student will say that.
That Robert Burns poem? Yeah, I own that.
Live Theater: Romeo and Juliet at the New American Shakespeare Tavern
I took our ninth grade class to the New American Shakespeare Tavern to see a production of Romeo and Juliet today. My students were well-behaved, which is always a concern for every teacher on a field trip. We all really enjoyed the production. As a long-time fan of the Georgia Renaissance Festival, I am always excited to see GARF performers at the Tavern. J.C. Long, who has played with the musical group the Lost Boys, played the part of Romeo, and he was excellent. Nicholas Faircloth as Mercutio was also brilliant. In fact, the whole cast was wonderful; if you are ever in Atlanta, you really must try to catch a production at the Tavern.
One of the things my students said they liked about the theater experience was the interactivity. The actors frequently played off audience members, which made us all feel like a part of the show. Of course, I know it is often said an audience is a critical part of a successful show, but I’m not sure I always feel so necessary when I’m in an audience. Actors at the Tavern have a way of making you feel as if you are necessary.
This evening as I was talking with my husband, I realized I had made a connection between Web 2.0 and theater. I forgot to keep one of the handy cast lists that the Tavern places on every third seat or so, and I was researching the names of the cast members online. I found the Tavern’s MySpace page as well as those of some of the cast. I added some of them as friends. In his reply to my friend-request message, J.C. Long complimented my students’ engagement and enthusiasm, and I thought, when else have we been able to take down walls like those between actors and audience? Five years ago, I never could have imagined I could see a production, find one of the actors on a social network, and personally compliment him on his performance…. AND receive a personal reply.
It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?
Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet
I just finished writing UbD units for Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet at the UbD Educators wiki. As I finished writing the unit for Hamlet and saved the page, I lost half the work I had done, and I am still not sure how it happened, so I had to re-do it. Word to the wise — when working with anything you’re doing online, save and save often. When, oh when will I learn to do that?
In order to successfully steal the Hamlet unit, you’ll need to purchase a copy of Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Hamlet and Henry IV, Part 1. I have the edition published in 1994, and I haven’t seen the latest edition, so if you know the difference between the two editions and would care to share in the comments for interested parties, I would appreciate it. I think the Shakespeare Set Free series is a great resource for educators, but I don’t do all of the performance activities.
While we’re discussing good resources for teaching Shakespeare, don’t forget the Folger Shakespeare Library’s website, which has a large repository of lesson plans contributed by teachers. If you can get them for your classroom, the Folger Shakespeare editions of the plays have pretty good explanatory notes and glossaries, too. A Way to Teach has a great selection of Macbeth lesson plans and Tempest lesson plans.
If you are looking for Shakespeare video, you might check out Shakespeare and More over at YouTube. They have a large selection of Shakespearean video. Speaking of video, if you were looking at older posts about teaching Romeo and Juliet, you will have noticed the videos don’t work. I’m sorry about that. I’ll need to go back and revise the posts so that the video isn’t necessary, as the videos are no longer available at YouTube.
Teaching British Literature
I think most secondary school teachers and college professors go into teaching because they have passion for a particular subject, but even within the confines of a certain subject, teachers play favorites — especially at the college level. When I was in college, I took courses such as Late Romantic Literature — we studied Byron, both Shelleys, and Keats for ten weeks — and Celtic Literature — a class that continues to inspire me so much that I still kick myself for not saving my notes. I decided to teach English because I loved British literature. It has been my experience, however, that English teachers must reach a certain stage in their careers before they are able to teach British literature, which is considered by some to be a plum assignment. In this, my tenth year of teaching, I was finally given the opportunity to teach the literature I was most passionate about, and I have enjoyed it immensely.
My British literature class finished Macbeth on Wednesday, and I really enjoyed teaching it for the first time. I had a great time with everything we did together this semester. My students seemed engaged, and I hope they learned something interesting. I am really hoping to teach two sections of British literature next year. Some of the things we did this year:
- Created our own Brave New Worlds using wikis
- Wrote résumés for Beowulf
- Attended a performance of Macbeth at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern
- Read historical fiction (most of my class read Grendel, although a few read The Other Boleyn Girl — next year, sign up sheets!) set in the time period we studied
- Learned a bit of Old English from Ms. Skott, who is team-teaching the course with me
- Memorized Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle” soliloquy
Stuff we didn’t get to that I really wanted to do:
- Dr. Faustus
- Historical fiction wikis
- Create our own Canterbury Tales
- Macbeth research projects
I hope I’m afforded the opportunity to do these projects next year.
Annie Proulx Literature Circles
My senior Short Story and Composition students finished up a study of Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories today. My department head and I are both teaching separate sections of this course, and we have been planning together. We decided to try literature circles, which I admit I have not done much in my teaching career. All of my students read “The Half-Skinned Steer,” which is widely acknowledged for its excellence — it was selected for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and study aid sites online have begun to pick it up, too. Aside from that one story, I asked them to pick four others to read — their group’s choice.
Borrowing stealing widely from suggestions in Mr. B-G’s post on Literature Circles, I created a handout for my students to use: Annie Proulx: Literature Circles. Each literature circle group member would have a different job: moderator, new critic, psychological critic, and anthropological critic. The moderator’s job was to compose a good list of questions for the group to use, especially when discussion died down. The new critic marked passages in the story and explained their significance to the group. The psychological critic examined character motivation. The anthropological critic examined the influence of society — in Wyoming, as it is depicted in the stories — on the characters and events. Each member wrote a short piece as part of their job — a sketch of the characters, for example, or a list of questions. Students switched roles for the subsequent stories so they could try different aspects of literary analysis.
I thought it was going well, but I received some great feedback today. The students told me first of all that they liked working in the small groups, and they asked if we could please do this again. Second, they said they liked picking what they read. I know it’s not always possible to allow students choice, but in the case of literature circles, I think it works well. I am also torn because I know sometimes students do need a teacher to nudge them in the direction of a story they will like. I know I never would have read much of the literature I read in high school and college if it had not been assigned reading, but I also thoroughly enjoyed it. Another aspect the students seemed to like is the freedom of the assignment. I even let them spread out into more cozy places — study nooks throughout our floor — to work (which of course involves more arduous circulation on my part, but really made for natural “book club” type discussions).
I plan to have them work in literature circles next with a study of Susan Vreeland ‘s Life Studies: Stories, after which we will be at the end of our semester, for all intents and purposes, and will begin working on the final writing project. It’s been a lot of fun, however, and I have to highly recommend Mr. B-G’s helpful post for teachers considering literature circles. One of the things I really like about our senior English curriculum is the academic freedom I am afforded to choose works that students in high school might not necessarily be exposed to. We read Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor, but the opportunity to read authors like Proulx and Vreeland in high school is much more rare.
GISA Conference
I went to the annual Georgia Independent School Association (GISA) Annual Conference today. I ate lunch with Megan; it’s cool to see connections I made through this blog become “real-life” connections as well. Incidentally, Megan presented a session on using social bookmarking (such as del.icio.us). The two sessions I went to were very interesting (which hasn’t always been the case at GISA — the session I presented last year included): Fantasy Literature (teaching The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter along with Campbell’s ideas about the journey of the hero) and Blogs and Wikis in the Classroom. Frankly, I confess I went to the latter to see if a) it would be better than the session I presented last year (it was), b) what the presenters would say. I did not expect to learn about anything new. Of course, I did learn about some things that were new to me, at any rate.
One thing that interested me in particular about the Fantasy Literature session was that so many other schools already have this class as an elective. A teacher from Pace Academy shared his successes teaching the course to 8th graders, and a teacher from Griffin Christian High School shared that he teaches The Lord of the Rings for the first semester of 9th grade, teaching all the literary terms, etc., through the context of that work. I taught The Hobbit one year — when I was a student teacher, in fact — and I found that students in general didn’t like it much, but I think as part of an elective, it would be a different crowd. Frankly, I could see myself really enjoying such a class.
The blogs and wikis session introduced me to Voice Thread, which Megan mentioned also at lunch. I imagine if you hear about something twice in such a short span of time, someone’s trying to send a message. For the uninitiated, Voice Thread is online software that allows users to create documentaries using images and creating narration to accompany the images. Check out this sample of its use: Slavery in America (by Jeff Morrison’s middle school students at the Lovett School). Jeff (one of the presenters) also introduced us to TrackStar, which somehow went under my radar, even though I’ve used 4Teachers‘ other service RubiStar to create rubrics.
I am thinking about ways I might integrate some of these resources with my current projects — The Canterbury Tales and The Odyssey. You can view Jeff’s wiki, which has links to a bunch of sources he shared with us.
One of my favorite parts of Jeff’s presentation was a video he shared:
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As Jeff said, that is what it is like to teach. Especially middle school.
By the way, I am now receiving e-mails when comments are posted. I kept my eyes on the WordPress Support forums’ thread related to my problem, and eventually, someone posted a solution that worked for me. I uploaded a plugin created to work around the problem.
Teaching Homer’s Odyssey
For those of you looking for a few good resources for teaching Homer’s Odyssey, you might want to check out the following:
- Victoria Allen’s Teacher’s Guide (pdf) — I worked with Vicki at Warner Robins High, and she’s top-notch. So is her Teacher’s Guide.
- My UbD plan for The Odyssey (printer-friendly version)
- Homer@Web English Teacher (which is an amazing resource for English teachers)
- The Odyssey Teaching Resources
- And last but not least, The Odyssey in
fifteenfourteen seconds:
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The Odyssey
I am once again teaching The Odyssey. I have posted my UbD plan for this unit over at the UbD Educators wiki. The unit plan is not different from what I’ve done with The Odyssey in the past, but I don’t think I’ve ever framed it with essential questions. Incidentally, inspired by Tom from Bionic Teaching, I have decided to integrate Google Earth into the project for the first time. I need to do some more playing with Google Earth so I can figure out how it works, but based on what I’ve seen so far, I think it will be a good tool for us.
The performance assessment is a project detailed in English Journal, “Bringing Homer’s Odyssey Up to Date: An Alternative Assessment,” Vol. 86 No. 1, pp. 65-68, Jan 1997. I was a student teacher when I first used it (the 1996-1997 year was my student teaching year), and I have always had great success with it. If you teach The Odyssey, I highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy of that article. I am going to have the students chart their own Odysseus’ journey using Google Earth. I am contemplating publication online through a blog or wiki or some other type of website, but we’ll see.