In my preparation of my sophomore curriculum for the fall (which is starting to take shape, slowly but surely), I’ve run into an interesting dilemma that I thought I would post here to hear comments on the issue. (Informed opinions from professionals encouraged, but experience and knowledge of pedagogy isn’t strictly necessary here.)
The textbook I’ll be using for my sophomores is Course 5 of the Glencoe Literature 2009 series, which I’ve liked fairly well from what I’ve looked through. The text doesn’t necessarily cover any particular region, period, or movement, but it is largely multicultural: within the first unit, there are stories from Jack Finney (U.S., 20th century), R.K. Narayan (India, 20th century), Chinua Achebe (Africa, 20th century), and Edgar Allan Poe (U.S., 19th century). Other units include stories from Amy Tan, Gabriel García Márquez, James Thurber, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many others. There are a few canonical figures, but most of the authors are not the stereotypical “dead white guys.” The text also does a nice job of organizing related texts into thematic units, which I like for the sheer fact that it helps organize the teaching around principles and concepts that students should be able to relate to.
My dilemma comes with one unit in particular, entitled “Loyalty and Betrayal.” It covers two major works, Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Between the two works, there’s about 100 pages of reading.
Here are my questions:
- Is 100 pages of reading, especially of drama where a substantial amount ought to be read together as a class, too much to ask of sophomores in a single unit? I get a little concerned that this unit will involved substantially more reading, and it’s bound to take up several weeks of instruction, certainly more than virtually all of the other units I have in mind. (I think the most text-heavy unit after this is about 30 pages of reading over the course of the unit. A unit on a novel would be at least this much reading, but I don’t have any novels I’m dying to teach to sophomores, especially not since I’m going to be teaching a semester of novels aside from this and have a limited selection of novels.)
- Would it be a travesty to consider dropping JC from the unit? I remember reading it as a sophomore, and I’ve found that it seems to be fairly common in sophomore curricula (although the school where I did my student teaching opted to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream instead), but I have my doubts about it, both on my end teaching it and on the students’ end trying to digest it. (On the other hand, I think that Antigone – especially with the Oedipus Rex backstory – could be very interesting to study.) It fits in well with the themes of loyalty and betrayal, but I’m just not sure.
Comments are open for suggestions and opinions – I really would like to hear what other people have to say about this.
June 9, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Talk to the other teachers at your school. At ours, Caesar is core curriculum, Antigone is enrichment.
My concern isn’t the reading itself, it’s that plays aren’t meant to be read. If you’ve got students who are strong readers, they may be able to act it out – vocal inflections and such – as they read, and that helps. But I haven’t that luxury.
June 9, 2009 at 9:29 pm
I suppose I should provide some clarification: Because the school I’ll be teaching is in very small, I’ll be the only full-time English teacher, so I really don’t have any other teachers to go to about this. (There is also currently no tracking done for English, so no go on the “core”/”enrichment” distinction.) I’m the one set out to make the curriculum decisions, so I can’t really defer on this. (Although I admit I did try: I asked the principal if there were any works that she thought ought to be included in the curriculum, mentioning Julius Caesar by name, and all she said was something about a consumer documents unit at the end of the sophomore textbook.)
I share the concern about the “reading” – when I said that I was concerned about 100 pages of reading, it really is more or less than the “reading” will really be most productive if it is done in class in parts as opposed to students “reading” the text when it is really is intended to be seen and experienced. If I could take the students somewhere to see a performance of Julius Caesar, I might not be so apprehensive. I doubt I’ll get that option.
Thanks for the input; it’s greatly appreciated.
June 10, 2009 at 11:15 am
Here’s my take on it (and you know me, famous for my “Shakespeare is overrated” comment):
–it’s useful if students recognize plots of Shakespeare plays (especially Hamlet, R&J, Othello, maybe Macbeth….others not so much0
–it’s useful if students have some exposure to Shakespeare’s language (“to be or not to be” etc.)
–neither of those goals requires that every 16 year old in the country read a whole play
Finally, I’d add that (as far as I can tell, and I’m not a Shakespeare scholar) Julius Caesar is NOT one of his better plays. I think it is generally the first one taught because it is short and easy to approach through history. But if you want to teach Shakespeare, I’d recommend one of the better plays.
Does your school have a drama club or do a school play? Will you be in charge? Or is there reader’s theatre or any speech-related extracurricular activity?
June 10, 2009 at 12:53 pm
I sort of expected a comment like that about Shakespeare from you, JWM, and to a degree, I tend to agree (at least about what Shakespeare is taught). I also don’t care much for Julius Caesar, which is why I even considered the idea of dropping it. I suppose I could also be amenable to a more limited reading of the play, focusing on those scenes that bring out the theme of betrayal, but I sort of feel like I’d be doing that just because it’s Shakespeare and not because it’s actually literature that my students ought to study. If I had access to a better one (even like A Midsummer Night’s Dream), then I think I’d be more apt to do that instead. I probably won’t teach much (if any) other Shakespeare if I don’t do it with sophomores, since junior English is American lit (no room there) and senior English is world lit and may or may not include any Shakespeare plays (again, haven’t looked through that text entirely yet).
As far as extracurriculars go, I don’t think that there is a drama club, although I believe that there is usually a school play that has been done in past years by the art teacher (if I recall correctly). I think probably not on reader’s theater and speech extracurriculars as well. I think that I very likely will include drama where possible, but Julius Caesar just seems gratuitous.
July 6, 2009 at 11:10 pm
If the choice was up to me, I would drop Caesar like a used Kleenex!
Don’t feel like you have to stick to the textbook. What kind of access do you have to computers or a photocopier?
What required standards does this unit connect to? What are YOUR goals for the unit?