In preparation for Independence Day events (and being a musician, I’m well-occupied with performing), someone remarked to me that the Fourth marks the halfway point of summer. I think this is about right: I have only about 5 more weeks of work before I have my open week to make final preparations for the beginning of the school year on August 17th. That’s only six weeks to get the rest of my curriculum planned and to get my organizational stuff in order.
It’s a little scary.
I am almost done with my sophomore lit selections from the textbook, although I keep thinking about what skills would be useful to help 10th graders with so that they don’t have to be crammed so much into the last two years of high school, things like critical reading and thinking skills. I also discovered that I probably didn’t have enough literature from the initial units I picked, so I’m going through and adding some more, including a unit on “genre fiction” that will allow us to compare literature from a variety of genres. The first selection is a short story called “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury – an excellent start.
As for the novels, I think I’ve got my selection nailed down to these works:
- Farewell to Arms
- Of Mice and Men
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Crucible [Edit: Actually, this is taught in junior English now]
- Animal Farm
- 1984
- The Scarlet Letter
- The Great Gatsby
- A Separate Peace
1984 is still iffy – I haven’t asked for a class set yet. (I don’t want to seem greedy!) Nevertheless, I’m going to try and work it out.
Edit: I notice that most of these works are American lit, with the exception of the Orwell novels, most are twentieth century, with the exception of the Hawthorne novel, and all of them are written by male authors. I hate to say it, but I’m probably going to end up teaching Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights out of the necessity of another non-American, non-20th century, non-male novel. I know that there are others I could probably choose – and would prefer – but I have class sets of both novels currently. At least I can limit my chick lit selections to one novel. Further edit: OR – I could try to get Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! That would be a brilliant and far preferable selection – it would be pre-20th century British novel by a female author, and it fits somewhat into the science fiction genre while still covering issues of humanity and the idea of anxiety toward science. If I can, I think I’ll try to get a class set of this one instead and possibly teach it right before Of Mice and Men, which to me resonates along the same lines (humanity, longing for acceptance).
I still have the semester-long writing elective and my senior English to determine, although I have a good idea about what I’ll do for both classes: memoirs, profiles, some form of professional writing (cover letter, resume, etc.), reflective writing, possibly a creative piece that incorporates research (following an EJ article by Linda Hammond on this subject), and of course some more conventional forms like essays, possibly including a college application essay, for the writing elective; an autoethnography project and probably some cultural projects for senior English, as well as a college application essay, a persuasive essay, and a major research paper (I will probably include a literary analysis essay in here, depending on what I decide when I get to know this senior English class better).
Maybe I’m halfway done, but I doubt I’m nearly half-ready. We’ll see.
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
The Crucible
Animal Farm
1984
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby
A Separate Peace
July 6, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Two questions: 1) what kind of computer access do your students have? a lot of classic works are public domain.
2) how long do you plan to spend on an average novel, and how much time do you plan to give to other literary formats?
July 7, 2009 at 6:50 am
I actually don’t know if my students in general will have much computer access outside of school (assuming that’s what you mean). It’s a small rural district, so I suspect that many students may not have home Internet access, although I could be mistaken. I’ve thought about trying to get works out of the public domain, but I keep running into problems like PC access or of course copying costs.
The elective course is solely on novels, so there really won’t be a substantial amount of other formats with a few exceptions (I might try Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” again if I teach 1984 just because it helps discuss Orwell’s views on language in the novel). For most novels, I think I’ll be spending about 1.5-2 weeks, with possibly less time on shorter novels like Of Mice and Men. I have a number of other novels available that I’m trying not to use because 1) I’m using them in my regular classes (To Kill a Mockingbird for sophomores, The Crucible for juniors – not exactly a novel, but it’s been taught in the novels elective in the past – because it’s in the new junior text) or 2) just because I think they would be less accessible for students. (If it were me, we’d probably have a higher proportion of contemporary/YA lit to canonical lit.)
July 9, 2009 at 11:45 am
I think that 1.5 to 2 weeks per novel is an incredibly fast pace. How much reading per night does that work out to be? Keep in mind that students have homework for other classes, jobs, church, and family obligations.
When I was in college we read a novel a week in my lit classes. That was a lot of reading, but I also had maybe 2 hours of classes a day, not the 6.5 to 7 hour schooldays that high school students have.
I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but many/most of the students won’t keep up with that much reading.
I also suggest that you do “more with less,” going deeper with fewer novels.
I am not an English teacher, so maybe I am wrong. Have you asked on teacher chatboards and teachers in real-life if they think that pacing is workable?
July 9, 2009 at 6:33 pm
I’m hoping to keep nightly reading between 15-20 pages a night. For one example, A Separate Peace, if I were to do it in a week and a half, would be roughly 15 pages per night (it’s about 200 pages long), and that’s if I don’t leave any class period for silent reading (which I likely will, for both my and my students’ sakes). I also think I’d prefer to shoot high as far as the quantity of novels we do, although the quality of learning will of course dictate the pacing of each unit, and I don’t intend on teaching these novels superficially – we will be reading to do justice to these novels.
Of course, some novels may have to be longer, and it may be that we don’t get to whatever novel happens to be last. I’m okay with that, and I’m not saying that the novels I select must all be done – for that matter, it may be that the composition of my class would benefit more from studying works like Jane Eyre – just that these are the novels I’d like to get to. There are at least a few of these novels that I won’t cry over if we don’t get to them, as long as we do in fact do justice to the novels we explore.