Comments on: Rounding the corner?

By: Mr. B

Mr. B — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:33:51 +0000

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.

By: yancy

yancy — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:45:54 +0000

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?

By: Mr. B

Mr. B — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:50:19 +0000

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.)

By: Clix

Clix — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:20:00 +0000

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?