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Old Dec 29, 2014, 01:03 PM
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JustShakey JustShakey is offline
WON'T!!!
 
Member Since: May 2014
Location: Arizona
Posts: 4,576
Quote:
Originally Posted by lolagrace View Post
I changed my philosophy of teaching literature a bit over the years. It used to be there was a canon of literature that all AP students "must" read, and we taught them as works to the whole class. Unfortunately, what that tended to foster was a lot of Sparksnoting it because, frankly, kids won't read what they don't want to read. I still do a few things as a whole class, but I've found giving more choice (still from a list of "quality" literature) gets more students actually reading entire works instead of finding shortcuts through novels they aren't interested in. My students are actually reading much more now than in the past, so it seems to be working. The challenge has been finding how to help them learn to analyze and read deeply when I have 50 or more different novels all going at once. I obviously can't be the expert on every novel, but they can be taught to discover these things for themselves. It can be done. Just takes a different approach and a lot of work in teaching literary criticism, archetypes, rhetorical analysis, etc. Once they learn that they can research the works for themselves, they really get into it and are rather proud of how capable they are of doing that for themselves.

Damn. I wish I were in school now. This sounds like fun. When I was doing my Leaving Cert (Irish A-levels) we were actually given pre-written analyses to learn off and regurgitate.
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'...
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my sawn, splay sounds,)
...'
Dylan Thomas, Author's Prologue