Couch 82: If you're happy and you know it, be a number!

ha. i don't like saying my name either. sometimes i say 'richard' (i'm a girl) to see their reaction.

No idea. I haven't finished it yet, but my guess is that Heathcliff is a rather uncultivated, wild individual--a gypsy of sorts; very rough around the edges personality-wise (huge understatement--rather dark and dangerous actually). And Heath works better as a name than Moor I suppose. Certainly the names of the houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, are symbolic. I suspect Bronte was using his name symbolically also.

WH - Heathcliff shows up, he leaves, he comes back, he disappears again, lather rinse repeat. It should be called, WTH

I think im still reading the mill on the stuffing floss

In 8th grade, i remember my best friend recommending Tess of the D'Ubervilles to me, telling md it was a really good book. I put her off, saying i didnt like spooky mysteries - i was mixing it up with The Hound of the Baskervilles - true story i finally did start reading it a few years ago, and i really do wish i had read it at age 14 - i needed to!

i love the name heathcliff.

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.

Reading was my escape growing up. I used to be able to shut out everything around me and exist completely in the story. My mother used to say the house could burn down around me and I wouldn't notice... I've more-or-less lost that ability as I've grown older. Wish I could reclaim it, but I suppose it's not necessarily conducive to being a responsible adult and parent

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