Poll!

[fossefox]

Argh. I'm working with a horrid anthology this semester. I feel like everything included is stuff that my kids would have already read in high school. This obviously isn't everything I have to work with, but these are ones that I don't know whether to teach or not b/c they all seem like things I read in high school (not that they don't deserve

Comments

[megalopoet]

i'd suggest asking your students to go through the anthology and pick out things they've not read--sometimes i do this just to be sure we're all on some even footing. and, sometimes my students really enjoy going more in-depth, as you said, with the multiple readings--never trust they were taught well in high school ;-) my other advice is to use handouts outside the book--given that you may have to put things *in writing* for a syllabus

[megalopoet]

thanks--if anyone's teaching bartleby it's my shriveled up old ap teacher--i sometimes think i may be the last person to have read it. of course, i never really dug melville--sorry in advance to any melville fans. i'd take hawthorne over melville ANY day. come to think of it, i hardly even remember any of bartleby--i know it was dark and drear. what else is new with mel?

[glaucon]

kids still read?

[doctortina]

DRAMA
Sophocles- Antigone
Shakespeare- Hamlet
Sophocles- Oedipus the King
MIller - Death of a Salesman
Ibsen- A Doll's House
Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire (but they may have seen the movie in H.S.)
Chekov - The Cherry Orchard

FICTION
Kafka- The Metamorphosis
Chopin- The Story of an Hour
Melville- Bartleby the Scrivener
Poe- The Cask of Amontillado
O'Brien- The Things they Carried
Marquez- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

[fossefox]

So what I should learn from all of this is that there's no way of predicting what they have and haven't read and I should just assign whatever I want? :P

[doctortina]

yes! And to hell if they've read it before! HS English is a lot about thematic groupthink, IMHO. If they read it again, you get to correct their teachers *and* teach them to think for themselves!

[megalopoet]

i love that: "correct their teachers" great line!

[timiathan]

1
Shakespeare
Miller
Ibsen
Oedipus
Anigone
Williams

2
Melville
Poe
Kafka
O'Brien
Marquez
Chopin

[walkingfish]

Drama:

Hamlet
Antigone
Oedipus
Death of Salesman
Doll's House
Cherry Orchard
Streetcar

(based on the fact that I read the first 3 in highschool and have never read the last three)

Fiction
O'Brian (I know this was on a lot of summer reading lists a few years ago)

I have no idea about the rest of the fiction category...I know I didn't read any of them in high school.