Since I’ve started teaching English, everyone I meet wants to tell me what books they read, loved and hated in high school English. Unfortunately, no one’s ever told me their dream high school English curriculum before, which is a shame!
One book I didn’t read in high school English is the Bible, which now I teach every year in my ninth grade class. It seemed strange to me to teach at a secular school at first, but now that I’ve taught it for several years, it would absolutely be part of my dream high school English curriculum. This conversation began in that first linked blog post for me, when another commenter brought it up, and then continuedin a really thought-provoking discussion of why we teach literature and why it’s valuable to study literature together.
Every year, it’s one of my favorite units to teach. The students who have come to us from religious schools get to display their knowledge, it ties in well with the Five Major Faiths unit they do in Medieval World History at the same time, and the stories are accessible yet rich with language. They write an exegesis essay and they also do a presentation on allusions, a concept that can be surprisingly tricky for them to grasp, but once they do, their excitement is a thrill to watch. The themes we introduce are timeless: jealousy, exile, faith, destiny vs. free will, and they enrich our units for the rest of the year.
Right now, my kids’ bedtime stories come from my old copy of A Children’s Bible in 365 Stories. Before the snowstorms, we just finished the story of Gideon, from the book of Judges, which is also the title of one of my favorite My Morning Jacket songs, which is part of the reason Biblical familiarity is so important. Whether you’re religious or not, you miss out on so much richness in Western art and literature if you can’t pick up the Biblical references. Also, our children won’t be raised in a church-going family, but we aren’t choosing to keep them ignorant of religion either. We want them to grow up aware of all religions, so that they can choose for themselves if/when the time comes.
So that’s my first entry in my dream high school curriculum. How about you?
Jackie — I would really love to include some bible in our curriculum, and in fact I’m planning to do so next year in AP Language, which is a class I’ll get to control myself and won’t have to coordinate with anyone else (which I’m expecting to be a huge relief!).
Can you give me some of the logistics of your Bible as Lit section? What translation do you use? Do you photocopy material for them, or do you have them buy a bible? How much do you have them read in a single homework assignment? What kinds of papers or assignments do you give them? I’ll be grateful for any info you share!
WN, one website I would highly recommend is Bible Gateway (http://www.biblegateway.com/). It’s searchable and features 50 different languages in one hundred different versions, so it is very helpful for comparing different translations. I try to choose several passages throughout the unit and have the students read four or five different translations and then talk about the differences.
We use a textbook that includes a great variety of paintings, sculptures, poems, songs and other works of art along with sections of the Bible, which is perfect for us because the skill of recognizing and analyzing allusions is one of the major skills we are trying to work on in that unit. I don’t have the title handy, but I’ll try and write it down at school tomorrow. I will try to add some documents to this post too so you can see some assignments, etc.
Okay, I just added the assignment documents for the essay and presentation they do. These are ninth graders, so keep that in mind.
I was just thinking …a unit on the Bible? Um…we did Genesis in my world lit. class in college, but the whole thing? In high school? But I see you must just mean certain parts now. I have read the Bible, as literature and as a religious book, and I think everyone who wants a well-rounded education as a citizen of Western society should read it – it is so influential in shared stories sort of way at its most basic, and in more complex cultural-underpinning sorts of ways as well. In social studies, we don’t really have time for reading it, but I definitely touch on the holy books, beliefs, practices, rituals, deities and sects of all the major religions we blow through in our whirlwind survey of the world. It would be great if they were getting a more in-depth look at those books in their ELA classes.
It’s hard to remember what I did in my ELA classes in high school, except for this sort of crazy, super-stereotypical Cool English Teacher I had for English IV. I guess it must have been English Lit. because we did Macbeth and Yeats and Wordsworth and lots of other great poets and then spent a truly ridiculous amount of time on Blake. Another English teacher had us read Silas Marner (gag) and another had us read Native Son, which now surprises me, although that was a great book. Really, we the best curriculum in my 9th grade U.S. History class (the order was different then) – our teacher had us read a great novel to help us understand every decade we studied – Babbit, Gatsby, All Quiet, The Jungle, Grapes of Wrath, Johnny Get Your Gun and more. It was amazing. Of course, we knew how to read back then. Also, she didn’t have to prep us for TAKS tests, so things were very different.
On a more religious note, as a First Day School teacher in my Quaker meeting, I have really enjoyed reading modern day midrashim, stories about stories in the Bible, typically from the Jewish tradition, with the little Quakers. A rabbi named Sandy Eisenberg Sasso writes some wonderful stuff for very young kids and I have also enjoyed Does God have A Big Toe? and Before There Was A Before, although the authors escape me.
LSM, what a great way to teach US History– my degrees are both in American Studies, which is founded on merging literature and history to better understand America itself– love it! And yeah, there’s no way we could handle the whole Bible. My colleague actually teachers an elective for our seniors that is a semester long on the Bible as literature, and even then I know he can’t cover it all.
Jackie, thanks so much for the allusions presentation assignment, which looks great. Your exegesis assignment link causes a “Bad Gateway” error, which sounds like something fairly mystical, doesn’t it? Did you find the name of the book you all use? I’d love to pursue that!
Just today I was teaching the bible in my typical way, which is that I give the students a handout with the relevant bible passages to whatever it is we’re reading in class. Today’s handout was on King Solomon’s decision about the baby that two women were claiming; it went with Huck and Jim’s conversation in Ch. 14 of Huckleberry Finn. The last time it was the story of the curse of Ham, which went along with Frederick Douglass’s discussion about said curse. I like this way of bringing in the bible to the course, but we also really need a longer unit on the bible as lit!
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