One of the invisible aspects of teaching, from the student’s perspective, is what we as teachers choose to teach. What books do we choose, why do we choose them, for which grade/level are they best, and when in the year should we teach them: all questions I wrestle with every year, and did every semester even when I was teaching college kids instead of 14 year-old girls.
Do you put the harder text earlier in the year, to establish the tone and rigor of your course, or are you dooming students to failure? Maybe it’s better to place the harder text at the end, but then you often get fatigued students who slog through the text as if dragging their feet through mud. In my class for juniors, I struggled with placing Hamlet and Beloved, faced with these same dilemmas. Which text is going to be a good palate-cleanser, between two longer or denser texts or units? Should you place the most teachable, perennial favorite (like The Great Gatsby, in my experience) in the middle of the year, because it will hold their interest in the festive weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, or do you save it to ramp their interest back up after the long winter break? If you’re teaching The Bible as Literature in the ninth grade, do you try and place a novel or text near it that is heavy on Biblical allusions, or will they be too Bible-saturated to appreciate it right away? Should the summer reading book be challenging, to establish the tone and rigor of your course, or should it be more accessible, since they are reading it independently? Should you require outside reading, or only class texts? Should we teach books we as teachers love, or keep our eyes only on tried-and-true choices?
I know I’m not the only one; I’ve read Dana Huff on : teaching books we love, and I LOVED her speech to her students before beginning Wuthering Heights and have given a similar version when I’ve taught Walt Whitman, one of my eternal favorites. I’ve watched Epiphany in Baltimore deliberate between Macbeth and Richard III and try to make some really tough decisions for his IB reading list. It’s nice to know I have company in this struggle, and I’ve learned a lot from what I’ve seen and heard in other teachers’ decisions.
Every year, I sweat the ordering of my texts, and every year, I find myself wishing I’d done something differently.
My daughter just wishes her teachers were less fond of books about children stranded on islands. It’s really hard getting her to read Lord of The Flies which is one of her summer reading books this summer and a good choice, I think, because she is so sick of Island of The Blue Dolphins, Julie of The Wolves, assorted London stories, Hatchet 17: Revenge of The Chokecherries, etc.(:
Prior to when the English teachers decide kids are ready for the classics, hers have picked some bland stuff, when you put it all together (they are decent stories if you just read one of them). I’d like to see edgier YA texts for middle schoolers than she has gotten – I think that would engage them more.
Oh, poor Lone Star Girl! That must be frustrating for her, and is exactly the kind of mistake I would think many of us want to avoid, but don’t even see happening.
I see your point about edgier YA lit in the middle school years also–I think so many teachers get stuck in thinking we must teach “the classics.”