TMI

I'm wading through the snot to wish y'all a Merry Crimmah.

I decided to clean my house, and I unleashed some pretty virulent dustbunnies that are trying to rot out my insides. But that's ok, wrapping Christmas presents with a Thera-flu-induced-fuzz-head makes me feel extra festive. And I'm breathing out of my right nostril now, so things are lookin' up.

While in recovery, I've been reading The Lovely Bones and The House of the Scorpion, which were recommended by a fellow teacher and my librarian respectively. I am trying to decide what novels I want to teach next semester, but I'm having a hard time. Next semester, I will be teaching two honors 9th Lit. classes and one general American Lit class. I carefully chose Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood for 9th H and Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow for 10th. My department head, after reading my email asking for thoughts about my selections, said both were too difficult, even for honors.

I'm not sure. My head is an awesome teacher and vastly more experienced than me. However, I don't see my selections being any more challenging than Silas Marner by George Eliot or The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Oreczy, which are other books recommended by my state for 9th grade. Of course, that list also includes Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird which I read in the 4th grade. My school and department are beyond cool, and I know I am allowed to choose anything I want, but I feel like I should defer to the wisdom of her experience.  On the other hand, I recklessly chose to teach Dante's Inferno last semester in my general World Lit class, and it was way to difficult for them, but I am still glad I taught it and would do it again. I liked pushing them, and even though it was too hard, they worked harder than they did for anything else because I was so into it. I also believe there are levels to reading literature. I read Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 8th grade, and while I didn't really get the book, I still took something away.

Here is a list of books we currently have and teach for each grade level:

Ninth Grade Titles
House on Mango Street, Bless Me, Ultima, The Chosen, Great Expectations, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’n Head Wilson, The Secret Life of Bees, The Chocolate War, Ellen Foster, A Separate Peace, Frankenstein, A Gathering of Old Men, The Odyssey, The Count of Monte Cristo, Anthem, The Bluest Eye, The Joy Luck Club, A Member of the Wedding, The Miracle Worker, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Bean Trees, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Romeo and Juliet, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Angela’s Ashes, Night

American Lit Titles
Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, A Raisin in the Sun, The Women of Brewster Place, Mama Day, The Great Gatsby, Billy Budd, The Scarlet Letter, The Grapes of Wrath, A Lesson Before Dying, The Glass Menagerie, Ethan Frome, Cold Mountain, The Crucible, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, All the Pretty Horses, House Made of Dawn, Wise Blood, The Killer Angels, Slaughterhouse Five, The Color Purple, All the Kings Men, Black Boy, Native Son
   
British Lit Titles
Here on Earth, White Teeth, The Tempest, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, Grendel, Beowulf,
Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, Oronooko, Gulliver’s Travels, Emma, Jane Eyre, Villette, Things Fall Apart (11th graders), And Then There Were None (12th graders), The Turn of the Screw, Wide Sargasso Sea, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Paradise Lost, Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the d’ Ubervilles, Importance of Being Earnest, A Room of One’s Own, The Canterbury Tales, Macbeth

World Lit Titles
Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities, Death of a Salesman, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Song of Solomon, Oedipus Rex, The Awakening, The Sound and the Fury, The God of Small Things, As I Lay Dying, Ceremony, Things Fall Apart (11th graders), And Then There Were None (12th graders), Heart of Darkness, Othello, Hamlet, The Handmaid’s Tale, Heart of Darkness, Dubliners, A Doll House, The Metamorphosis, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Pere Goriot, Siddhartha, The Iliad, The Inferno, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Brave New World, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

I almost wish I taught at a school that dictated what I had to teach. I spend too much time over-thinking my selections. But, not really. I like my school.

I mean, look at all those books. Plus, each English teacher gets a budget of about $350 to buy books and supplies each year. And to think that during AmeriCorps, I ran a literacy program at a school that only had one book for each subject and year. We had to check our one book from the office and make photocopies each time we wanted to read something.

I just need to stop stressing and pick something so I can get on with planning. I intend to start off next semester with a whole lot more planned than I did last semester.

Comments

[noreen]

i am a huge fan of latin american literature, but i've always hated sandra cisneros. on the flipside, i'm happy to see that arundhati roy is now high school reading. good luck planning... i say go with atwood for 9th grade!

[Sig.]

I agree with your dept. head...Alias Grace and Ragtime are probably a bit much. I read them in a 300-level historical fiction class in college.

They're definitely great books, but probably not for 14- and 15-year-olds.

[nicole]

i am so jealous of your book selection.
i have like 4 books to choose from for my 8th graders, and they are all at about a 4th grade reading level because so few students are reading above that. oy.

[Lectrice]

Some of the factors that affect what books you teach are:

1) How much support material for planning lessons already exists? If there's little to none, you will have to do every single worksheet and plan and really stretch yourself to keep up with / on top of all your students. If that's one class per term, that's interesting - any more classes than that, and you're drawing energy away from the actual job of teaching, and that's not helping your students.

2) Are other teachers in your department teaching these novels? They're an utterly invaluable resource - if you ever get the opportunity to swap ideas or plan in tandem with a colleague on the same book for the same term, it raises your game massively.

3) Did the students do a difficult text last term? However well they did, you need to think about their approach. Children find it discouraging to *always* find reading hard. Could there not be a seesaw effect - one hard text, one fun text, one challenging text, one relaxing/interesting text etc? Can you recall a teacher who ever pushed you to go further than you felt you were capable off every term, or did they manage your learning so that you enjoyed your study, and balanced that with pushing you further than you knew you could go?

4) The difficulty level of reading the text is, as you rightly point out, not the only factor. Equally, a less challenging text can be made far more challenging by spirited planning.

I don't want to say, no, no, no, don't do it, but I think you need to assess the reasons that established teachers may not always set Ulysses in second grade...?

Having said that, your department's bookolist is fantastic. You have a good schoool there. I have a choice of three texts per year group in my school, one per ability group (they assume only three ability groups exist). None is challenging, and very few are interesting. I teach plenty of the books you've metnioned in secretly smuggled photocopied versions, on the quiet, as the administration would have a hissy fit if they thought I TAUGHT ANYTHING OTHER THAN WRITING REPORTS FOR FOURTEEN WEEKS AT A TIME. (oops, accidental caps lock, there!)
It's an uphill struggle.

Finally: I found Alias Grace a deeply boring read, myself. I'm sure it could be done well, but I'd very much like to know how you would do it. Would you object to putting your ideas, or an outline of the issues you'd pick up on, on-blog, as it were? It could be very useful for other Literature teachers.

[Lectrice]

Another question - I can't understand how some of those titles register as 'world lit' and not in the other categories? 8 of them are british, and 8 american lit, as far as I can see. What's the criteria? Is the category merely setting? In the which case, Brave New World and Handmaid's Tale should be set in Chronologicallly futuristic Lit, no?

[hipteacher]

Lectrice- Wow. Thanks for your comments. I'm going to mull them over and then give them a post of their very own.

[Lectrice]

Gosh. There's validation! (Flattered!)

[kristen]

No _To Kill a Mockingbird_? Did I just miss it? That is a 9th grade classic!

[Sherri]

Well, you know I am not in the know into how these things are selected, but I never really understood how certain books were decided appropriate for certain grades. I used to think that maybe writing style & elements made certain books more complicated, but then I see what to me are more complicated books taught to younger grades than some easier, more straightforward books. And symbolism, etc is very subjective and you can complicate even the easier books by introducing all sorts of literary critism.

But - if something is fun for you, I am sure some of the enthusiasm will rub off to your class.

Good luck deciding!

[jennifercookie]

i entirely agree with noreen.

arundhati roy is my favorite writer. i love her political stuff. but i simply do not understand the obsession with the house on mango street. back in ninth grade i had to read that i believe... i hated it.

random question: why is "and then there were none" on the world lit list?? or is there another book named that besides the agatha christie one. i'm assuming it's because it's modern, but that's a complete cop-out, if the point of "world lit" is to expose students to non-western viewpoints.

too bad "catch 22" isn't on there. that was my favorite book from required school reading at least in 12th grade. AP though... i don't remember if this was on the list, but "heart of darkness" was the only assigned book in high school that i absolutely refused to finish because it was so painful. so please don't teach that :)