Thinking of the near future

[Shea]

Hi all,

I'll be graduating in the summer and if all goes well, I'll be teaching high school English in the fall. But since I'm not an education major, I keep coming up with syllibi in my head and teaching methods that I want to use.

I keep thinking of all my old English teachers (high school and college), and I'm coming up with things to do and not to do. But all my classes were honors. What if I wind up teaching regular English? I don't know if those students read the same sorts of things as I did.

I'm probably asking the wrong people, but are there any late-blooming book lovers out there who took regular english classes who can tell me what they studied?

[Jester]

well i know in my school the ap and the reg english were teaching the same things, same teacher... very bad teahcer i might add

[Stanislaw]

Which grades are you looking for specifically?

Here is my best general highschool shot:
Grade 10:
- The Chrysalids
- Grammer
- assorted short stories
Grade 11:
- Assorted short stories
- Great Gatsby
- Glass menagerie
- Taming of the shrew
- tons of essays
Grade 12:
- The wars
- Hamlet
- Death of a Salesman
- Bird in the house

[baddad]

Don't most teaching posts have a prescribed curriculam that must be generally adhered to, with only a small amount of latitude as to presentation method? Hope I;m wrong, because varied teaching methods have the greater chance to touch upon the myriad learning techniques of students.

[mono]

I registered for a lot of english in high school, and I cannot remember everything we studied, but some novels and plays that come to mind:
Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)
The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)

Some short stories:
The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontilado, The Fall of the House of Usher (Poe)
The Gift of the Magi, "girl" (Henry)
Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God (Edwards)
The Necklace (Mapaussant)

[Shea]

Okay, these sound really good, I think I can have a lot of fun with this.

Baddad, I still have to research the requirements for english instructors in Florida. But from what I understand, I'd be responsible for teaching from certain genres as far as literature goes. Other than that I think that I just need to teach grammar and how to write papers.

As far as style goes, I had an extreamly good early Brit Lit teacher this past semester. She had a wonderful knack of relating the old stuff to today. I probably would never have had such a good understanding and appreciation of Beowulf, Judith, Gawain and the Green Knight, etc.... if it wasn't for her. I don't know if I have that knack yet, but another thing that she did was give a quiz everyday. We had to answer one of four or five questions on that day's reading, and one of the answers that we gave would be turned into a paper. She also only counted 10 quizes out of about 36 so if something happened and we couldn't read, it was okay. I may have to rearrange that depending on the schedule in public schools, but I want that idea as sort of my foundation.

The thing that I liked the most about it was the opportunity to choose a quiz answer for my paper. She always gave feedback to our quiz answers so when it came time to write, we'd already have the main ideas written down, and had it mulling around in our heads. We just needed to expand the idea. Despite the tough material, that class was an easy A.

[papayahed]

I stunk at english in high school and it was a few years ago. So what I remember reading is:

All the kings men, The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, and Catcher in the Rye.

I remember watching the movies also.

[The_Anachronist]

Well I'm at an all girls school and the A-level English Literature is really heavily based on feminism...which is awful...we're bombarded with it....the worst was Carol Anne Duffy...

We only do one Shakespeare play which is awful!! I think we should do about 3 a comedy, a tragedy and a history.

Good Luck!

[Shea]

Thanks everyone, and keep 'em coming! and sorry for your luck Anachronist, I'm not a feminist fan either. I had to study The Awakening for two different classes back to back in the same semester. I was so annoyed by it that I didn't even show up to class the second time round. I would much rather have done Shakespeare also. Let me guess, the one play that your school does is Hamlet and you focus on Ophelia's plight?

Papayahed, I'm glad you mentioned movies. I remember watching some movies because we didn't have time to read the books, but I never paid attention because I would've rather read. However, I've gained some experience due to my husband who would rather watch the movie. It's the only way I can discuss literature with him. But I feel like he's missing out, as I would feel the same about my students. At what point should I show a movie to get them interested (those having the same attitude as my husband) if I can't spark an interest myself? Or maybe I should just cross that bridge when I get there?

[Dina12]

My english education has be awful. My favourite play that we've done is The Glass Menagerie. So good. Favourite novel: I chose for my independent study and it was slaughterhouse five. Favourite film was bran nue dae but mostly because it was a musical. In regards to your choices, please don't do anything contemporary as in beyond 1970, don't do 'femmenist' texts, or aything that only has merit in it's discussion of social issue. I have felt like killing myself over newish femmenist texts at least a hundred times over the past few years. Science fiction is usually great for 'what makes us human?' type topics but don't do science fiction if you have a narrow minded class, there's this idiot in my english class who's all like 'but I couldn't get into the book because it isn't plausible', after a long discussion and her very faulty version of the 'plausible' (believe I'd know, to fool thought that a society which harvested organs from clones would bother to work out methods for growing individual organs, why?) I just endded up yelling (I almost never talk in class unless adressed as I'm awfully quiet) "The point of science fiction is that it's fundamentally flawed!" and that was that. But yes. I would beg though, please do some steinbeck, his writing is beautiful, and you can always you relatively short novels if you have a resistant class. In regards to the film thing, I'd advise you to do a film as a seperate topic or as a paired text. Don't show your class a film to replace the novel, it never works, trust me. Film can be a great alternative to a novel though,especially if your class struggles but I have never seen a film that supplements the study of the novel that it is based on well. I remember watching pride and prejudice while we were 'reading' it. It was utterly confusing because although all the films are similar, they have scenes dealling with the nity grity, big ideas type things that the novel just doesn't have so we couldn't write abotu them.