teaching lit in highschool

[SleepyWitch]

hey guys, I've got a question about teaching (English) Lit in secondary school.
In Germany, the curriculum doesn't give any clear guidelines as to what books you should read with your students. The only obligatory stipulation is that you should read one play by Shakespeare in year 12/13. Otherwise, the curriculum only gives genres, like you should read either one novel or a bunch of short stories, but there isn't any reading list to pick from.
this has resulted in teachers avoiding the classics (probably because many teachers haven't read all the classics themselves and because they are too lazy to whip their kids through difficult-to-read books).
Anyways, our didactics prof mentioned an approach where you don't set one book for the whole class, but you offer several books so that each student can pick the one they like best. I.e. every one reads a different books and then they give a presentation about it or something. The books can include anything from Jane Austen to Harry Potter. I like this idea a lot, but on the other hand it sounds a bit unrealistic. I mean I'd like to try it, but if you're going to let your students take their pick from a list of 30 books (unless your teaching year 12, your class is likely to be 30 students), that means you'd have to have read all of them yourself, right? So it's probably not something I'd try in my first year, but after a couple of years when I've had time to read loads of books?
has anyone here ever tried this method? how did it go? what happens if 10 kids pick the same book? do you make them give a group presentation or set them 10 different very specialized topics for their presentations?
thanks :)
- Sleepy

[Petrarch's Love]

Hi Sleepy. While the idea sounds appealing in some ways, I also think having students presenting different books is something that would have to be handled carefully. Frankly it isn't something I would want to try at all as a beginning teacher. If it's going to work at all, it's probably going to be with a fairly experienced instructor and in a situation where the instructor is both willing and able to do lots of one on one advising with each student.

Incidentally, just yesterday I overheard a conversation among some undergraduate university students who were complaining at length about this sort of approach in one of their classes. They felt they were just being left to their own devices to read the book, figure it out for themselves, and teach their fellow students about it in a presentation. They felt (justly, from what I heard of the class set up) that they may as well have done the reading on their own, since they were essentially teaching themselves anyway. They weren't getting the benefit of the professor guiding them through the material as you would in a class with common reading. They also weren't getting the benefit of being able to talk over the common reading material with their fellow students and learn that way. If this is how students at a top university reacted to such an approach, I can only imagine that high school level students would be even more confused and resentful. I personally don't believe that any class should be run on the sole basis of independent study and presentations until the graduate level, when at least it is reasonable to expect people to be able to do self motivated research and to come up with something that will actually be helpful and informative for their fellow students.

That said, I do think there can be room for such an activity so long as it isn't the only basis for the class. Certainly you can do book report projects in addition to a more normal common reading curriculum so that students get the chance to read something they are interested in. In my junior year of high school (age 16 or 17) I had a teacher who did a very successful term paper project which involved selecting from a list of about 100 books (with no one allowed to do the same book as someone else), researching and typing a 5-8 page paper, and making a short presentation in front of the class. It was a great success, and we all learned a lot, however, looking back with from a teacher's eye view, I realize that it must have involved a tremendous amount of work and preparation for him. He had to be familiar with all the books on the list so that he could advise students individually on their work. He set up a couple of trips to the library to educate us all on the very basic points of doing research. He wrote out very specific and well planned guidelines with steps for how to go about reading through the book and coming up with a topic to write on, and he was available before class every day to do one on one advising. He had the advantage of both 20 years of teaching experience and the fact that this class was the honors group (more motivated, mostly college bound students). I think it would have been much harder to pull off as an inexperienced teacher with a less self motivated group of students.

Just to toss another idea into the bag in terms of coming up with class reading, I've heard of instructors who put the class readings to a vote. Usually I think they have a few categories with a list of possible books for each category so that the class still has a general structure, but the students as a group get some say in what they want to read. For example, you could have five categories: Shakespeare Plays, Romantic Poetry, Victorian Novels, Early 20th century works, Contemporary Literature. Then you have a list of works for each category that you think would be good along with a brief description of that work and the kids vote on which one they want to read. Some instructors seem to think the students are more motivated when they feel they had something to do with choosing the reading and that it leads to a more lively class discussion.

[Charles Darnay]

I've had a very successful high school English experience in which there were two books (very different from one another) offered. The teacher had to be familiar with only two books, the students got to work in smaller groups to discuss the novel and they had choice in what they read.

The only stipulation is that you need a class that can work fairly independently. When the teacher was working with one group, the other group had to function on their own.

[Silvia]

we do this with our English teacher....but we can't choose from a list of 30 books! In my class we are 16. Our teacher gives us a list of books to read during the summer and then, when we come back to school, we have to divide into 4 groups and each group has to choose one novel out of a list of 4 books. After a month (more or less) each group has to present its novel to the rest of the class...I like working this way, even if I must admit it is tiring to be in a group, because sometimes it is hard to get people to realise that everybody has to do his part and that if you don't take it seriously, the whole group will be affected by your attitude.

[aabbcc]

We often had something similar, both in our native language and foreign languages literature classes.

Even though there was a fixed canon of our readings in all the schools I attended, it was generally greatly appreciated by the students if professors manipulated that canon a bit, thus giving us certain freedom in our readings. If, for example, there were 17 readings prescribed for a school year, all of which needed to be chosen from certain canon of books suggested for the epochs and literary movements studied, our professors usually limited their choice of compulsory readings to 'only' 13 or 14, thus allowing space for us, for the rest of them, to choose from a couple of suggested ones, or even to choose completely on our own the work we wanted, of course according to some guidelines (e.g. in 9th grade, when nearly the whole year readings focused on classical antiquity, we had one book free, but it had to be a book whose central themes were classical motives adapted in contempory lit - be it the issue of "tragic", or the question od odusseia, or Antigone's being torn between physis/nomos, etc).
Generally we were not requested to note professors of which works we were going to present, nor expected help from them - it was considered our work on our own. It did happen once or twice that somebody's choice surprised a professor (there was a guy who presented Ulysses and the antique element of odusseia in it - remember, we were 15 when we did that, he was a shock for everyone :D), or even chose a book professor hadn't read, but it generally was not a problem even if it occured.

In some cases when we were asked to choose between a couple of works, the works were of the same 'weight' more or less. As a lot of our literature classes were based on history and theory of lit, and only a number of them on the specific works which we were expected to have read in advance (therefore no reading together in the class), nobody really missed anything by their choice. There was hardly ever group work, usually it was about short presentations to the rest of the class and discussion, or we simply each from a test/essay from the work we read without sharing it with the rest of the class (stupid, I know).

In my experiences, however, we loved to have at least some freedom in our choices, so any choice was better than no choice. Still, our literature studies go with completely different goals than yours probably do... We weren't expected to go as detailed about specific works (therefore we never spent an entire month on a book), but rather to get an overall picture (we studied literature by its historical episodes). That's why we had a lot of books to read, in addition to selected readings to textbooks, but generally didn't go around when doing one book, but had to hit the point right away because very few lessons were dedicated to it, so only some things could be highlighted, and as we focused on historical development of literature more than specific books themselves, you can easily guess what was asked of us - to recognise motives which have been repeating throughout history of it, to contextualise the work in the time and place and literary streams of the time and place, to note the work's specialities in relation to that, a bit about an author, a bit about adaptations of the work and its themes, a bit of critical essays on the work, a bit of discussion, "end of story because we need to study other things, those of you who are interested in more about this work will find your way to do it". :D

I went off-topic, but just wanted to note why making some readings elective had a sense in our system, with fixed programme and canon. In a system with different approach to literature, more 'specialist' about fewer works but with lesser theory and history and context of complete European lit of the time, it probably wouldn't have that weight as it had for us, esp. if kids are expected to work on the works in class (we were expected to completely have gone through the work on our own), if going through a work together is encouraged, if professor has the role of 'leading' kids through the book (our professor had simply the role of comparatist of literature who was there to give us theory, and 'moderate' discussions), etc.

It's all about what you want to accomplish with this way of work. If you don't have a canon but are free to choose your readings, you can do so together with your students - I think it's the best start, then regarding some readings you can suggest an alternative one and thus give a choice. This wouldn't overload you, and would give your students an illusion of freedom. :D

[Sarasvati21]

My advanced english teacher had us place our school IDs into a paper bag, and we were drawn in a random order to choose from a selection of about 4 or 5 different books. There were about 5-6 copies of each book, so all 20 kids in my class weren't reading the same book. Also, with the smaller number of books to choose from, it becomes more manageable as far as being familiar with each story.