New teacher needs some advice

[atlantatransfer]

I just got my first teaching job. I'll be starting next week at a private high school teaching Latin and British Literature. I'm not so much worried about teaching Latin, as the standards for what need to be covered are pretty well established. As for Brit Lit, one of the best (but rather difficult, I'm finding) things about the position is that I have full control over the curriculum. So I'm trying to come up with a syllabus that will be a good, comprehensive survey of first semester Brit Lit. I'm aware it might be a little ambitious, but I need to ensure that it's comprehensive. Note: the class is four days a week, five hours a day. I'll be dividing my time between two Latin II students and one Brit Lit student, so I've worked out a schedule to spend about 2.5 hours lecturing each section, moving back and forth between the two subjects. I figure this should leave room for lots of in-class reading time.

This is my tentative Brit Lit syllabus. Is there anything I'm leaving out that you think is just too important to be overlooked? How do you all get your lessons done when crunched for time?

6/09: Introduction to Old English; Bede, selected readings; Beowulf
6/10: Beowulf
6/11: Complete Beowulf; Intro to Middle English; Canterbury Tales: Prologue & The Knight’s Tale
6/12: Canterbury Tales: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale; Marie de France, selected works;
6/16: Sir Phillip Sidney, selected works; Review for test #1
6/17: Test #1; Begin Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or The Merchant of Venice (student's choice)
6/18: Continue Shakespeare
6/19: Complete Shakespeare; The Johns: Milton, Donne, and Dryden, selected poems
6/23: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
6/24: Oroonoko
6/25: Complete Oroonoko; Coleridge and Wordsworth, selected poems; Swift’s A Modest Proposal
6/26: Semester in Review; Test #2

[amanda_isabel]

hi there atlantatransfer :)!

congratulations on the new job... and as far as your syllabus goes, well, i'm pretty useless for that, but i wish you all the best anyway :D

[Petrarch's Love]

I'm a bit confused about a couple things: First, do you actually mean "student" singular, as in one person? If so, that is one tiny high school. Makes things much easier though, since you would be able to tailor things to the individual student as you see how it's going. You talk about dividing your time. Are the Latin and Brit. Lit. students in one classroom? Is that all they're taking? Sounds like an unusual set up.

As for your syllabus, the dates seem to indicate that you're doing all this in three weeks? That is an ambitious amount of reading for three weeks, and I'm dubious about how you're going to get even a very bright and dedicated high school student through all that. Introducing Old and Middle English in the same week, and reading Bede, Beowulf, Chaucer and Marie de France seems like an awful lot. The reading alone would be a lot to take in in the space of a week when you're looking at works as historically distant as these, and the students (student?) will also need plenty of lecture/discussion to understand what they're reading (I would say that first week is nearly impossible if you're doing the Chaucer in the original ME). You're also planning to finish a discussion of Shakespeare and then cover Milton, Dryden and Donne in one day?!!! Maybe I'm reading this wrong. In a college level survey I usually budget a minimum of a week to cover Beowulf or to read a single Shakespeare play, and the students are just able to keep up with the reading for discussion. Then again, I've never worked in what sounds like a five hour tutorial format, and my students are taking other classes at the same time. I can also see you're a bit stuck if they're actually expecting you to cover the first half of Brit. Lit. in the ridiculous space of three weeks (that's a semester?!) Given the time constraints I would probably cut Bede, Marie de France, and Behn. Oroonoko's great if you have time, and I would certainly include it on a more normal length semester survey, but it's not absolutely essential the way Chaucer, Shakespeare and probably Milton are. Ditto with Bede and de France. Beowulf and Chaucer are more than plenty for a week. Much as it hurts me to suggest such a thing, maybe you should also consider leaving out Donne and Dryden in favor of more time with Milton to do a segment of PL. Do you need to go all the way up to the Romantics for part one? Perhaps you could stop with Swift and maybe a bit of Pope? (Though it now occurs to me that part two probably involves some rather lengthy novel reading that could edge out poor Wordsworth). Anyway, my advice would be that, while we all have a tendency to want to pack in as much as possible, a survey will generally be more successful if you're able to spend some quality time with fewer works than might be ideal than if you rush through so much that the student can't really remember the difference between Donne and Dryden. Best of luck.

[Page Sniffer]

.................

[Page Sniffer]

Can you squeeze in some of the English trench writers poets, i.e., Graves, Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Lewis, etc.?

Good luck and thanks for teaching!

[sofia82]

Congratulations on your new job and good luck!
To some extent I agree with Petrarch's Love.

[dramasnot6]

Looks like a lot of fun to me! I'd love the challenge of such an intensive lit course, it would be a hard but extremely rewarding semester. I suppose the success of such a course would depend on the number/quality of students. A small,eager class may be more up to such a challenge than a larger, less enthused class.
Hope that is of some help.

Good luck!!

[Remarkable]

I agree with Petrarch's Love.I don't think it is possible to fit all that literature in 2 weeks.Sure,an intensive course is something nice,but it will come as a forceful study and one cannot have much profit from a book,however good it might be,if it is read obligatorily overnight.

[Charles Darnay]

I also have to agree with PL. I took a year 2 university course this year in Middle English and we spent at least a week Chaucer and Marie de France (separately), especcialy if you are teaching the original Chaucer, you will have to spend some time with the language of Middle English. If you are set on this, may I suggest swapping out the Knight's Tale for a shorter one - perhaps "The Miller's Tale" which was a very important tale.

Also, I was wondering, why is Swift thrown in with the Romantic poets? I don't think you will have much success covering Romanticism and Modest proposal in one class...I don't think the student wouldn't get much out of either.

Best of luck to you.

[wordsinart]

You could get some teaching resources for a few of these at motillism.com - the cool way that the texts are presented might help enthuse the students

[byquist]

You are one smart person, so just "execute." Never heard of that Oro. so will look it up. If you can succeed at teaching early English in the South in the Summer, you are gifted!

[Bookman43]

A book you might want to look at...

-Books...
____
A Companion to Bede: A Reader's Commentary on The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
J. Robert Wright

$25.00 Hardcover

162 pages; dimensions (in inches): 6 x 9; 12 black and white photos; 2008

ISBN: 978-0-8028-6309-6

The Venerable Bede’s history of the Christian church in England, written in the early eighth century, still stands as a significant literary work. Translated from Latin into various other languages, Bede’s fascinating history has long been widely studied.

Thirteen centuries later, this thorough and reliable guide by J. Robert Wright enables today’s readers to follow the major English translations of Bede’s work and to understand exactly what Bede was saying, what he meant, and why his words and account remain so important. Wright’s Companion to Bede provides the answers to most questions that careful, intelligent readers of Bede are apt to ask. Despite the countless numbers of books and articles about Bede, there is no other comprehensive companion to his text that can be read in tandem with the medieval author himself.