Literature in the classroom might be DOA. I have my comp students usually blog on current topics. Our conversation is lively before as we discuss the topics and get primed. Then we write and then finally we read back the blogs. This leads to more discussion. Sometimes it does feel like a current events seminar but we really are just formulating ides and hurling thesis out into the blogosphere. I feel this is what is going to help students most in the year 2014.
So on Halloween I shook it up and brought in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story A Short Trip Home. It is the only ghost story Scott ever wrote. I read it to one class and the other class I had read a page for every student. It was a snore. Besides people tripping over words no one could really follow F Scotts meandering prose. I realized too Fitzgerald was probably never meant to be read out loud. But I think the greater issue is literature in the classroom.
I would argue it doesn't really work. It is too passive and too remote and just not relevant to the digital age where we operate in the present tense. I think for English Majors and serious writers literature is essential to learning craft but to our twenty first century view it feels like taking a spin in a Model T. It just doesn't go fast enough.
So we are back to blogging. Like this.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
So on Halloween I shook it up and brought in an F. Scott Fitzgerald story A Short Trip Home. It is the only ghost story Scott ever wrote. I read it to one class and the other class I had read a page for every student. It was a snore. Besides people tripping over words no one could really follow F Scotts meandering prose. I realized too Fitzgerald was probably never meant to be read out loud. But I think the greater issue is literature in the classroom.
I would argue it doesn't really work. It is too passive and too remote and just not relevant to the digital age where we operate in the present tense. I think for English Majors and serious writers literature is essential to learning craft but to our twenty first century view it feels like taking a spin in a Model T. It just doesn't go fast enough.
So we are back to blogging. Like this.
www.williamhazelgrove.com
