Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Scheduling Literature
I'm teaching an intro to lit class this semester. I've only taught it once before, and that was when I was taking exams, so that class was not well-prepared in advance. This time I'm doing the schedule in advance and thinking carefully about assignments, the way one does, and it is so hard. I have to leave out so much good stuff because of time. I also don't like the anthology, but I picked up the class for a sick colleague so I have to use what ze ordered. It's also a Tuesday/Thursday class, which I like for my majors classes because it means more time for in-depth discussion. But in this class, I think exposure and being excited about literature is more important, which (at least for me) is easier to schedule in one-hour chunks instead of 1.5 hour chunks. One hour equals one story. Great. What is one and a half hours? One and a half stories? Two stories a week doesn't seem like enough, but four is pushing it. Regardless, they will read a lot of good stuff. Although looking over my fiction unit, all but 2 stories involve death. It will be a dark beginning I guess, but the class will be good.
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4 comments:
Add a short lyric poem from the same period, and having some connection to the story?
Or take a bit more time with the story, have them do more writing and group stuff to tease out those skills a bit?
Have fun!
I'm doing a separate poetry unit (that's how the book is divided), and it's much easier to schedule in terms of number of poems per day. That was actually the part where I was more pained to leave things off.
I've set it up at 2 stories per day for that section, but I'll tell them that we may not be able to discuss everything and that anything not discussed in class won't be on the exams. And I'm okay with redoing the schedule to drop it to one per day if that isn't going to work.
Maybe have them write something after y'all talk? Not a big writing assignment, but a short reflective paragraph, something question like "What confused me most about our discussion," "What I'm still wondering about --" "What I wanted most to say but didn't --"
That kind of question. I don't do it a LOT with my classes, just when I have an extra 15 minutes or so, but I learn a lot about what they're not telling me! Plus it gives them some practice writing about lit, so.
Oops! Bardiac already said this!
(Must...practice...reading...skilz!)
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