Beach ch 4 & 9

In high school, I red Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, and The Lord of the Flies. As I’m not approaching these classics from a teacher’s perspective, I view them a little differently. I’m excited yet reluctant to teach them. I’m excited to teach them because they are timeless works that address universal human experiences and themes. However, they’re old; they’re full of archaic syntax and complicated structures that turn modern students off to them. When I say I read them in high school, I really mean I sat in discussions in which others students—certainly not I—read them. I didn’t like them when I was younger because they had little appeal to me. That, then, begs the question: how can I make the canonical literate accessible and enjoyable for my students? I think the easiest answer is teaching the themes, not just the books. The books are simply vehicles to explore universal themes of the human experience. I can ask essential questions—any open-ended questions that would lead to fruitful conversations—about the books. I can also make my discussions on literature more interesting by using theoretical lenses to augment ideas and conversations. For example I can have my students analyze literature through a reader-response perspective, the archetypal perspective, a Marxist perspective, a deconstruction perspective, a gender perspective, or a postcolonial perspective.