This teacher in Alsup and Bush’s book describes the situation when his school bought new laptops to place in all the classrooms.  The school and the teachers had thought that they had anticipated and corrected all of the foreseeable problems, but they were wrong.  When the computers were used by the students in the classroom, many problems occurred that they had not anticipated.  With so many problems many teachers were turned off and chose the “safety” of classrooms without computers and more structure. 

I, like this teacher, embrace a little chaos in my classroom because its active, engaging nature ensures student interest and learning.  I feel that in order to peak the minds and interests of students a teachers has to take a risk and try new things.  Experimenting and breaking from the norm and your comfort zone is the only way to stay cutting edge and develop new wonderful techniques.  If it were not for teachers like this and other ones before him like Langer and Rosenblatt, then English education would still be teaching from white, male-dominated literature anthologies.

I am interested to find out who agrees with me of if there are any teachers reading that find structure and predicatability the most important factors in the English classroom.

In their book, “But Will It Work with Real Students?,” Alsup and Bush describe a wonderful activity where the teacher reads aloud a passage that he has never read before to the students.  Then he shares with the class as he is reading his thoughts on the reading and his reading process.  This activity demonstrates to the students first hand the reading process and that even good readers, such as their teacher, do not always immediately comprehend what they are reading the first time.  This activity will be beneficial to the students as it will build their confidences in their own reading and their further knowledge of the reading process.

I wonder if there are any downfalls to teaching Metacognition or with this activity or if anyone has any other thoughts on this subject matter?

Before reading this chapter in Appleman’s book on teaching Marxist Literary Theory, I was immediately resistant and reluctant to ever use this particular theory based on my personal prejudices and preconceived notions about Marxist Theory.  I believed that Marxist Theory was all about Communism and I was not about to teach Communism along with literature to high school students.  After reading this chapter, however, my views have changed.  Marxist Literary Theory is about teaching students to consider issues of class, social status, and power that are evident in many pieces of literature.  Using this theory will enable students to reflect on a piece of literature’s characters, themes, and plots using a different perspective and will help students to relate these reflections to their own life.

My own prejudices make me think about how students will initially respond to Marxist Literary Theory; therefore, I intend on addressing these concerns by teaching students the differences between Marxism and using Marxist Literary Theory.

Has anyone else felt these same prejudices or preconceived notions?

Does anyone have any ideas on how to overcome the preconceived notions that students or their parents may feel?

This book argues that the teaching of Shakespeare is most effective when taught with active methods, such as acting out scenes.  The book emphasizes the plays as pieces of drama and less on the plays as a piece of literature.  I agree that active methods for teaching anything is usually the best and most effective way as it gets students involved and interested in the lessons and, hopefully, into discussions.  I also believe that it is important to teach students that, yes, Shakespeare did write the plays with the intention of them being acted on a stage as a drama, but the plays are also a piece of literature.  The plays should be studied and acted out by students, while also being studied as literature through the studying of language, theme, character analysis, plot, etc.

This is a great quote and an idea that I plan on using in my literature classroom.  Some of the theories that teachers can pair while studying literature include Reader Response, Archetypal, Feminist, Psychological, and Psychoananlytical theories.  This idea of teaching theories with literature is wonderful because it gives both teachers and students various perspectives and ways to interpret texts and characters that they may not have previously thought of before.  The Reader Response theory is perfect for studying literature because it allows students to interpret literature for themselves using their own personal experiences, opinions, and backgrounds and allows students to share their ideas with others and to learn of other students’ interpretations, which can add new meaning to literature.  The other theories are great as well because they offer theories from other perspectives and can be used together or alone while discussing and interpretting literature.  The teacher can guide which theories to use with a particular novel or the students can decide when it is appropriate to apply certain theories.  Learning other perspectives and ideologies is beneficial for students to learn while studying literature and will also hlep them relate to other people and the world.

One problem that could occur while teaching literary theory in conjunction with studying literature is that it could overwhelm some struggling students with too much information and could cause more harm than good.  However, I believe that if teachers are aware of their students and their abilities and treat theory with care these problems can be avoided and literary theory can successfully be introduced and implemented in the class.

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