Teaching Lit To Adolescents

Throughout my completion of English 493, I completed weekly blog posts, two book talks, and a three-week literature unit plan on the graphic novel American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. Each assignment in the course was very clearly purposeful and essential. The most enjoyable assignments were the book talks. I enjoyed completing them because it was interesting and insightful to look at some of my favorite young adult novels through the lens of a teacher, rather than simply a reader. My first book talk was about the book A Long Way Gone: Memiors of a Boy Soldier by Ishamel Beah. This book talk was the most reflective of the two because I have read the book several times at different stages of my education. Reading and presenting the book to future teachers as something to potentially include in curriculum was rewarding. Sharing a book that I love and justifying its inclusion in the classroom felt like an important step toward turning my experience with literature i...

I believe that Night by Elie Wiesel could be appropriately used in the classroom at any secondary level, but I would narrow down the age range to high school students. I think that the book is, technically speaking, an easy read. This gives it a lot of diversity regarding the way it can be adapted to fit a classroom anywhere from 9th to 12th grade. If I were to teach it in a freshman or sophomore level English class, I would first assess my students' previous knowledge of the holocaust. If they had a relatively solid foundation of holocaust knowledge, I would read the book and focus more on the literary aspects than the historical. If my students did not have much previous knowledge, I think the book would be ideal to teach in a humanities block period where students could spend time with the book facilitated by a history teacher as well as an English teacher. If I were to teach this to upperclassmen, I would use it as part of a text set in which students read this book and others...

For this week’s blog post, I read a blog post on TeachersFirst about the use of graphic novels and comics in the classroom. The article is called “A Comic Approach to Reading: Graphic Novels.” The article discussed the stigma that surrounded graphic novels for a long time, especially when used in the classroom. Nowadays, graphic novels are considered very legitimate literary works. The article I read gives the Young Adult Library Services Association’s definition of a graphic novel; “a full-length story told in paneled, sequential, graphic format. The list does not include book-length collections of comic strips, wordless picture books, or hybrid books that are a mixture of traditional text and comics/graphics.” The article also mentioned the most common graphic novels to use in the secondary classroom, such as Maus and Persepolis. Maus had a lot to do with the acceptance of graphic novels as legitimate literature to use in the classroom. I am currently doing my Th...

For today’s blog post, I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The short story is about an insane man’s confession of murdering an old man whom he cared for. Although it is about murder, the story is rather light in subject compared to other Poe stories. I think it would be an excellent story to incorporate in a junior or senior English class. I would use this short, engaging story to practice comprehension skills with reading. In I Read it, But I Don’t Get It, Cris Tovani discussed the difficulty of introducing a text with atypical words to the average high school student, and especially those that are conditioned “fake readers.” As most Poe, or anything written around the time period, there are quite a few unfamiliar words in the story. In an attempt to make this story actually understandable, rather than just readable, I would introduce a vocabulary sheet before reading. I would make sure that this came across as helpful, not condescending, as vocab sheets...