I love books. I love to read them and share them and talk about them. I love to analyze them and hear what other people think of them. When I was given the opportunity to teach a before school literature class once a week for an academic competition coming up, I jumped at the chance. I think I am a pretty good teacher and I really love teaching these academic team classes because there's no homework and everyone wants to be there. It's just learning for the sake of learning and it's fun.
I read the book we were assigned to read, The Wanderer, and I really enjoyed it. Like all good literature, it was boring until it wasn't. There was a great twist eight chapters in and the ending made me cry. That's always a great sign. It has tons of symbolism that's really easy to see and the themes and tone are also easy to identify. I even asked an English teacher friend of mine for advice on how to teach the novel. In addition to the novel, we were given three poems to discuss. I really liked the poems and couldn't wait to share them with my kids.
I had visions of my kids sitting at my feet drinking in my literary wisdom and becoming deep thinkers themselves in the process. I could envision the lively conversations with kids shouting back and forth about their opinions, maybe even passionately debating a point or two.
This was my vision, and it's sorta coming true but not really. They are doing a great job and trying really hard, but I feel like I keep saying, "So what does that mean?" waiting for a few kids to respond and then saying, "Yeah, here's what I think." I realized that loving something and being good at teaching it are two different things. I love math. I am good at teaching it. So it seemed like the natural chain of events. But I came to realize that my love for math is not what makes me good at teaching it. It is the fact that math never came naturally to me that makes me good at teaching it. Math was always a harder subject for me than English or history. So to help myself learn it, I made up weird stories or tricks. Integers aren't integers, they are warriors facing a battle of good vs. evil. And as far as trig goes, Sine is a girl and Cosine is a boy. They are siblings who both depend on their father figure, Tangent (don't make me explain that one to you, it only really makes sense to me.) So I teach math in this unconventional way and that helps my students enjoy it and understand it.
I have trouble helping my kids see Literature in a more exciting way, because to me it is just by itself lovely and exciting. The beautiful flow of words in Byron's poem, "Solitude" just make me smile, while my kids get lost among the e'en's and 'tis' and 'twixt's. The good news is they are so smart and so willing to learn that as soon as the language is cleared up, they dive right in and analyze the poem for all it's worth. They didn't cry as they read the last few chapters of the book ("Is that Sophie, my Sophie?") but they certainly got a kick out of it when I cried as I read it to them. We knocked out some good vocab words (Kid 1:"What does 'smite the sounding furrows' mean again?" Kid 2: "Remember how God smote Ms. Dempsey's ipod touch because she was addicted to that cake game?" Kid 1:"Oh, yeah!") and they are better at identifying tone and simile.
I just know that any success they have in literature will have more to do with their skills, than with mine. But even though I am faced with a weekly challenge of how to teach critical literary thinking and I feel totally not prepared for the task, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I certainly have even more respect for all of you English teachers out there and if you have any good teaching tips, I'll take 'em.
