I, like perhaps some of you, am
afraid to stick to one idea and one set direction for the unit. I’ve never
planned something so detailed in such a large scope, so I’m afraid I’ll get
stuck in a dead end in which the lesson is just way too broad or way too
narrow. For now, I’m dealing with way too narrow. I’ve got a lot of ideas
popping up, and I thought that once I sat down and considered the multiple
texts I’d be using, I’d find some common ground between them that would lead me
to at least a teeny idea. And I did! But I’m not sure I’m completely married to
the idea yet. Again, the fear of commitment!
I have a ton of YA books, but
finding the perfect one that would somehow work with Shakespeare……. And not in
the direction of “Oh, Romeo and Juliet is about love, let’s do a YA story about
love,” type deal…… Not that simple. Finally, I just picked up a couple of YA
books I’ve been dying to read. Al Capone
Does My Shirts, Miss Peregrine’s Home
for Peculiar Children, and A Spot of
Bother. (I considered Spanking Shakespeare,
too. Who knows. Maybe I’ll change my mind!). So, I was lookin’ at ‘em real hard
and thinkin’ real hard, too, but there wasn’t anything solid that connected to
them to Much Ado. I know this isn’t
the ideal way of selecting novels, to begin with, but I figured, hey, in the
future, an administration will most likely give me a limited choice of books to
work with. And if I can make it work now, I’ll make it work then! Also, selecting
only a few books to choose from helped me in that I didn’t have 1,000,001 books
in front of me!
I finally chose Al Capone because after a while, I
started considering the differences
between Shakespeare and YA especially in terms of the people the authors were
portraying. Al Capone is about a
young girl and her struggles with autism and being accepted into a school that
accommodate her needs. Much Ado is a
far more trivial story about the deceit and trickery preventing lovers from
being together. To me, even at face value, Al
Capone is a much more compelling story. It’s real, and applies to the
realities of my life much more than Much Ado. And I think many people can say
the same for themselves.
While I don’t want to get into the
tried and true direction of “Why read Classics like Shakespeare when we’re
teenagers? We can’t relate to that at all,” it is an option I’m considering,
but I’d like it to be centered around something much more specific, like the
change of the human condition, or the change in the kinds of characters and
stories authors choose to write about… So far I really like the latter idea because
it’ll take on a layer of historical contexts (culture and society, background
about the authors themselves, etc)…
If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear ‘em!
‘Til next time.
Natalia,
ReplyDeleteThat's one of the great things about this kind of design! It doesn't have to become lock-step, and you can revise as you go, since you're planning "from the back." It's not a familiar kind of sequencing, given that most of us learn in that progressive kind of forward direction.
So--I actually like the idea of talking about literature as text. What makes the "literary" literary? Why do texts become classics? What makes something (a character, a text, a conceit, a theme, etc.) iconographic? How do different genres function within different literary categories? This could even lead to more intense study of the ever-problematic question: What makes good writing "good"?
In this way, you could study questions about the relevancy of a topic like Shakespeare, but then study each of the texts for the ways in which they function as texts, but also answer the critical questions about the role of the literary. I know this seems like a kind of privileged, college-ish sort of way to approach the material, but it makes me wonder more about this idea of power (in ways Beach et al address it) and what it means for us, as teachers and schools, to presume that students need to be taught what it means to read "good" books. What happens when we ask them to be a part of that conversation, as writers and readers?
Anyway, I hope this helps! I think you have some interesting directions you can take your inquiry toward.
sarah