Addicted
I'm already addicted to this blogging business. I have a few observations: the first is how exciting it is to be spending my time with people who love literature as much as I do and as strongly as I do, but who want to use that love not to write complicated analytical papers, but to make the world a better place and to open minds and hearts and introduce skills. After school/work tonight Lizette and I gabbed about our favorite authors and what poems and short stories we wanted to teach next year, and got very revved up. What an idealistic bunch we are.
The second observation is that David Copperfield, my current reading project, is sooooo good. It's so much better and more absorbing than any other Dickens novel I've ever read, even Great Expectations whose racy overtones (uneaten wedding cake anyone?) used to get me very excited about the world of literary analysis. More importantly than DC being "good" is that its subject, the growth and maturing of and the hardships faced by a young man in a cruel ,mercenary and not particlarly child-friendly world, has struck me as incredibly relevant to what we're undertaking here. Adolescence is so universal and unchanging from century to century, and the influence of older people on David's development (and their inability to stop him from some of his foolish choices) is poignant, and even makes me think of the "emotional intelligence" and other adolescent psycho-jargon I'm learning at Lehman.
My final observation is that the article we read tonight about Literacy for the 21st century (http://techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15202090), could barely contain its bile and spite towards No Child Left Behind, which made me happy. I thought its three additional criteria for students--global knowledge, technical knowledge, and civic knowledge--were spot-on. So now we have to integrate all those three, plus emotional intelligence, into our english classrooms. Good thing literature is so damn flexible.
The second observation is that David Copperfield, my current reading project, is sooooo good. It's so much better and more absorbing than any other Dickens novel I've ever read, even Great Expectations whose racy overtones (uneaten wedding cake anyone?) used to get me very excited about the world of literary analysis. More importantly than DC being "good" is that its subject, the growth and maturing of and the hardships faced by a young man in a cruel ,mercenary and not particlarly child-friendly world, has struck me as incredibly relevant to what we're undertaking here. Adolescence is so universal and unchanging from century to century, and the influence of older people on David's development (and their inability to stop him from some of his foolish choices) is poignant, and even makes me think of the "emotional intelligence" and other adolescent psycho-jargon I'm learning at Lehman.
My final observation is that the article we read tonight about Literacy for the 21st century (http://techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=15202090), could barely contain its bile and spite towards No Child Left Behind, which made me happy. I thought its three additional criteria for students--global knowledge, technical knowledge, and civic knowledge--were spot-on. So now we have to integrate all those three, plus emotional intelligence, into our english classrooms. Good thing literature is so damn flexible.
posted by SarahMarian at 8:09 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home