I Should Have Researched Teacher Professional Development Sooner
May 24, 2011
Everyone knows that books you have to read in school are the ones you never end up enjoying. I teach English and I thought that was true. Had I looked into teacher professional development sooner I would not be kicking myself for accepting that misconception for so long. It’s not surprising anyone teaching a literature course assumes no one will read the assigned material when all you’re given to teach with is a standardized lesson plan with the dullest and driest prompts imaginable.
Let’s not even talk about Shakespeare. Yes, he’s great and literature probably would be inconceivably altered had he not so eloquently showcased the now basic tenets of character, plot and all that symbolism. But there’s no way you’re going to capture the attention of teenagers with a story written in a diction so archaic it borders on Middle English. It’s just not going to happen. What can happen, though, is you pick more contemporary novels or plays and you can relate it back to authors like Shakespeare or the other dreaded poet, Homer.
After I got completely tired of the same routine every semester, I decide I was going to find a better way. It was alarming how many helpful things I found just after some cursory searching. Theories about the nature of the novel that at once seemed to me so dry were now attainable concepts that I could relate back to my students in better ways than just giving a quiz about which characters did what.