 |
| English toffee (the chewy kind) in cellophane wrapping. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
There's no comp class for me, so I'm taking the summer off and turning my blog over to Dr. Toffee (not her real name; a classmate suggested it when he was eating a Heath bar-- English toffee, get it?) until school starts in the fall. So, here she is, and I'll see you later.
Just like Rhonda, I have no composition classes on my summer schedule, but I am teaching a section of Masterpieces of American Literature, and I thought it might be fun to talk about that for a change of pace. It's a general education course that's available at most colleges, which makes it worth discussing on its own. The class begins next Monday, and at this point I'm fine-tuning my syllabus. There's a few things that didn't work as well as I had hoped last summer, and I need to figure out good substitutions for them. I am limited here since I cannot choose the textbook for the course -- I have to use The Norton Anthology. I'm not really wild about the selections, and I'm not at all happy about the physical weight of the thing, even though it's now in two volumes. What I do like, of course, is the introductory material, which makes the whole thing worth buying.
At any rate, what I've found over the years I've been teaching this course is that students really dislike some authors that they've encountered before, but they're willing to give unfamiliar authors a chance. The one author most of them already know and enjoy (sort of) is, ironically, Edgar Allen Poe (ironic, since he's not exactly the hottest academic topic in American lit).
And, many students are extremely leery of poetry in general. All of this means that I (like every other teacher of the course) have my work cut out for me.
