Transacting with Literature (8/31-9/7)

-Teaching Young Adult Literature
-Mike Roberts-Using Graphic Texts in Secondary Classrooms: A Tale of Endurance 
-Mary Rice-From Hinton To Hamlet, Chp.3, "Directing vs. Exploring: How to get where you're going without a Literary Map"- Herz/Gallo

Say:

     In the Roberts piece, there is talk about new teachers getting into the profession due to their fiery love of people like Shakespeare, Twain, and Hawthorne, thinking that these same passions which struck a chord with them/us as students would work as teachers. Using basic contexts clues (reading the title, and understanding of how foreshadowing works), my fears of having to accept and learn to work within this new realm of YA Literature is becoming more and more of a reality. It doesn't honestly bother me as much as a may sometimes let on--kids are kids, and reading, for the most part is just that-reading. So whether we're reading some new NPR recommended 9th grade coming-of-age story, or Macbeth, i'll be just happy to see pages turning. 
        The sample teacher in the article, Haskins, mentions that both her levels of excitement and her experiences with YA in the classroom have shifted, progressed, and only gotten better over the long haul. But how long does this go on? After all, if I wanted to be a high school English teacher, shouldn’t I have been devoting more time to reading the classics (Roberts 101)? I think that the answer is a couple pages down on pg.104 where he says, "Let me set the record straight. I’m not saying young adult literature should replace the literary canon. At the same time, if I can use YAL to help make reading enjoyable, my students stand a better chance of someday appreciating The Scarlet Letter...And even more importantly, they stand a better chance of leading literate lives.
        Boom. There's the takeaway for me. If my time with Styslinger has taught me only a few things, one of them would be to understand that my teaching should not be about how well they understand the themes of Shakespeare, but whether or not they have the tools in order to read for meaning, and therefore transfer their literacy skills across different texts, inside of the classroom and out.
        The sample teacher in the article, Haskins, mentions that both her levels of excitement and her experiences with YA in the classroom have shifted, progressed, and only gotten better over the long haul. But how long does this go on? After all, if I wanted to be a high school English teacher, shouldn’t I have been devoting more time to reading the classics (Roberts 101)? I think that the answer is a couple pages down on pg.104 where he says, "Let me set the record straight. I’m not saying young adult literature should replace the literary canon. At the same time, if I can use YAL to help make reading enjoyable, my students stand a better chance of someday appreciating The Scarlet Letter...And even more importantly, they stand a better chance of leading literate lives.
        Boom. There's the takeaway for me. If my time with Styslinger has taught me only a few things, one of them would be to understand that my teaching should not be about how well they understand the themes of Shakespeare, but whether or not they have the tools in order to read for meaning, and therefore transfer their literacy skills across different texts, inside of the classroom and out.
       When I was younger, and even still today i see it--there was always a stigma against working on artistic endeavors vs. working on official Model U.N. resume builders. Like many kids before me, at one point in my life someone made art come alive for me and I thought that I could be an artist, a painter, illustrator, something. Even though being from the humanities department with my English works makes my art friends essentially in the same boat as myself, Rice's piece really helped me to remember not to marginalize the artistically inclined students. Even as a lover of art, I have many times placed the power of the 
      Rice talks about the complexity of reading a graphic novel, something that is very evident to avid readers of the genre, and unfortunately something very lost on the majority on the outside. Reading a novel is reading the words and the rhetorical devices (usually), where as reading a graphic novel means using those same basic reading strategies on top of art analysis. Read, view. View. Read. Go back and re-interpret the artist's depiction from last chapter. more often than not the pictures are more than just pretty pictures; i really think that students can get excited learning and applying the same analytical eye that they've used for Cormac McCarthy onto Neil Gaiman.
      $$$$$$. Jesus, the affirmation of what i already knew about teachers being underfunded for their classroom libraries doesn't excite me, though I appreciate how Rice goes into heavy detail about how she acquired different grants and outside donations in order to complete her class sets (it's a shame that art/graphic novels are so much pricier than traditional texts). Though, the age of technology (in the classrooms) makes it fairly easy for me to purchase or find select graphic novels or art pieces, and then illegally distribute them via email or by simply projecting them for an individual lesson.
      In From Hinton to Hamlet there are some quotes that reinforce my desire to integrate (possibly replacing traditional titles) quality YA Lit. into my classroom. "I hated almost all of the books we studied in English class...I couldn't finish it and have never been able to force myself to try again"(Herz/Gallo 16). My fear is that once English is made to be boring and one-dimensional, then it's infinitely more challenging to re-appeal to young readers. Quality lessons working with, and embracing YA texts (I believe) can do this.

"Shouldn't a major purpose in teaching literature be to help students find pleasure in reading and to become lifetime readers (Herz/Gallo 17)?" Yes, there are tests to prepare them for, but the same techniques can be taught with books that kids will actually like.

Do:

        The Reader's Profile is something that I believe i'll do with my class at the start of next week. I may or not have time or space in the unit to make them immediately relevant via follow-up lessons, but at the very least i'll be able to get a sense of what my students have read, know their personality a bit more, and hopefully be able to recommend them some titles. Classroom community is very important to me, and something that is even more difficult to cultivate and affect being that I am only an intern at the moment. One of the best ways to connect with your different classes is to teach to their individual personalities and understandings. 
        I think that the most obvious way to best integrate appreciation of graphic novels and illustration into the classroom would be to obviously teach at least one graphic novel a year. In addition, there is art for the romantic period, the modernist movement, the transcendentalists, the enlightenment, etc. Art, like more familiar texts, is associated with nearly everything that we go over in the English classroom. Even if it's just a political cartoon, fan-art, or animations of famous short stories--the connection and importance is there. Showing things like helpful animations and graphic alternatives to accompany canonical works would be very useful and received. 
      Using graphics that are purposefully controversial in relation to a story's theme is a good idea as well--it links the class works with ideas found in public. Some examples might be hyper-masculine or sexist depictions of characters, or even alternative interpretations of famous characters from literature (black Harry Potter characters for instance).

      Most importantly, I want to try and find ways to get kids at least thinking about reading something for pleasure.
(will upload Reader Profiles as they come)