"Plus que ca change, plus que la meme chose."

I'm reading the 1960 novel The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who was a member of an aristocratic Sicilian family. The novel is set during Italian risorgimento (1860-70). E.B.Browning, George Eliot--all the significant high Victorian thinkers had an opinion on Italian unification, but I'm reading the novel for more personal reasons.
A line early in the work struck me as pertinent to the sort of cultural studies/post-colonial approach many of us take in our own reading and teaching: "Sometimes things have to change so that they can remain the same." So open to interpretation and interrogation! And not just on the geo-political level!
Perhaps this is a novel we could add to our optional or summer reading lists. At the time, many literary organizations deemed The Leopard the novel of the year. Its author died before he could see his only work published.

Noblest Nobel of Them All

Why is there no Nobel Prize for Education? I do realize that many of those who win in various disciples are academics, but I'm talking about (pardon the overworked expression) educators who are on the ground. I would nominate Dr. Li, who started the first all-girls school in China since the Cultural Revolution.
Who would you nominate?

Good Year for Books

I've recently stopped long enough to realize that many of my and my former students' favorite authors have new books out this year: Margaret Drabble, her sister A.S. Byatt, William Trevor, J.M. Coetzee, Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, and (78-year-old, wheelchair-bound) Chinua Achebe. Achebe's The Education of a British-Protected Child is advertised as an arc of his literary life.
The Man Booker shortlist looks interesting and varied with the announcement of the winner coming October 6 at the annual dinner at London's Guildhall. BBC online will cover the event. There's a website, http://www.themanbookerprize.com/ .
I'm currently reading Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs. How have I missed her before now?

The Myth of Lesson Plans

I love to design courses; even more, I love to plan individual classes. I might as well admit it: I love lesson plans. I was forced to think about this the other day when I overheard administrators complaining about their teachers' reluctance to write out their lesson plans.

Too often, when administrators and department chairs require lesson plans, they supply a sort of template--goals, objectives (what is the difference?), methods, assessment, and so forth--for all disciplines and levels in a school. That 's not what I have in mind. In fact, my lesson plans more closely resemble football plays than what teachers have to fit in those little boxes in the Lesson Plan Book.

As I lay awake pondering the issue, I realized that there is a benefit to writing lesson plans that hadn't occurred to me til now. We teach our students that one reason to write is to understand what we know--in other words, to create knowledge. Lesson plans work that way for me too. How often have I begun to think/write about a class when I have an inspiration about how to begin or how to end or how to involve students? In other words, the benefits of writing lesson plans parallel the benefits of writing . . . period. Just as long as they don't make me fit it all into those little boxes.

Things Don't Always Turn Out as We Plan

Reflections upon Teaching Churchill’s Top Girls:

From the beginning, I hated the idea of teaching British literature to sophomores in high school. We had taught Brit Lit to seniors at my previous school. I had misgivings about the ability of 15-year-olds to deal with some of the works on the reading list both for their complexity and because of the sophistication of their content. My concerns, it turned out, were justified on both counts.
In the first semester, they dealt fairly well with The Canterbury Tales, Macbeth, and Emma. I was a bit bummed since I did have to tone down the sexual references that are appropriate for seniors, but would have just been titillating to younger students. My teaching of Chaucer seemed especially flat to me after decades of teaching CT to college students and seniors. After Santa left town, however, and we got into the 20th century works of Woolf, Gordimer, and Churchill, things began to break down. With Top Girls, they turned ugly.

The thing was just too hard for them to read, plain and simple. Realizing this, I rented a DVD of a 1991 production of the play—a good piece of work. They hated it and me. I soldiered on. Soon I realized that they weren’t just in over their literary heads; they had no idea “what was the big deal.”

I had to figure out an approach. I decided to confront these little post-feminists with Churchill’s own words. In class, I would pause the video and ask them such questions as these:
· How do women treat women of a class other than their own—in the play and in actual life?
· Which character do you most identify with? Why?
· What character would you add to the play and why?
· Is the play still relevant to women today or is this a period piece? (I had told them about the “in yer face” theatre and politics of the Thatcher years.)
· The DVD starts with the dinner party; Churchill has started it at different scenes. Where would you start a production of TG?
· What scene is absolutely essential to the play?
· Your “gut” reaction to one line from the play?

The discussion, perhaps because they didn’t like the play, was heated. It turns out that they thought that class didn’t matter in women’s dealings with other women; that the play is no longer relevant to women; and that Churchill isn’t a very good writer. But that was just their anger speaking and their frustration with the overlapping dialogue and multiple conversations. They did use evidence from the text better than they had done all year (it was April) in order to convince me that TG is a (pardon my French) POS. And I’m just English-teacher enough to be glad about that!

Yes, it was painful for me to hear them say that the play had nothing to do with the lives of 21st century women when I knew that their own doctor/lawyer/accountant mothers (and fathers) were struggling to balance work and family. But I had to let them have their opinions, and I respect them for expressing them so well. I was damned sure not going to deny them the freedom that the English department had denied me.

Here are the topics I devised for their writing assignment:
· Meaning of success for 2-3 of the characters and for women
· Use of language/silence in play and in women’s lives
· Role of humor in play and in women’s lives
· Function of alcohol and food in play and in our culture
· Operation of anger in play and in women’s lives
· Marriage in play and in our culture
· Motherhood in play and in our culture
· Feminism in play and in our culture
· Which characters were feminists?
· How does Churchill use history in the play? Connect to present.
Use 5-6 passages from the playas evidence to substantiate your thesis. Discuss each in your journal before you begin to write.

Why We Do What We Do

I'd be the last person to discourage English teachers from reading fiction, poetry, and drama. It does concern me, however, that many (if not most) English teachers stop reading works of literary criticism and literary theory when they leave graduate school. What good does it do to know who Edward Said, Julia Kristeva, D.A. Miller, and others are? I was amazed at the number of English teachers who, during his recent skirmish with the Cambridge police, had not heard of Henry Louis Gates! I'll bet that many of them had taught Their Eyes Were Watching God; his work would be so helpful to them.
At the high school level, theory for theory's sake has very little use. It does serve the purpose, though, of giving students more questions to ask of texts--questions beyond the level of plot and even character analysis--questions that have to do with the reasons we are reading the text in the first place. Why read Pride and Prejudice, for instance? Read Edward Said's groundbreaking work on the never-mentioned-but-always-present context of wartime (Napoleonic) England in her work. The value of young men assumes a whole other dimension.

Literary Scrabble

Last night, I lost at Scrabble to my husband and my college-aged nephew, but had a thought. If I were teaching this year, I'd have the Scrabble board out for students to wander in and add letters. Then I had another thought: confine the words to literary terminology or characters. Granted, it's not the deepest, most profound use of class time, but might be a nice thing to do on the day a huge assignment is due or on the day before the holidays.

Has anyone ever used Scrabble in this way?