Reading the Canon and Writing Poetry

I have already begun curating my library for my classroom. Here and there, I pick up books that I think would be great for my students. Of course, I have the classics that you’d expect, some Shakespeare and Moby Dick, as well as more contemporary books like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hunger Games. When I took my adolescent literature class here at RIC, I made sure to purchase all of the books because I felt like that was a great place to gather recommendations.  

When I was in middle school and high school, I remember finding the Chronicles of Vladimir Tod and immediately checking the books out back to back when I could. It was so fun to me to read a story about a kid who looked and acted kind of like me. Short of being a vampire, I really did connect with these books and the characters. Other stories like Catcher in the Rye and Beloved are examples of things that when I read, I very much connected with and that are more classic examples.

            Throughout my reading history in school, I was exposed to a wide variety of books. For the first two years of highs school, I was in regular English 9 and 10, and I read a lot of the classic things that you would expect. During this time, it was a lot of textbook curated pieces of literature, with a heavy emphasis on short story. In contrast, when I was a junior, I took English Honors and then a senior I took AP English; in these classes we were focusing on the canonized pieces. I didn’t mind getting out of the textbook but I did feel like my teacher was “simply assigning canonical books is order to check off texts that students are supposed to be reading” (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen, 94), and that in the words of Antero Garcia and Cindy O’Donnell-Allen, “is ludicrous”(94). They believe that it is our job as educators to curate literature for our students. Of course, thinking of being culturally sensitive to minorities like discussed in other posts, it is obvious this is where this thought process is put into action.

            We have a responsibility to be mindful that the “white male canon do[es] not reflect your own culturally proactive pedagogy and/or your students cultural backgrounds, needs, or interests” (Garcia & O’Donnell-Allen). Later on in the chapter, they talked about if the authors demographic that your students were consuming matched the United States demographic the syllabus would include: half of the texts written by women, 4/10 would be people of color and 6/10 white people, and of these listed 25% would be written by authors of other minorities like LGBTQ+ or those with disabilities. See 2010 Race Profile by Vox. These statistics fascinated me because most of the texts I had consumed were written by 90% white people and mostly men.

            It was only until college that I was truly exposed to different authors. It was purposeful that RIC has required world literature classes. I have had whole semesters where we did not read more than a paragraph or two of a white person’s literature and it was extremely eye opening. I really enjoyed the different stories and perspectives and I know that high school students are eager and willing to read and interact with these types of authors.

            Something I’m worried about is finding the balance of classic literature that I believe is important without white-man overload. As well as making these classic texts accessible and desirable to all different types of students. In one of my other classes we are going over how comic books are a very valuable tool for exposing kids to dense literature. For example, I got to hold Hamlet in comic book form, and I was very surprised by my impressions of it. At first, I dismissed comics because I prefer to imagine the text for myself, but Shakespeare was never meant to be read more seen. I realized that comic books are the closest we can get to actually seeing it on the original stage. This is a picture from when I visited the remains of the Rose Theater where Shakespeare originally preformed the works, we now torture high school aged kids with decades later! If you want to see more, you can check out my blog from that trip here.

            Poetry is another great gate way to literature for students. Chapter 1 of Teaching for Joy and Justice by Linda Christensen talks all about the power of poetry in the classroom. Christensen explains that “by letting go of the rules and the mandates about technical grammar, I freed my students to find their voices” (44). I think that is so important because it is much more enjoyable for students to write once they have discovered how powerful their voice can be in words. Often “teachers hold struggling writers’ hostage to learning grammar before they can write papers” (Christensen, 44) and I think that with poetry students feel more open to making mistakes and taking chances which is so important. It will be challenging because “curricular documents like the Common Core State Standards that make no mention of writing poetry” (Macaluso). I am very excited to incorporate my favorite poem My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke, into my curriculum as well as have an awesome library for my students.