Grrr.

[valancy_s]

Bother. I had been planning to use the same syllabus as I taught this fall in my spring section of Freshman English, same texts and all. And now, having looked at my roster and discovered my class is more than half boys, and almost all students in the sciences, I'm wondering if I'd be sadistic (or would it be masochistic?) to try and teach Pride

Comments

[steve_mollmann]

Dare I say it, but The War of the Worlds?

[valancy_s]

Ha! I did think of that, actually. (How could I not?) Though it's not so much gender-neutral as a boy thing... not that that's bad, exactly. More problematically, I haven't seen or read any of the adaptations, so it would mean a lot of extra work for me!

[steve_mollmann]

There's lots for girls to like in The War of the Worlds! The narrator's wife very nearly gets a line of dialogue at the end, I think.

There's also The Wizard of Oz, if we want to mention another of my obsessions.

[tinuviellen]

Ooooh, good one, the Wizard of Oz. How about Alice in Wonderland, if we're going along that vein?

[tinuviellen]

Frankenstein Frankenstein Frankenstein!

[valancy_s]

Well, it is only 200 pages. I wish I actually liked it...

Hm, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is pretty short, isn't it? That's got a lot of spin-offy type adaptations... especially if you count The Hulk, which maybe you shouldn't. But then, I've never read the book...

[thepresidentrix]

All I remember from reading Frankenstein in high school was that some form of the word 'wretch' or 'wretched' occurred on every page

Ooooh! Oooh!

[tinuviellen]

Or A Christmas Carol! You can't say you haven't seen a billion of those. And you'd get to include The Muppets in your course - how awesome is that?

Re: Ooooh! Oooh!

[valancy_s]

I have seen a billion. And I imagine there's quite a lot of TV episodes one could use, too. I just wonder how much the students would be into watching a bunch of Christmas movies in March.

[jcd1013]

What about The Odyssey? Or some of the Shakespeare plays?

Although I don't know that it would be so bad to have them read P&P....

[valancy_s]

Shakespeare's one of the best alternate possibilities, certainly. Some of his plays have a million spin-offs.

I did P&P with my class this semester, and I don't think most of them hated it, but I do suspect that most of them didn't actually read it. I don't want to underestimate the new bunch... I just don't want to torture them, either. I don't know.

[tempestsarekind]

That Thing We Do as a culture where we decide that boys don't have to EVER come into contact with girly stuff like Austen, in case it rubs off on them or something, is one of my least favorite things ever. So I say, don't change the syllabus. If you'd picked Hemingway or something, and then discovered that your class was more than half girls, would you change it?

[valancy_s]

You know, I truly do agree with you. That Thing We Do is actually something I end up discussing with my class most semesters, and yet I fall into catering to it myself. Pathetic, really.

It's just cowardice on my part. I know I have to get over this to be a good professor, but I hate when I teach things I like and the students dislike them. And with 85% of the boys and half the girls expecting to hate P&P, it just feels like setting myself up for exactly that experience.

[tempestsarekind]

It's not pathetic at all! It's a perfectly natural response, and I find myself having to struggle against it quite a bit.

I hate when I teach things I like and the students dislike them

Oh man, I know. My consolation is that sometimes it goes the other way--that I teach something that students were expecting to dislike and they at least discover that there's more to it than they thought--but it's hard. There's something about having to be the "dispassionate," "objective" teacher that makes it harder for me, too--because I frequently feel like it's not even my *place* to tell them what I love about the work in question, because I don't want to shoot down or invalidate their feelings.