Painful as it may be, the time has come to chop something wonderful off the syllabus.
Yes, the syllabus for my African-American Literature class is a little ambitious, but I keep reminding students that this is an upper-level class and therefore my expectations are high.
Maybe too high.
Okay, definitely too high. If even I am having trouble keeping up with the reading, it's too much--and with that huge writing assignment coming due soon, it's time to do a little pruning. I can't chop off the deadwood because there isn't any, so instead I'm trying to distinguish between different types of wonderful.
Students adore Alice Walker and Maya Angelou but tend to be stymied by Rita Dove, while I'd love to devote more time to Dove and let the others slide. Shall I cut off the authors students find less familiar or those they're likely to encounter elsewhere?
I could cut the ones I teach in other classes, but that would mean saying goodbye to Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka. Maybe I should choose a totally random method, like drawing names from a hat or deleting every author whose name begins with W--but there goes Colson Whitehead!
If it must be done, let it be done quickly. Chop! Chop! Chop! (Why do I get the feeling I'm cutting off my own arms?)
3 comments:
I know that feeling. I'm always overly ambitious when I'm planning a course because I hate to leave any really great literature out. But then at a certain point of the semester, I realize that the students don't have time to read everything I'm assigning.
As long as you can maintain thematic unity, I'd vote for eliminating the texts they're most likely to encounter, or have already encountered, elsewhere. But that probably means being prepared for a bit of unhappiness. Is there a way to preserve the option of a compare/contrast assignment for those who already know and love a particular text (not that loving a text always leads to the best paper on it, but you know what I mean).
Good idea. I ended up dropping two short stories that students are likely to encounter in other classes, but I also had to drop Rita Dove's poetry. We need that day to work on research projects. Since it may be two or three years before I teach this class again, I need to write myself detailed notes about what worked and what didn't so I don't make the same mistakes next time. Instead, I'll make a whole different set of mistakes!
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