I am currently teaching The Great Gatsby to my honors class. I haven't taught it in years and I am thrown by the beauty of its pages, but my students loathe it. The vocabulary is throwing them off, "There's too much description!," and there is general malaise in my class. I keep pep-talking them about how this is a canonical of American Literature, the penultimate book on the American Dream, that smart people know and have read this book and you like being considered smart! But the last couple of days I have felt like Sarah Palin in a room of rabid liberals. No trick, wink, jig or colloquialism can convince them that this book is worth reading.
Today I had to call upon the words of old students to get through to the disgruntled crowd of my 5th/6th period class. The last time I taught this book, with my friend and then colleague Caroline, we created a lesson on character dynamics and had the students write out a conversation between two of the characters in the book that dealt with the characters' personalities and the plot. One looked something like this:
Nick: Yo, what are you doing with Myrtle?
Tom: Son, Daisy frontin' with the booty but Myrtle drop it like it's hot.
Nick: Fo' sure, fo' sure.
In describing the difference between Daisy and Myrtle today, I quoted these past students. THAT got their attention. At least they laughed. I gave credit to the old student, and they seemed to grasp the Daisy:Myrtle dichotomy.
Teaching...What I resort to on some days is definitely questionable...
I read to my wife Rebecca every night to get her to fall asleep. We have been thru myriads of books and series (Harry Potter, Narnia, some classics) and are currently reading Catcher in the Rye with Great Gatsby due up next. We are only half way through Catcher, but I have yet to find any redeeming value at all in it! The kid just rambles, repeats himself...maybe I need to read the whole thing and then reflect on the themes and why this is chosen as one of the top 50 pieces of literature ever. Or maybe I am just too shallow and need to find the Cliff's Notes to find out what the hell it is all supposed to mean. We laugh so hard sometimes at how inane some of the stuff in it is, we really do.
ReplyDeletei think you're supposed to look at it as holden seeing the world as shit as one of the first societal critiques post-WWII and 1950s "every's great" era...also, you shoudl remember that he's a disgruntled teen. believe me, teens still sound like him, just with different terms for "phony". "wankster" was a good "phony" equivalent a few years back, but i'm not sure what the hot term is now.
ReplyDeletegatsby is so pretty, though. a great program on studio 360 on npr outlines hte importance of gatsby if you'd like a more adult form of cliff notes!
btw, cliff's notes were bought out by sparknotes and they're now all online (sparknotes.com) ;)