On Literature and Teaching

 (Part 2) Of course, an easy way to partition the town is to view it in terms of nationalities: French Literature, Japanese Literature, English Literature . But as the landscape of the town makes clear, blood relations supersede geography : Murakami claims Raymond Carver as a major influence on his own work, and Joyce admired Ibsen so much he wrote him a fan letter when he was 18 (where he doesn't shy away from telling Ibsen that, being old, he'll soon die and that he, Joyce, is ready to move in that space :)). That is probably why it is so difficult to determine what the literary character of a nation is; after all, there are neither stylistic, aesthetic, narrative or structural resemblances between Fielding, Blake, Dickens, Eliot, Sassoon and Kingsley Amis than there are between Martin Amis, Ishiguro, Magnus Mills or David Mitchell. And in fact, Mills and French author Toussaint are much closer to one another than Mills and Ishiguro, or Toussaint and Claudel. Eliot has more

 Literature Town - How not to get lost in texts A very common problem for students and teachers (and people generally I guess) when dealing with literature is the sheer amount of it, and the seemingly endless accumulation of titles, authors, movements, sub-movements and the chronology of it all. Where does this one fit? When did that one write? Do those two belong to the same movement? Is the Naturalistic novel the same as Modern? Who’s that guy? What did she write? When was that? The answer, of course, is simple: read it all and you’ll find out. Or you could do worse than reading the excellent little book by Pierre Bayard (a University professor of Literature): ‘ How to talk about books you haven’t read ’ – don’t be fooled by the title, it’s light-hearted but deadly serious too, and enormously useful. Or you could read on right here 😊 Because the answer to the problem stated above can be given in one word: Connections . T he problem is to do with getting a cohesive vision

Be more jazz - Lesson plans and freedom As a student-teacher, one of the first things you are made to learn is how to phase a lesson: in terms of content (what to teach), goals (why teach it) and timing (how long for each phase of the lesson). Typically, that results in a Lesson Plan: a document listing your goals and learning aims for the learners, and showing how the lesson will go step-by-step. The idea is: if your lesson plan is well-designed, follow through with it and everything will be fine. As a teacher - and certainly as a more experienced teacher - your lesson plans tend to become shorter, with fewer details and fewer timings. You know by now that when you plan something for e.g. 10 minutes, a more realistic view of classrooms dictates that you can never be quite sure that those 10 minutes will be 10 minutes. Anything could happen, and 10 could become 2, or 20. But it remains your choice of course: phasing is important for variety, change of rhythms and focal points, and ther