British Literature

British Literature Overview

At my school, British Literature was taught during the students' Junior Year.  It was also mandatory (this changed the last two years that I taught).  When I initially designed the course - and as it grew and changed over the years - my driving force (as a teacher) was two-fold:  What skills do I want the students to learn and which texts do I want them read and be exposed to.  Above all - I wanted them to succeed after they left my class - both with the skills that they learned, but perhaps even more - in life.  Which poems, plays, stories will they fall back on, when tough times come into their lives.   Over the years, I have heard from former students - and what they tell me has been heartening.  They succeeded at doing research in college, because they already knew how to go to a library, find, and then synthesize information.  And when life got hard - the could think back on "Deor" ("this too shall pass) and "Dover Beach" and all the rest.  Finally, I recently received a note from a former student talking about my class, where they said my class "requires just a little closer reading, making us work just a little harder, with what we know and what we are capable of doing - making us then, a little better at those things (reading, writing)".

My course was taught, for the most part, chronilogically, and I will be echoing that here on the website.  I will present lessons from the most recent years intially - and then I plan on supplementing what is here with alternate areas of study and different approaches.  For the first go around (of creating this site), I will ignore the research paper - but will come back to it after a year of literature is in place.