Finally!  A comedy I actually thought was funny (I’m looking at you, As You Like It)!  After many years of only teaching Shakespeare’s tragedies, I couldn’t face the prospect of teaching Julius Caesar one more time to sophomores.  Shakespeare is a bit of a tough sell alone, but Julius Caesar is just so dry.  It doesn’t go over well.  So I’ve been on a search for a good comedy to teach.  Much Ado is shocked me.  In a good way. I had never read Much […]

I’m not a huge fan of Greek tragedies, but I do appreciate works like Oedipus and now Antigone.  Of the two, I’m definitely team Antigone.  The “sequel” to Oedipus, the action is much more condensed and the theme is much clearer.  That being said, there is a lot lost.  Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus and the niece of the current king.  She gets herself into some trouble by wanting to bury her brother, who tried to cause a civil war in Thebes.  Being a […]

I had never read, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird until I was preparing to teach it as part of my Student-Teaching semester.  The book was ok on a first read.  But after teaching it and seeing my students react and hearing their interpretations of it, but book’s power opened up to me.  Since then I’ve held To Kill A Mockingbird on my shelf of American classics.  So much to my surprise when I learned earlier this summer that were was a sequel coming out.  […]

Daisy Miller by Henry James is about a young man, Winterbourne (how’s that for a rich-boy name!) who is vacationing in Vevey, Switzerland and meets a young woman, Daisy Miller.  They both hail from wealthy American families.  The difference is that he is a blue-blood who has been living in Geneva to study.  Ms. Miller, on the other hand, is from new money and is doing her “grand tour” of Europe with her mother and brother.  What follows is a clash of social norms, classes, […]