Week 1 Notes

Here we go!

The students in Lang and Lit are very impressed with the size of their textbook, and I can't tell if they are excited or agonized by the amount of material we will be covering!

We spent the week exploring the book, a new one for SGHS this year, and discussing the ways in which it tells the story of what American Literature is all about. I introduced two concepts of storytelling: chronological/historical arrangement and trend-based arrangement because, in my opinion, the text blends both methods really well in order to highlight the many voices at work in the USA which create "The American Experience."

We finished the week with an introduction to our first unit, Modernism. Each unit is arranged to focus on a particular time period, a particular form of writing, and a particular theme. I have chosen to begin with the turn of the twentieth century since many of the ways that we read and write in the present and many of our current expectations of literature are based in the Modernist literary movement.

A selection from Garrison Keillor on "Good Poetry" helped to begin what I believe will be an interesting week to come as we think about Imagist poetry and how we make connections to the world we live in through this form of literature.