Appleman Chapter 5

I'm starting to realize that these books, almost in their entirety, aren't really all that useful for teaching low level English classes(6-9th grade) and actually, I'm ok with that. We take so much time in our teaching courses learning about the basics and how to get students interested that it's really helpful to learn about how we should be teaching some of the more advanced classes. The reason I say this is that practically all the classroom environments that Webb and Appleman are talking about for their Theory teaching are 12th grade or AP or even College classes. I read A Room of One's Own for my 11th grade AP English class and for me that book was just brutal, it took everything I had to actually finish the damn thing, although it probably didn't help that it was summer reading. I find that some of Appleman's classroom examples seem a little bit contrived, the way his students respond so perfectly, but once again I find that I'm really drawn to this concept of teaching different literary theories. Feminist theory is important because there have been so many portrayals of women in literature over the years by both men and women and the comparison is amazing. I think a good focus would actually be to read two relatively similar works by a Male author and a Female author and compare both through a feminist lens.

Also, you could probably combine the whole unit of Feminist examination with a unit on Victorian Literature, heh.