Webb Chapter 1

The Webb book from the beginning strikes me as being very similar to the book from Appleman, with the main focus being the challenge of striking a balance between relating class reading to the students (making it relevant) and actually teaching the students meaningful information about the text without boring them to death. I really like Webb's story about the Contemporary World Lit class that he taught because it's always helpful hearing about someone who didn't really know what they were doing and slogged through it successfully. For me, the biggest worry about my first teaching year is that the curriculum will be so open ended/non-existant that I won't have any idea what to teach, and it's encouraging to see that even in extreme situations where you simply don't have a curriculum set up it's still possible to figure things out as you go along.

A lot of what Webb says in the first chapter about cultural studies reminds me of my literacy class I took here at Western. The teacher I had for that was also a big proponent of teaching culturally relevant books and her favorite books were books just like Night, controversial depressing stories that could evoke something from the students emotionally, and in fact for that class the book I was set to read with my group was First They Killed My Father. I think there's something to this, because books that get the kinds involved emotionally also have the best chance of getting them involved intellectually, but the challenge here is finding books that not only involve the students emotionally and culturally by finding ways to take classic literature and have it fulfill the same purpose.