The Bell Jar

I was actually surprised by how much I liked this book. After reading some other feminist literature I assumed it would be very dry and with not much happening, and I felt that the book actually moved along at a good pace and Sylvia Plath was very engaging as a writer.

It was a good idea for the group to spend a lot of time talking about the life of Sylvia Plath because of how obviously autobiographical the book was. I liked the timeline where we all had to read different things about her life in order and the place them up on the board. It gave a good point of reference for the rest of the lesson. I'm partial to the poem Daddy as well so I liked the part where we covered that poem.

I think one of the dangers for us as we go into our classrooms is the fact that there's a slight difference between "teaching" and "presenting", and sometimes it's hard to break away from the presenting we've been doing all our lives into something else. This group did a good job teaching, and a lot of the time I was really entertained by the discussions they brought to the table, but at times I felt as if I was just being presented material. And hey, that might be the point, because they are presenting to us how we ourselves can teach this book, it's just a thing to watch out for in the future when teaching actual students. Like I said, overall I really enjoyed this book and I really enjoyed the group teach based on it.