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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Hunger Games and the SAT

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Hunger Games and the SAT

The cheap shots are kind of tempting — analogies, or allegories even, about the SAT as a form of gladiatorial combat. Some of my students do experience the test that way. Certainly the SAT has become a fasting ordeal, now that it’s four hours long and still allows only one break long enough for scarfing down an energy bar. But I’m not enlisting the aid of Katniss Everdeen to fight the College Board over its test. Odd as it sounds, there are some admirable, humane aspects to the SAT in its current incarnation. I’ve just started using the Neo-Roman culture of Suzanne Collins’s Panem setting to work to take the fear out of Latin-derived vocabulary words.

One of the pleasures of the Hunger Games trilogy for adult readers is the subtle thread of Roman influence on the world-building. It’s completely lost on the narrator, who has been raised in extreme poverty and educated only far enough to serve a dictatorial state. Since Katniss can’t comment on the classical echoes, and doesn’t need to understand them to navigate her world successfully, teenage readers who haven’t been offered much history earlier than 1776 can get by all right, too. They hang on in the wake of Katniss’s enormous personality and follow her through fire and storm to the end of the last volume. My students do get all the big themes and moods of the story, and all the wild action. The little grace notes that genre readers smile over, well, left to themselves, my students just shrug and treat them as non-specific markers of Panem’s otherness.

Consider the Cornucopia.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: How to Use Your Proud Geek Heritage to Survive The Scarlet Letter

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: How to Use Your Proud Geek Heritage to Survive The Scarlet Letter

What a book to assign to high school students! The plot plods, the characters wallow, the ending claims to be happy but is, in most readers’ experience, a huge downer. The book manifests many forms of excellence, too, but it’s simply the wrong book for high school, and it’s part of a canon of eat-your-brussels-sprouts literature that notoriously turns boys off from reading in general.

Fortunately, I have discovered a secret reading protocol that takes some of the sting out of Hawthorne.

American teenagers will probably be stuck with The Scarlet Letter for many generations to come, for several reasons. One good reason: It offers insights into both the Puritan world of its characters and the mid-nineteenth-century world of its author–it’s a sort of curricular three-for-one bargain. Another good reason: Nathaniel Hawthorne was an immensely important author, with an influence that galvanized both contemporaries like Poe and Melville and generations of authors since. (It bears noting that a small minority of readers actually like The Scarlet Letter. Maybe some of them will come visit our comment thread and offer other perspectives. That would be cool.) However, not all the biggest reasons are so, well, reasonable.

Crappy Reason 1: Everybody who trains for certification to teach high school English is required to write lesson plans for The Scarlet Letter, so they’ll have a unit to run with, no matter where in the country they get a job. This means when you study The Scarlet Letter, even if your teacher is a veteran by then, you may be  getting a unit s/he wrote as a college sophomore. The chicken-and-egg flipside of this phenomenon is that, because almost any certified English teacher has already been required to prepare a lesson plan for The Scarlet Letter, school districts regard it as safer to put on required reading lists than other classics that would require more fresh preparation on the part of their already overworked faculty.

Crappy Reason 2: If your poor English teacher had to suffer through The Scarlet Letter when s/he was in high school, and then again in college literature classes, and then a third time in education classes, that book may come to seem as inevitable as death and taxes. Cognitive dissonance may set in, too: I was made to suffer my way through preparing to teach this book, therefore the book must be appropriate and worthwhile to teach.

But you came here for my secret reading protocol, my survival plan, so let’s get on with that.

Read The Scarlet Letter as a failed fantasy novel.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part II)

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part II)

The Years Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens

Last week I got so carried away with my enthusiasm for my favorite SF/F anthology to use with students, I had to break the post into two parts. You can find Part I over here.

When last we saw our intrepid writing teacher, she was doing a story-by-story breakdown of how she uses The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s brilliant but insufficiently lucrative 2005 attempt to launch a new Year’s Best annual series.

Then, in a stunning cliffhanger, a pack of Red Martians from the troublesome vassal city of Zodonga attempted to kidnap her and carry her back to Barsoom.

She tricked them into arguing about the necessity of the serial comma, and while they resolved the question by means of roaring bloodshed, she fled to the nearest cafe to gather her thoughts about teaching the following short stories:

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part I)

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens (Part I)

In a small infinity of alternate universes, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens isn’t just a single volume — it’s an annual Year’s Best that every library, especially every school library, collects, and that genre geeks of all ages look forward to. Alas, in our universe, Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielsen Hayden could only give us a 2005 volume. It’s a delightful cross-section of styles and subgenres, full of short stories that seasoned, adult readers of SF/F can sink their teeth into.

As Yolen notes in her preface, the YA market’s appetite for fantasy and science fiction novels doesn’t seem to have extended to short fiction:

[T]he book you hold in your hand now is chock-full of SF and fantasy stories Appropriate for Young Adults published last year — 2004. However, the majority of them have been gleaned from adult magazines, Web sites, collections, and anthologies. Why? Because there is very little being published in the field specifically for Young Adults. So we have taken it upon ourselves to seek out the gems for you.

The “you” Yolen and Nielsen Hayden address in their short introductions to all the stories is maybe twelve, maybe fourteen years old — at the real Golden Age of Science Fiction. Try to imagine picking this collection up the year you first realized you wanted to read every book the library had that the librarians had labeled on the spine with that little stylized rocket ship sticker.

About half of my students live in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, so this is my go-to teaching anthology. Here’s a story-by-story breakdown, how I use it, and how I don’t:

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Uses of Terrible Comic Adaptations

taran-wanderer21“Usually the combat scenes are the part I understand best,” said my student. “In this one, I have no idea what’s going on. There’s a wounded character at the end of the scene, and I have no idea how he even got near the fighting.”

We’d made our way to the end of Lloyd Alexander’s Taran Wanderer, the fourth volume in the classic 1960’s YA fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain. My student and I had sojourned in Prydain for most of a year. The prospect of seeing Taran come into his full powers at last in The High King was so exhilarating that the kid had rushed through the last several chapters of Taran Wanderer and confused himself thoroughly.

I could have assigned the usual remedy — write one page per chapter, explaining who did what to whom and why, flagging anything that’s still confusing — but I had just read Ralph Fletcher’s Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices. Fletcher devotes a chapter to the ways it can help students, especially male students in his experience, to draw illustrations and diagrams alongside their writing. Apparently English teachers in high schools and middle schools are trained to discourage such drawings, on the assumption that they’re a distraction from learning how to write.

“Write me a comic,” I said.

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For the Resolute at New Year’s: Promises, Process, and Progress

For the Resolute at New Year’s: Promises, Process, and Progress

bgnanoOaths, vows, geasa, bindings–you love reading about that kind of thing, or you wouldn’t be here at Black Gate. A vow is powerful magic. A vow written or witnessed is more powerful still.

You would think, then, that the New Year’s resolutions that saturate our culture this time of year would work better than they do. There’s lots of help out there for people who make resolutions about physical fitness, but not so much for people who make resolutions about their writing. How do you come up with a writing resolution that you’ll be glad to fulfill, not just when it’s all over, but while you’re actually doing the work? If you’ve already made a resolution, how do you follow through on it? Maybe last year you tried the crazy ordeal that is Nanowrimo, and you’re looking for a way to tap into its productivity that is actually sustainable. Maybe Nanowrimo’s cheery cultishness turned you off, and you’re sure there must be another way.

There’s an abundance of other ways, thank goodness. Although I have fond memories of frenzied November write-ins, and my novella that’s slated to appear in a forthcoming issue of Black Gate got its start as the first chapter of a Nanowrimo project, my Nanowrimo survival skills are some of the least sustainable writing behaviors in my repertoire. I have some very different ones that have helped me stay in the game for years and finish some long, daunting projects. I want to tell you about some books on process that have been of enduring use to me in broadening that repertoire.

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Teaching Fantasy II: In Which I Knowingly Assign the Worst Short Story in the History of Sword and Sorcery

Teaching Fantasy II: In Which I Knowingly Assign the Worst Short Story in the History of Sword and Sorcery

eye-of-argonIt was for his own good, honest.

My student said, “It’s time I learned to proofread. Can we do that next?”

I nearly fell off my chair. He was right, of course, but it’s not a skill students usually ask to work on. “Sure. I’ll see what kinds of exercises I can find in my files at home…”

“No exercises! No fake documents. Please, don’t ask me to proofread something whose only purpose on this earth is to be proofread.” A very reasonable objection. “How about we proofread one of your manuscripts?”

Uh oh.

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Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

Teaching Fantasy Part 1: Rewards, Backfires, Escapes

bgolympian“What do you do when nobody’s making you do anything?”

His parents are making him meet with me for tutoring in the first place, so why should the kid trust me? I look like any other English teacher to him. No matter what he does when he’s free, he assumes I’ll disapprove. He’ll answer with embarrassment, and be surprised when nothing bad happens.

“And what do you read when nobody’s making you read anything?”

Most of my students, boys and girls both, answer, “Fantasy.” They say that with embarrassment, too, because English teachers are famous for their aversion to fantasy.

Yet when you read around in books about teaching teenagers, or teaching writing, or the intersection of gender and learning, it’s common to find the authors lamenting that fantasy is not just a boy genre (as the reviewer Ginia Bellafante notoriously called it), but the boy genre, the only one their male students read voluntarily. Why does the education community fall into this error? Is it that the girls are able to conceal their preferences better, or that they’re able to stomach the tedious mainstream books they’re assigned better? Or maybe it’s that the kinds of fantasy novels girls prefer are less vexing to their teachers? I don’t know.

I will concede that the boys I tutor tend to be more shut down as learners, and more shut down about literacy, than my female students are. Some education writers have explored this widely observed disparity eloquently and imagined fantasy literature as one of a range of remedies for it. In Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices, Ralph Fletcher implores his English teacher readers, whom he assumes will be mostly female and uniformly hostile to genre fiction, to allow their students to read and write fantasy at school. He takes particular pains to advocate for fantasy stories that incorporate violence.

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