Korean Job Discussion Forums

[tanklor1]

There has been some talk as of late at entertaining the possibility of teaching a novel. A few have been thrown around. Harry Potter, The Hobbit. But I am currently considering a few selections from "O'Henry's Short stories"

Has anyone here taught a novel in class, if so any tips that you can give me?

[air76]

The biggest obstacle will be getting ALL of your students to do the reading/homework outside of class....if even 80% of your students do the work and 20% don't then teaching a novel will be a headache. Students will get behind and never catch up.

In general, students in Korea are really already too overwhelmed to take on a big project....plus, it isn't in their normal curriculum to do project type work, so writing a research type paper or stringing a complex activity out over a couple months will probably be a disaster.

[Bibbitybop]

What age and level? Roald Dahl (who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) has some fun books. I like The Twits.

[tanklor1]

Their ages are just below High School. They may have a year to go before they get to it.

[BreakfastInBed]

I did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, and the short story "The Lottery" with students the same age as yours. It went beautifully and was the best time I've had teaching yet. Of course, it's the kind of teaching I want to do at home as a career eventually, so I'm biased. Plus I had a really small class with great students.

As Air76 said, getting everyone to keep up with the reading is the hardest part, but you can always crack the book in class and cover a few passages together to give you something to work on.

The sophistication of your students will determine how best to teach the book, but I'll tell you what worked for me. Invariably I'd start with simple comprehension questions to see who had finished the assigned reading, and whether they had understood the basics. "What happened to so-and-so after he did this or that" type stuff, "what is Charlie's grandfather's name," etc... Then we'd spend some time rehashing the plot and establishing what exactly is happening. Once everyone had a handle on this, we'd move on to the more "between the lines" type questions and discussions. These were often the meat of the class and covered things like foreshadowing and character development. I liked to work from the students' feelings backward to the text to get to these issues, starting with questions such as "do you like character x?" or "is character y a nice person?" Then move on to the whys and why nots and how do you knows, the idea being to get the students to start identifying passages of the text that contributed to the formation of their opinions. From there we'd talk about the language the author uses in the passages and how it is giving us information without coming right out and saying it. Especially in the children's books, the language the author uses to describe his or her characters expresses his or her attitude toward them and clues the reader in on how to feel about them.

I would use this questioning pattern to get into whatever aspect of the book was appropriate for the point in the novel we'd reached, or for the students' level. Toward the end of the book we'd start talking about the larger overarching themes of the story. What are they? How do you feel about them? What does the author seem to be saying about them? How do you know? This was the best part for me.

It's nice too to use books that have been made into films and then compare and contrast the two later. We had some nice discussions about the changes Tim Burton made in Roald Dahl's story and how they affected and changed our impressions of certain characters and interpretations of certain actions.

Anyway, good luck and have fun!