Skip to main content

Peace, Land, Pizza! All Power to the Platypus!

Happy May 1st, everyone.  May is the last full month of school, and it's always the period when student revolutionary fervor roils just beneath the surface of the classroom.  Every little huddle of students looks like a Committee of Public Safety, and you start to worry that they might all show up to school one day wearing brown.  Was that the Internationale I heard coming from the boys' locker room?

In all seriousness, my students have performed well this year.  They have survived quite the literary blitz.  This year's reading list included:

The Aeneid
Beowulf
The Prince
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
Sense and Sensibility
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Great Expectations
Idylls of the King
Pygmalion
Orthodoxy
Peralandra
Mere Christianity
The Screwtape Letters
The Chronicles of Narnia
A Separate Peace

All in all, I think we laid a good ground work for future studies.  My Tenth graders, for instance, can now claim to have read most of the Old and New Testaments, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Antigone, The Aeneid, The Prince, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, The Idylls of the King (the Arthur Legends), Lord of the Flies, Peralandra, and A Separate Peace.  That gets them quite a few of their bases covered and they should be eminently ready to branch out in any number of directions in the years to come. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....

Under the Moon: The Platypus Reads Part LXVI

My wife and I were discussing our favorite books from the Chronicles of Narnia on our way back from lunch.  My wife, true to her sunny personality, is a staunch fan of "The Voyage of the Dawntreader."  I can't argue with that choice but, when push comes to shove, "The Silver Chair" has always been my favorite. I have a bit of a theory.  I think "The Voyage of the Dawntreader" is Lewis' grail legend.  If that's so, then I'd hazard a guess and say that "The Silver Chair" is his "Pilgrim's Progress." -just think about the shape of Puddleglum's hat and the fact that he lives in the Fen Country and you'll see what got me thinking down this line. That brings me to why I like "The Silver Chair" so much.  When I was little, we had a children's version of "Pilgrim's Progress" that my mom used to read to me.  I lived in New England and the Christianity I was raised with had a heavy tin...