“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Unlike other disciplines, literature mirrors life with all its pros and
cones. A literature classroom is an open window that guides the students to
explore the new continents of knowledge and experiences. Literature has a
unique capacity to educate, transform and mould an individual. It represents a
world of ideas, ideologies, perspectives and emotional insights.
How can we make literature classes more
effective?
1. Benjamin Franklin once commented “Tell
me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”. So more
than teaching the students, involving them in the learning process is
important. We have to train the students
to become the higher level thinkers by generating the skills of interpretation,
argumentation, critical analysis and writing in them.
2. The study of literature must help the
students to see the world, people, place, things and events through different
view points and which enables them to develop their own belief set, opinions
and views.
3. By realizing the fact that a class room
is conventionally anti-democratic by allowing the dominance of the former in the binary opposition
“extroverts/ introverts”, we should give equal priority and enough space to all
students to raise their voice in the microcosm of the world called classroom.
4. Teachers must ensure the students enough
freedom to interpret the literary texts as once I.A Richardson, the New Critic,
once did in his classroom. (He threw a poem at his students without its title,
author’s name and biography and it has been said that Richardson himself amazed
after hearing the various interpretations given by his students).
5. Understanding the genre that you are
going deal with does matters a lot. A poem is different from a drama, a novel and
a prose. We can not use same teaching techniques for these entirely different genres.
A drama is something that meant to be staged. Suppose if you are dealing with
Wole Soyinka’s ‘The Lion and the Jewel’,
let the students enact the play or at least some scenes of the play in the
classroom and let the students experience the play.
Thus a TEACHER can do MAGIC in a
classroom and make the students interested in leaning.
4th semester PG
there are so many good movies giving the idea of great teachers.. teachers who gave the optimum space for students and made class come to life by their inventiveness and innovations.. some such movies are 'Dead Poet's Society', 'Monalisa Smile', 'Freedom Writers' etc.. these movies made me want to be a teacher but i don't know how much of that would be possible.. but these are some real good movies and i suggest everyone to get hold of it and watch.
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