A TEACHER CAN DO MAGIC-PROMISE AND WISHLIST

“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” 
 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