Choosing Voices

After two years of teaching World History and Psychology, I find something odd: grading English Literature is enjoyable. Either the caliber of my students has increased so drastically that suddenly grading is fun, or else the topics are suddenly things I care about deeply. Or both.

The most difficult part of the English course thus far has been in choosing the texts. IB gives fairly free reign in some respects—while requiring basic variety in genre, period, and place, it offers no further stipulations beyond six texts used for various assessment styles. However, picking those six texts is incredibly difficult. They need to be similar enough in theme to be usable in an essay and rich enough that an average student can talk for ten minutes about several lines of the text.

Then there’s the joy of teacher’s preference. Never in a million years would I put anything by Isaac Bashevis Singer, V.S. Naipaul, or James Joyce on the syllabus. I also feel very little responsibility to expose students to the canon of high school literature I read. They’re going to meet Shakespeare regardless of me—I don’t have to introduce him. Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, and Brave New World are sufficiently common that they may stumble upon them by themselves. I chose texts that I love, or want to read again, or think that they cannot properly appreciate without an English class to drive them on. This is what I ended up with:

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. I’ve never read it, but it was highly recommended and sounds fantastic, besides knocking out both our genre and work-in-translation requirement. Taking a chance on this one.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. A choice perhaps influenced by her recent death and the similarity of her story to some of my previous students’.  I find myself eager to return to it.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I think this may be the contemporary teacher’s version of 1984. Dystopias are so appealing to the high school mind. Perhaps because they haven’t yet realized that our realities are so dystopian… or perhaps because they haven’t yet blocked that knowledge out of their consciousness.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Because I was going to get one classic feminist text in there, and it might as well be one I love like a sister.

How happy I feel at being able to teach her.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie. I read it last year and, after a lengthy love affair with Adichie’s voice from her Tedtalks, fell in love with her writing, too. I feel that this is one of my most daring choices, but perhaps will yield the richest harvest as students cannot find an abundance of other people’s thoughts on her—they’ll truly have to come up with their own.

Whitman. Because I am in a land far, far away from the America I love, and because his poems sang to my soul when I was a teenager, and because I think high schoolers will adore his sensuality and his pantheism and his permission to contradict ourselves.

As I look back over the list, I consider calling my old English and Gender Studies professors to let them know their message has sunk in; I have four women, four people of color, and at least one writer who joyfully sings homoeroticism in a list of six. My teachers would be proud. But mentioning it defeats the fact; I must present them to my students as though it is utterly normal to represent a range of voices in literature, and perhaps they’ll think that it is. If I can trick my students into believing that high school English literature adequately represents a range of experiences, their assumption of a range of voices will be more powerful than any tokenizing unit on gender or race could be.