American Lit Evaluations
Today in 11th grade American Literature, I handed out course evaluation forms. Here are some responses from my students. I think it just goes to show there's no accounting for taste. (Except for the fact that everyone liked Poe!)Who was your favorite author this year?
T. S. Eliot (crazy and confusing) and Edgar Allan Poe (intriguing)
Poe - he was actually okay
Edgar Allan Poe - he wrote very great works
Poe (great amazingness, awesome horror) and Cummings (I like experimental poetry of this kind)
Poe was the best because he is amazing and Twain was good too
Gilman - "The Yellow Wallpaper" was amazing
Poe, because he's cool; Twain, because he's funny
Whom did you like the least?
Whitman - blech . . . oof . . . just yuck
Thoreau - he was so odd
Ezra Pound - because he's a traitor to our country!
Thoreau - he had no life (and neither did Emily Dickinson)
Thoreau - Walden was so annoying
William Carlos Williams - that guy is a retard
Melville - I absolutely hated him with all my heart, soul, and mind
Which works did you enjoy most?
Call of the Wild and Huckleberry Finn (minus the paper!)
"The Yellow Wallpaper"
Emily Dickinson's poems
"Grasshopper" (Cummings poem)
"The Raven"
The Scarlet Letter; the dramatic stuff
All of Twain's stuff
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Poems - they were shorter
If you could drop one or two works/authors from this course, what would you get rid of?
Some of Emily Dickinson's stuff
"Bartleby" (Melville)
Imagism (20th cent. poetry movement)
Thoreau
New England School Poets
Fewer poems, more novels
posted by Andrea at 6:04 PM
4 Comments:
Hilarious--it's always amusing to see what younger people think of the stuff us older ones take so seriosly. The "that guy is a retard" bit on Williams had me rolling.
Hear hear for Poe!
When my son was a junior in high school, he loved Poem and that was when he hadn't yet found the true joy of reading. I always intended to look for an old edition for him of something by Poe.
So, I must be out of the loop.
What's the deal with Poe? Are you a big fan or something? I didn't remember that from when we were in school.
I'm certainly not a fanatic about Poe, though I do enjoy his stories. I showed my students a video about him and we listened to Basil Rathbone reading "The Raven" and then read "The Fall of the House of Usher." At that time, many of them thought he was odd, but I guess he rose to the top of the opinion poll by the end of the year.
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