Onwards & Upwards

A couple of days of wall-to-wall teaching combined with some drama-related stuff - a rehearsal at a primary school of a piece the students are doing as a school assembly item, and attending a show at another school - have left me little time for anything else, but it's been productive work and that never feels quite as bad as the futile variety.

At this point in time the majority of my lessons are made up of presentations by students on some of the texts they've been introduced to under the Part 4 section of English A1 for the IBDP and I've found myself enjoying almost all I've had to listen to. In fact, over half the presentations have been genuinely engrossing and illuminating to the point where they've made me want to go back and reread the text in question on the same day. I've always enjoyed two of the texts in question, Salman Rushdie's East, West and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, but I've steadily grown more aware of the considerable virtues of the other two texts, No Other City, an anthology of largely recent Singaporean poems, and the Selected Stories of Lu Xun, and there are moments when the poems, particularly, work magic on me.

I suppose that's how I've coped all these years teaching literature, despite the fact I don't really think it makes much sense to 'teach' it at all, and even less to assess it. (And no sense at all to subject it to 'criticism'.) It's the stuff itself that survives what we do to it. I hope that's as true for the students as it is for me.

One last thing today: I've been thinking about what I wrote about Amory in This Side of Paradise the other day and it occurred to me that I failed to acknowledge the bracing honesty with which Fitzgerald confronts us with his (Amory's?) snobbishness, selfishness and general lack of depth of feeling for anyone other than himself. The fact that Fitzgerald remains too obviously enamoured of the idiot doesn't alter the fact we are meant to be irritated by him and since we are all, to a greater or lesser degree, irritating idiots it makes perfect sense to invest him with significance. It may be a young man's book but Fitzgerald was an old young man in many ways.

Oh, and one more last thing. Thanks for the comments, guys.