As the semester comes to a close, I feel it necessary to reflect on my work and this final high school English class of coming-of-age novels. I had previously taken all three other classes that Mr. Mitchell teaches so I came into this class with a lot of expectations of my own and suggestions provided to me by former Uni students. I also had the added stress of battling senioritis throughout the end of my senior year but hopefully this didn't affect my perception of the class too drastically.
Ok, to start with the basics, my favorite book was either Portrait or Black Swan Green. The books are very different but I liked the depth and attention to detail in both. I think they gave rise to our best discussions, too. With Portrait, we got to discuss and explore Stephen's complicated and troubled consciousness as he searched for his artistic identity among the intellectual plebeians that surrounded him in the world. It easy was see the carefully calculated symbolism and peripheral narratives that Joyce nurtured in his novel. Black Swan Green, on the other hand, was a little harder to draw the secondary levels out of. The conversational narration, provided by the young Jason Taylor, and trivial activities of a child make Black Swan Green seem far less grand than Portrait. Still, the depth is there, the reader just has to work harder to parse the meaningful from the mundane. Personally, I think books like Black Swan Green are harder to read than obviously "deep" books.
I would say that I didn't exactly have a least favorite book but I was definitely disappointed with our discussions about Housekeeping. We stayed very surface level and were unable to talk about the most interesting parts of the book, namely tone and metaphor.
I also continued to miss panel presentations. I think that they were a good way to get discussion going and stimulate a discussion above what any of our inexperienced minds could think up on our own. These days were also a good break from daily discussion, to throw a curve-ball in there every once in a while.
My two favorite papers were my reflective response to Catcher, which I adapted into a personal story, and my semester project. My least favorite paper was the revision because I had a very hard time adapting my work after I had turned it in.
Looking past this last semester, I have had the privilege of taking all four classes that Mr. Mitchell teaches. I would say that History as Fiction was my favorite of the four. We read the most challenging books, had an awesome class for discussion, and did the most interesting projects. Although this semester was fun, History as Fiction was my favorite Uni class by far.
Thanks everyone for a great semester!
I appreciate your comment about panel presentations, and I continue to be surprised and delighted that those are such a highlight for so many students. I agree that it would be cool to involve students more in discussion-leading in CoA Novel, but I'm still not sure how to work panel presentations into this course. With 20th Century Novel and History as Fiction, there's a good deal of literary criticism out there on all of the books on the syllabus, and a lot of it will be relevant to the things we're discussing in class. There's a good deal of stuff available of Joyce, and also Plath and Salinger, but probably less on Robinson, and aside from book reviews, pretty much nothing on Mitchell and Whitehead. And our focus is so specific in here, on the coming-of-age dynamic, a lot of the crit. on Joyce wouldn't necessarily apply. I'll keep thinking about it, though--maybe simply having guest discussion leaders would work, like we do with _Song of Solomon_ in 20C. Or critical panels for first quarter, and discussion-leading for second quarter (and the books with less of an established critical pedigree).
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