School Books - Fall 2017

I'm late to posting - and behind! So without any ado at all, here are the books I taught last semester!

I used this as a sort of primer for my graphic novel class -- which turned out to be a very good thing, since none of my students had ever read a graphic novel before! Although it is a textbook, it presents its argument in comic strip form, which was a shock for my students. However, once they got used to it, it made the works that came after a good sight easier for them to navigate.

Alongside McCloud's work, I also taught Watchmen. I enjoyed the way that it used juxtaposition (one of the characters in the work is reading a graphic novel and the frame events and events in the story overlap and sync up) but it proved a very taxing read for my students and I doubt I'll be quick to teach it again.

The students liked V better than Watchmen, but the somber ending troubled them (and me, a little). I had hoped it would spark discussion about recent political events, but they were more interested in finally seeing a woman take the role of a hero -- which was also a good discussion topic!

I actually taught ElfQuest only up to book #4 (Quest's End) but I enjoyed it so much that I had to go back and re-read those books that followed after. Like all of the books that I love and have been deeply impacted back, I take something different away with each reading!

I taught this slender title during a guided study that focused on Sports and Field Sports and I was pleasantly surprised by how much the author was able to get into the small text. Anyone interested in hunting should spare the short time it takes to read this one!

This was a fun one! I had the students read Doyle, then watch "A Study in Pink" from the first season of Sherlock. Some of them enjoyed Cumberbatch and Freeman so much that they kept watching!


 

I was fortunate enough to get to see this production at WVU with an awesome colleague and the Honors students from school. It started off gaily enough, but I should have seen the nihilism coming in those last lines (it is Chekhov). Nonetheless, plays always seem like miracles to me and this one made wonderful use of birch posts for a forest and a series of pipes/frames to become windows or walls.