Big brother really is watching you. Today we accept a certain amount of oversight by government and business as a part of daily life. Students know about all the surveillance cameras that follow them as they move about in the…
Category: British Literature
Even More Literary Ten Bests
Can you name ten memorable vegetables from the literature you’ve read? How about ten pieces of literature that include a shipwreck or perhaps a volcano? You’ll find lists for these and much more below. When I went searching for the…
A Year-End Activity with Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
There’s not much time left in the school year, and you may find that students are uninterested in reviewing for final exams when they could be making plans for summer fun or a few days off between terms. You can…
Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
The UK newspaper The Guardian has an ongoing series that focuses on “The 10 Best of” a variety of topics. They’ve covered a range of interests, including fashion, movies, comedy, politics, and music. Fortunately for those of us who teach…
Poem 13: “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse”
I have a running list of poems to include this month, but none of them were singing to me. There’s a bit too much stress in my world right now to feel very poetic. That is until I Googled around…
Poem 12: “Easter, 1916”
If the beginning of April must be marked with The Canterbury Tales and The Waste Land, Easter must be celebrated with a reading of William Butler Yeats’s "Easter 1916." I think I learned 99% of what I know about Irish history from…
Poem 11: “Jabberwocky”
Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky" is wonderfully fun as a nonsense poem. Many consider it the best example of a nonsense poem that we have in fact. How can you look on the opening lines and not smile? ‘Twas brillig, and the…
Poem 5: “Locksley Hall”
Tennyson’s "Locksley Hall" isn’t the Victorian poem I like the most, but it is the one that gave me the publication bug. For a survey class, I was asked to write an analytical paper on something we’d read. I had…
Poem 2: The Waste Land
Because of the opening lines below, the other poem that everyone expects to hear at the beginning of April is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory…
Poem 1: The Canterbury Tales
It’s terribly obvious to begin with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but it’s not here for the obvious reasons. This is the poem I think of every April. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t opened my Chaucer texts in years. These are…