5 Reasons Cormac McCarthy's The Road Should Be Taught In Schools
4. It Promotes Classroom Participation
This is often underused or at the least, under-appreciated. One of the joys of learning Shakespeare in school is the participation inside the classroom. It's fun and makes the words leap off the page. I remember doing this all throughout high school, reading no less than four different plays in this manner. Students actually love this. The Road is written with such sparse language it reads almost like a screenplay or stage play. Teachers would be able to assign roles and pages to their students to take turns and become directly involved in the telling of this story. Reading and hearing words out loud often manages to convey a much better understanding of the material. Teachers would love having new material to fully engage their students and the students themselves would be better served by having the material spoken out loud by and to themselves. By being able to put their own personal inflection onto the novel, students would then be able to debate a deeper meaning to the material seeing as how they would all have slightly different takes on performance. Getting a classroom fully involved with their teacher and each other? I ask you, why the heck not?
I'm married and live in New York with my wife and pets. I'm a writer and definitely not a comedian (just ask my wife). I've successfully linked my twitter, goodreads, facebook and google+ pages although the successful aspect of all that is up for debate. I also started my own blog on wordpress and have just finished my first novel, The Violent Winds. Now it's time to try and trick some unsuspecting fool into buying it.
This is often underused or at the least, under-appreciated. One of the joys of learning Shakespeare in school is the participation inside the classroom. It's fun and makes the words leap off the page. I remember doing this all throughout high school, reading no less than four different plays in this manner. Students actually love this. The Road is written with such sparse language it reads almost like a screenplay or stage play. Teachers would be able to assign roles and pages to their students to take turns and become directly involved in the telling of this story. Reading and hearing words out loud often manages to convey a much better understanding of the material. Teachers would love having new material to fully engage their students and the students themselves would be better served by having the material spoken out loud by and to themselves. By being able to put their own personal inflection onto the novel, students would then be able to debate a deeper meaning to the material seeing as how they would all have slightly different takes on performance. Getting a classroom fully involved with their teacher and each other? I ask you, why the heck not?