Re-Reading Harry Potter

With less than a month away from the premiere of the new Harry Potter, my roommate, girlfriend and I are all starting to re-read the series. With so many books I feel like it's going to be quite a task. The books are rather long and will require me to be dedicated in my reading. However, doing this will only help me when it comes to teaching. We are in positions where many of our students are unfamiliar with this literary "canon" that we are expected to be experts on. Yet, I personally think that these are some of the books we should be brushing up on. Many of our students will find this sort of reading to be more enjoyable. Although the school may require us to teach Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby, The Chocolate War etc., these books are ones we can use to fill in for those students who need a suggestion of a book to pleasure read. I also know that for instance at my school my cooperating teacher has told me she was able to choose a young adult literature book at her own discretion for her Junior level class. Back to my topic. Harry Potter is set in a world of fantasy. Wizards, witches, werewolves, trolls etc. These books really open up the imagination of the reader. Obviously everything is fictional, and half of the enjoyment is how you view it in your mind. We talk about everyday in class ways in which we can really reach our students. We have given examples of successes that we have had thus far in our teaching. For the most part, I haven't heard us talk about many books we are teaching in the classes.

I think of last year when we were in Dr. Pytash's class and she gave us the opportunity to choose a young adult book to read and do multiple assignments that went along with it. Honestly, this was my favorite thing I have ever done in a college classroom. I enjoyed it for several reasons. Dr. Pytash introduced this activity to us in a way that was as inviting as possible. She did research on all of the books we were able to choose. She told us the categories in which they fit into which allowed us to narrow our decision. Once we had dones so, we chose the books, read them, presented them, wrote papers on them. Now, obviously there were much more details than that, but what I truly loved was the ability of choosing something ourselves. I really got excited about what we were doing and I got excited about sharing my book with everyone. I ended up going on to read the next two books in the series and The Hunger Games has become my favorite trilogy. Below is a PDF file about some research done on young adult literature. Not only has it been incorporated into English classrooms, but into others as well. This research is trying to show that young adult literature can benefit students in all areas, and all subjects that schools offer. I enjoyed reading it, and found it to be very interesting and informative.

http://www.learningpt.org/pdfs/literacy/young.pdf