Goh Wee Kiat's E-learning Assignment: Write, not just read!

The website that I will be reviewing is“Great Source iwrite”, especially the “Response to Literature”and “Literature Connection” sections for educators. The URLs for both websites are as follows:

Response to Literature (for Educators):http://www.greatsource.com/iwrite/educators/e_lit.html

Literature Connect (for Educators):http://www.greatsource.com/iwrite/educators/e_literatureconnection.html

As the name, “Great Source iwrite”,suggests, this website concentrates on providing teachers with pedagogical skills and resources to equip our students with writing skills. In response to the changes made to the Ministry of Education (MOE) Syllabus for English Literature in 2013, which emphasize critical thinking and reading skill, students should also be taught how to write a credible literature essay. I remember during my one-month MOE Teaching Award (TA) attachment in Junyuan Secondary School, I realize that Lower Secondary School students have very good interpretations of the texts, but when it came to writing out their ideas, they fail to communicate their ideas clearly because the points are not structured properly on the paper. Hence, it is very important for students to understand the writing techniques required to frame the amazing, creative interpretations of the text they have read.

What are three great ideas an educator can draw from this website?

First, when teaching a class about characterization, students can be taught how to plot a person/character chart and from this chart, to write an essay about the character. For example, if a teacher is teaching Lower Secondary students, they will be made to identify a character on a graphic organizer. An example of a graphic organizer can be found in, http://www.greatsource.com/iwrite/students/s_char.html#anchor_charsketch.

Students will write down the details of the characters, for example, the age, appearance, personality, strengths, weaknesses, goals and other aspects. From this chart, students will be taught to describe each character using full sentences. Teachers can build upon this by teaching them to write a thesis statement, specific topic sentences and finally an entire essay about the character from the text they have read.

Second, through a debate, a class can be taught how to structure a literature response essay according to the for/against model. For example, the teacher will set a motion, like “In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, Percy is a bane to others and himself”. The class will then be divided into two teams and each is to send out a group of representatives to argue for or against this motion. On the whiteboard, a Venn Diagram is drawn for the for/against points, where common points can be placed in the middle of the two circles. After the debate is done, students will then begin to do individual work, classifying the points written in the Venn Diagram into specific themes and putting them into this chart: http://www.greatsource.com/iwrite/dot/theme_chart.dot. Then we return to the same process of writing thesis statement and topic sentences.

Last, a lesson can be planned to teach students how to structure an essay according to the narrative technique of a short story. A lesson plan is as follows: http://www.greatsource.com/iwrite/pdf/TraitFocus_G12.pdf. For example, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is know for its technique of defamiliarization. The story begins right in the middle of the family moving to somewhere and slowly works its way up to the final revelation that this is a story about the Holocaust. Similarly, students can be taught how to model their essay according to the John Boyne's novel, leaving their original interpretation of the text as the final part of the essay.

So how effective are these teaching ideas? Are they good?

As this current generation of students come from a multi-modal age, where visual text is as important as the printed word, the usage of graphic organizers can help students structure their thoughts better. As in both the characterization exercise and debate class, graphic organizers help students to formulate and structure their ideas into concrete points, which then can be written out in prose form. A blog about the effectiveness of such graphic organizers and charts can be seen here in this site: http://newsletter.schoolbox.com/2010/04/05/the-plot-thickens-a-graphic-organizer-for-teaching-writing/.

The usage of debates also forces students to form an opinion and take a stand, whilst having to provide evidence drawn from the text. Students are already forming an essay through this debate, just that it is more in the audio/aural form. Debates forces students to constantly be on their feet, so they have to ensure that their arguments make perfect sense, and they are not ramblings. Under these circumstances, students will not face much difficulty translating the points raised during the debate into proper essay points.

Using the narrative techniques of the texts that teachers are teaching to teach students how to write their essays is also a good avenue for students to learn that the line between fiction and non-fiction is not porous and not clearly demarcated. Students will also not see reading and writing as mutually exclusive. Rather, both are closely linked and related.

However, one major weakness of the above exercise is the constant emphasis in writing thesis statements and topic sentences. Even though this might help students to write better essays, the constant drill-and-practice routine might lower students' interest in literature. Alternatively, teachers can teach students how to analyze questions, for example using Bloom's Taxonomy to interpret the requirements of an essay question. (Review: 291 Words)

Pepper - elearning website

The website I shall be reviewing is http://www.teachit.co.uk/ - a website that actually is a library of English language and Literature teaching resources. It does not cater exclusively to the Literature classroom, but I did find a couple of gems in here that would be of interest for us Lit people. Most of the resources are free of charge; you just have to register to get access to the resources.

Three interesting ideas:

1. On literary criticism: the website has designed eight flashcards, each representing a different literary school of thought ie Marxist/ Psychoanalysis/ Reader Response etc.

 
2.  On Bloom’s taxonomy: Teaching literature texts using key words taken from Bloom’s taxonomy model.  The website provides the example of teaching Little Red Riding Hood using this teaching strategy. Learners are led through the levels of Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation. For instance, under Knowledge, learners answer questions like “Where did Little Red Riding Hood live?”  At the ‘Evaluation’ stage, they answer questions like “What do you think of Little Red Riding Hood’s behaiour?”

3. On Media Studies: The website has a section on Media Studies. It provides a scheme of work for introducing students to Film Noir. It aims to teach the conventions of Film Noir and the historical background to Film Noir. Students will also study how camera angles and lighting bring meaning to moving pictures.  

Review:

1.   I like how the flashcards attempt to capture the essential differences between these eight critical approaches by having students use different critical lenses to summarize poem/ prose in one sentence. However, the brevity of description means some nuances are left out; also, students do not get a sense of how these critical approaches relate to one another. 

2. What I like about this use of Bloom’s taxonomy is that teachers have to mindful of their use of terms like “analyse”, “interpret”, “assess”, “describe”.  Teachers oftentimes use terms like that interchangeably; here they are reminded that these terms require students to operate at a different level of the taxonomy.

3. Good way to introduce students to language of film and media studies. However, students may be unfamiliar with and thus have little interest in the films studied - The Big Heat (1953), Double Indemnity (1944). Perhaps modern film noir works could be incorporated in the suggested viewing list. 

 
Review word count : 157

For the Love of Literature

‘I believe that the moment I open a book, a connection (however fleeting and paltry) is formed between it and me. This connection is an intangible one that the unseen/unknown author spins across space (reality of the book) and time (eternality of the story) to reach out to me, the contemporary reader. This moment in time is bounded to me – I am the one solid that exists outside of the book, and it is through me that the relationship between it and me is embodied. And this relationship needs passion to sustain itself. There is a quote from Jeanette Winterson on the necessity of passion in forming a relationship with books –

“A reader can fall in love with what is alive through time. Such a book is not an object it is a relationship.” – Art Objects (1995) 

‘It is a love relationship that I form with books (i.e. Winterson’s books). A book is not bounded by the normal limits of time (and space). Its existence continues beyond its author’s. When I form a good relationship with a book – I have fallen in love with it. A relationship with a text is special because it is the closest one can come to forming an equal relationship with anything/one. For one carries forth one’s own baggage – memories, beliefs, traumas and joys – without being judged by the other (the text). Instead, the text offers itself in return. It tells you a story, or draws you (into) a fantasy. Stories of life are immortalized in words – in texts, and when one “falls in love” with a text, the reality of literature becomes the reality of life.’

April 2010

--

The passage above is from part of an assignment I did for Philosophy and Literature class (it sounded like a dream module to me) some years back. I was at the peak of my Winterson mania (the first encounter was 20 December 2009, give or take a few days) and the way love works is that it is irrational and unpredictable (what philosophy students strive not to be) – it takes your life down paths you would never have imagined yourself going on otherwise, if not for the love object’s sudden appearance/existence in your life.  

This is partly why I am vaguely uncomfortable with being tasked to write my “reading biography” – it is such a personal and unpredictable undertaking; you never know what might come back at you from the past. (The lengthy chunk at the beginning serves as a stalling measure – of sorts.) However, I do understand the possible merits of such a piece, and I shall begin, but not at the beginning.

The last time I was proud of my reading list (I am not saying I am ashamed at what I am reading now) was earlier this year, when I was working on my dissertation under the tutelage of Dr Tania Roy, a professor whose classes I had been taking since semester one of freshman year (no, I did not stalk her. At least, not initially). From December 2009 to December 2011, I had read everything Jeanette Winterson has written, and was determined to write my thesis on her (works). So I chose the First Encounter (on 20 December 2009; The Stone Gods (2007)) and another text I had liked for its ambiguous lesbian overtones, Written on the Body (1993). Both works marked the overarching theme of my life in the earlier half of this year. That was the beginning of my post-Winterson mania.   

I was reading Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig for research purposes, and also because I liked their language. Roy suggested “why not some Kristeva too” and I obligingly checked out Black Sun from the library. “Tales of Love might be good for you as well...” It seemed a familiar trajectory – back to Freud and Lacan of my psychoanalytic days in her class.

But the slight souring of relations with Winterson came before that, before the Irigaray-Wittig intrusion into our exclusive relationship – for I do agree with her (Winterson) that one can fall in love with a book – if it is at the right time, and the right one (book).

In the period of December 2009 to December 2011, I tried to diversify my reading interests – I read Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Martin Buber and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. My classmate was reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and attempting to compare it to The Little Prince. He has always been considered a disruption in class. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) for me, the professor (she was/is not actually a professor yet because she was still working on her PhD at the time) adored Winterson as well and assigned a text of hers for class. Unfortunately for me, my (male) tutor could not empathize with this love of ours and gave me a bad grade for my Winterson-Kierkegaard essay (perhaps it was a wrong move on my part). I got a reprieve (of sorts) when I was sent away on exchange, but in Madison, Wisconsin, I met a lesbian (I was not supposed to let her know I know this) professor who was in love with Winterson as well, and gave me her unrestrained approval to work on a couple of Winterson’s texts for the final paper. Her class was on disability studies, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that queer theory comes under that fairly broad umbrella as well – “queer-ing being a sort of dis-abilizing” she told me. From that point onwards, my academic trajectory would go something like this: disability studies -> gender studies -> race studies -> French feminist theory (plus Winterson), something I am very thankful for, today.

That fall semester in Madison, I had the chance to pursue my greatest love (not including Winterson) – existentialism. Or rather the course name was “French existentialism” (it began and ended with the French, so.) but having Sartre and Camus on the official reading list was exhilarating. I remember I had a running monologue of thoughts alongside the professor’s lectures, and I would dash home after every afternoon class to pen down my reactions – agreements and disapprovals – to what my professor had earlier said. In matters of Literature, I could indulge in my love of Shakespeare (a Shakespeare class was not available in NUS at that point) and was also introduced to the works of Sara Willis and Walt Whitman, which struck a chord in me.

In the years since I have encountered Winterson, I came into contact with a few other writers whose influence came close – but not quite – to hers. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was the one work which epitomized the notion of a philosophical novel for me. (This was before Sartre’s Nausea, and Camus’s novels.) I also enjoy Tove Jansson’s Moomin series and short story collections. Later on, I discovered Simon Van Booy, whose sparse lyrical prose evoked thoughts and emotions similar to that which Winterson’s writings stirred in me.

But what (who) did I read before her? Italo Calvino, whose Invisible Cities was a strong recommendation by my best friend when we were in secondary school/junior college (unfortunately I only read him later on); J.M. Coetzee, whom I had first encountered in a British literature class, but later on when I grew interested in pursuing the ethical issues surfacing in environmental philosophy class, I picked up his copy of The Lives of Animals, which made me appreciate him more as a thinker; Kazuo Ishiguro is another favourite of mine, especially Never Let Me Go. During the Coetzee-environmental-issues period, I found a wonderful writer who truly touched me with his writings. He was a Catholic priest and also a strong advocate of deep ecology.  I am slightly ashamed to say that what moved me were not so much his ideas but rather his language. I carried The Dream of the Earth with me to and from school (when I had to manually renew it for the n-th time because I could. Not. Bear. To. Part. With. It.). For a couple of months, I toyed with the idea of working on environmental literature/philosophy for my thesis (I have no idea how that would have worked out. If at all). 

That was pre-Winterson.

I am a faithful lover, like her. But unlike her, I realize that the face of love changes as time does its slow, gentle work upon her. My love for/with her works began like the irrational, unfathomable sparks of first love. I felt that I recognized something in her words. Maybe it is this recognition that will always remain, when all else has changed.

Perhaps the beginning of my reading trajectory was already sown with the seeds kick-starting my wanders down existential and lesbian fiction. Like everyone else I began my independent reading life with Enid Blyton (the hardcovers, the boarding school series, The Faraway Tree, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, the MYSTERIES – OH MY GOD THEY ARE STILL IN MY BOOKCASE, I just had to turn my head to the left and there they are; I haven’t looked at them for a long, long time – I’ve two 3-inch thick MYSTERIES books), Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Babysitters’ Club, Sweet Valley, Fear Street.... But my very very first experience with books were – slightly-larger-than-A4-size hardcovers of folk and fairy tales that my mom would read to me. Two of them are Jack in the Beanstalk and Puss in Boots. I was at that age where I could read alphabets but could not read words (or am I wholly imagining this?), and sometimes when I was waiting for my mom to read me the story, I would grow impatient and make up my own by “reading” the pictures instead of words (because I couldn’t read).

I don’t remember reading the Disney tales with its princesses and happily-ever-afters. But I knew every one of their stories – and was especially delighted when Angela Carter (and sometimes Winterson) re-wrote most of them out of their subservient servile lives. For some reason, through my growing years, I intensely followed series with strong female protagonists – Francine Pascal’s Fearless, Meg Cabot’s (not The Princess Diaries, not really) Mediator and 1800-WHERE-R-U series, this short-lived series featuring a Japanese girl named Heaven... (I cannot remember its actual series title and author.) The girls in these stories all had one thing in common – they knew martial arts and they beat up guys. I LOVE THEM. (Okay, maybe Suze and Jess in Cabot’s series didn’t know how to fight per se... but they had powers that um, the male characters did not have.) They had lots of spunk, coupled with a wicked humour, and my one greatest wish in life at that point was: To be like them and Get into A Fight.

That was when I was in secondary school and following Gaia Moore’s (Fearless) life as closely as though I’d been there beside her, living her life with her. My male classmates refused to succumb to my challenges and one particularly annoying one informed my best friend and I that “the only reason [he] won’t beat [us] up is because” we are girls!

Gaia ruminated a little about existentialism sporadically across the books – I was twelve-and-a-half years old when I first met that term. 

When I was fourteen-going-on-fifteen, two very memorable books dropped by (and have since stayed on in) my life within months of each other. The first was Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli. It was the single most life-changing-affirming-reaffirming book I read that year – and all the years thereafter. Till now? Perhaps. I shall do it for the upcoming assignment. Perhaps. The second was Lucas, by Kevin Brooks. A few pages into the story, I realized I was holding onto a gem, and despite knowing how the story would end, I started tearing before the penultimate episode, and when the finale (with the ending I expected) came, I wanted to close the book, pick it up and begin all over again. Because reading those lines, brought me that much closer into the world Brooks had created, enmeshed me that deeply in the psyche of Caitlin, whose point of view the story is seen through, regarding the sixteen-year-old stranger who passed by their island and set off an inevitable chain of events with one misunderstood kind act – ending in his death by lynching (I haven’t read that book for close to eight years. Its present-ness is fairly disturbing). As though he were a primeval Winterson, I read all of Brook’s works within half a year of encountering Lucas. There was a unifying strand of philosophy present in the YA-themed fictions he wrote – I didn’t know it then, but I know now that that was the spark to the flame. (Plus the fact that my best friend was hiding in the school library during lessons reading Bertrand Russell, and telling me about it during our breaks. She was a Math-Chem-Bio student on her way to biosciences or pharmacy or something-like-that but philosophy sidetracked her life, too. I was studying Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Sylvia Plath but the majority of my time was taken up by organic chemistry, differential equations and macroeconomics etc. It must be my literature teacher, who read existential angst in Boey Kim Cheng and casually dropped Kierkegaard upon us.)

I never read Nietzsche (in full), but I wish I did.

On the night of my best friend’s final university exam (literally the FINAL finals), five hours before we had to get on a plane to the destination of our grad trip, I was helping her write her Nietzsche paper.

She had four (or was it five) other philosophy essays overdue; undone.

I wrote her Nietzsche paper for her, reading Nietzsche as I went along – and I WISH I HAD READ NIETZSCHE.

You never know when it might come in useful.

The books arranged on my desk right now are telling: Kristeva Reframed, Theory and Practice, Teaching Literature in Virtual Worlds, Thinking about Literature, Farewell Waltz (Kundera; I still love him), Textual Construction of the Female Body, Hotel World (Ali Smith), The Whole Story and Other Stories (Ali Smith... is one of Winterson’s closest friends), Bodies (Susie Orbach... is Winterson’s partner).  

I am going to read Nietzsche. Though you never fully fall out of love with the first love of your life.  

Oh yes, another text I Love – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. I love Alice... in the way I prefer Puss in Boots to Snow, Ariel or Belle. Incidentally, I recently wrote a play for a friend’s birthday – it featured the Disney princesses and Alice. I haven’t gone into the playwright-incarnation part of me that took place in the year overlapping my first and second years in NUS. But that is a whole other story for another life.

I am going to read Nietzsche.

But first Ali Smith and Susie Orbach... because I’ve outpaced Winterson’s output, and there was that curious time during my thesis writing when I hadn’t been able to fully grasp the amazing (yet absolutely frightening) experience of writing about my favourite author under the supervision of my favourite professor. And I’d still thought I was going to send Winterson my final work.

Reminder to self: I am going to read Nietzsche. You never know when it might come in useful.

“A reader can fall in love with what is alive through time. Such a book is not an object it is a relationship.” – Art Objects (1995) 

Rachel's Reading Biography

My experience with reading started at a young age when my parents read to me before bedtime. When I displayed an interest in books (as a result of the regular sessions of bedtime storytelling), they introduced me to the Peter and Jane primer series. I found the primer boring, because of the lack of a proper plot or conflict, and was very glad when I could finally “graduate” and move on to proper books with more interesting content, such as the Enid Blyton series and the Disney Princess series, which consisted only of five princesses back then, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Cinderella, and Snow White. I revelled in the make-believe world of pixies, elves, fairies and fairy godmothers, often wishing that the real world that we lived in had such beautiful and mysterious creatures as well.

In primary school, I picked up the Nancy Drew and Sweet Valley series, along with a few of the Little House on the Prairie series. I also remember reading Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess (by Frances Hodgson Burnett), a few of Roald Dahl’s books, as well as other books whose titles I cannot recall. Looking back, I think that it is intriguing that most of the books that I read then were about girls (whether children or teenagers), and their lives. Perhaps I could identify with the viewpoints of these female characters, or perhaps I bought into the idea of these romanticized notions of living in a peaceful, somewhat pastoral world as depicted in the texts. Toward the end of primary school, I picked up books such as the Diary of Anne Frank and Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Ma, autobiographical texts with darker and more adult themes.

In secondary school, I had less time for reading, with an increased workload and CCA schedule. However, because I took literature as a subject, I could still read within curriculum time. Lower secondary literature consisted of books such as Sing to the Dawn and Rice Without Rain, while upper secondary literature consisted of books such as King of the Castle and Twelfth Night. I enjoyed literature lessons not just because of the time that I could spend ‘legitimately’ reading, but also because of the analysis of these texts in class, something that I had never consciously done before. It brought a new lens to my reading, the idea that I could interpret the texts in different ways. It was also the first and last time I did a ‘proper’ study of a Shakespearean text. In the meantime, I also picked up The Clay Marble, another text by Minfong Ho, various ‘chick lit’ such as Confessions of a Shopaholic, and magazines.

Moving on to junior college, I was very excited about literature lessons: I was convinced they would provide more in-depth and critical discussions and readings of the texts in the curriculum. The texts I studied were selected poems by Wilfred Owen, two Dublin plays by O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, The Great Gatsby, and The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. By that time, I was more interested in meeting up with friends or watching television programmes in my spare time. Thus, I ‘stopped’ reading for a while, focusing only on my A-level texts.

This break from reading continued into university, where I read mainly texts that were required for my modules. Some of these include: Midnight’s Children, Shame, Disgrace, Foe, Robinson Crusoe, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, The Bluest Eye, Love, and the list goes on.

Right now, I’m slowly starting to read again. I am currently interested in Asian American, specifically, Chinese American, literature. This interest could have been sparked off from my thesis writing, where I wrote on Chinese American Literature. I have recently finished reading A Thread of Sky by Deanna Fei, and am planning to pick up Please Look After Mom by Kyung Sook Shin. Hopefully, this effort to start reading again will continue and develop, allowing me to step into the different worlds of literature again.

Samuel's Reading Biography

Like so many others, I started reading when my mother forced me to read Peter and Jane books. I would read 1 sentence and run out of the room, hoping she would tire if she had to catch me each time. She would simply call me back verbally to read the next till I got through the book. This laborious process on my mother's behalf equipped me with reading skills.

Like you probably did, I progressed to Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl. This was in Primary school, and perhaps my most avid reading period. My parents would bring me down to Popular on the weekends and I would read, while standing, the Enid Blyton books that I had missed out on. There was, of course, also Constable Acai and a couple of Singaporean books. Singapore Ghost Stories always freaked me out.

My favourite childhood memory is of myself holding the Enid Blyton Omnibus (3 tales of fantasy) and reading it while lying down on the sofa. Next to me, below the sofa, and always within arm's reach, was a bag of Grandma's brand assorted chocolate chip cookies. I could finish half a bag a day while reading, which was probably quite unhealthy for a young boy. Apart from all the playing with Batman and Lego, this had to be the quintessential reading experience for me.

Roald Dahl increasingly became my reading pleasure as I grew into my teens. I devoured every one of his short stories. I also became slightly more capable of understanding his wit: In "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" the main character explains that his machine has a compendium of long, exotic words which it taps on at least once in each story it crafts, as every writer throws in a difficult word in their stories to make themselves look clever as well. A few lines later the word Dahl himself used the word "epexegetically" in his own story; his self-deprecating humour had flown over my head so often, and only hit me when I grew older. Yet Dahl would disturb me as well. His dark twists had me at times feeling distressed in the lowest reaches of my consciousness. I threw the Dahl short story omnibus my parents had bought me into the trash one day, but my mother retrieved it and scolded me for wasting money. I don't think I tried to explain myself.

Reading became a less common affair as I grew past Secondary school. I only read what I was given, as far as books were concerned. In JC my books were amazing, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. In particular "The Country Wife" for its bawdy humour, "Decline and Fall" by Evelyn Waugh, Chaucer, and Sylvia Plath. But I never made efforts to read other books. My time was occupied by manga (in particular "One Piece"), anime, and the occasional science magazine, which interested me far more than any novel. I remember in the days before Wikipedia how amazing it was to take a whole stack of magazines dedicated to the latest findings in science, especially about solar systems, stars, black holes, and the Big Bang.

All through university life, to this day, I don't think I have recaptured the love for reading I had as a child. I very much enjoyed a good number of the texts I was given as a student, but I enjoyed TV series, movies, manga, and scientific articles far more than reading on my own. I think, in part, that I didn't enjoy dealing with the emotional roller coaster that books put me through. So, so many, would never leave me with a happy, yet satisfying ending. I remember being struck by how the movie "Stranger than Fiction" really encapsulated my dilemma. It so often feels more artistically satisfying, more poignant, when the happy ending is denied (in the movie, that entailed Will Ferrell having to die to make his writer's story more exceptional). Yet a tiny part of me dies which each tragedy. I remember convincing myself to get through "The Mayor of Casterbridge" on a rare occasion I dedicated myself to reading my own texts, as I had heard Thomas Hardy was a great writer, before giving up halfway when I realised that it was a tragedy of epic proportions. In particular I remember throwing down the book in anger when I found out.

Today, Wikipedia is my best friend. I read it not only out of necessity (for all those texts in Uni that I never wanted to get through), but also for sheer joy in the amazing complexity of our world. Maybe one day I'll mature enough to enjoy dealing with texts again.

Shu May's Reading Biography

            I started reading at a young age, when my parents read the Peter and Jane series to me. Initially, the black letters on the page did not make sense to me, until one day something clicked and the letters began coalescing into words. My parents firmly believed in the importance of reading, and so we would make twice-weekly trips to the library to borrow as many books as we could.

            As a child, I enjoyed reading the Childcraft encyclopedias as well as the musty Britannica encyclopedias that my parents owned. It was fun to read through all the items listed under each letter, e.g. “A”. I remember being fascinated by the account of English history, especially how each king came to power and was defeated by another upstart. I also enjoyed finding out about exotic animals in the world and how they were endangered due to human activities. My initial foray into reading, then, was anchored in the realm of facts.

            When I entered primary school, I began reading more fiction. My favourite author was Enid Blyton, and I especially liked the Faraway Tree series. I remember wishing that I could live near an enchanted wood, have midnight adventures with fairies and slide down the incredibly long slide in the Faraway Tree. Although I read other Enid Blyton books such as Malory Towers, The Secret Seven and The Famous Five, the Faraway Tree series really caught my attention because it transported me to a beautiful fantasy world whenever I read it. I also fell in love with C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series. I think I read through the whole series thrice during primary school. For me, it had all the elements of a great story: ordinary children turned into dashing princes and princesses, a large and furry lion, and once again fairies, elves, wood nymphs and more. Looking back, I guess I really liked these novels because they transported me to a world that was more exciting than primary school.

            In secondary school, I continued my reading streak and picked up almost any book that looked interesting. I wasn’t particularly selective in my choice of books because I just wanted to win the monthly “Most Number of Books Borrowed” award in school. I did have a burgeoning interest in Asian-American books, though, specifically those by Lawrence Yep. Somehow the stories of Asian immigrants building the Great Railroad and seeking to find their fortune in the gold rush really resonated with me. This positive introduction to Asian-American texts later led me to take a module in Asian-American literature in NUS.

            When I entered JC, and all the way till the end of my undergraduate years, I read less for leisure. Perhaps it was because I started majoring in Literature and had to read so many texts during the semester that I did not want to read much during the holidays. I also suffered a mini “identity crisis” of sorts, as these Literature modules kept introducing me to ostensibly “good” writers that made my previous reading choices seem very lightweight. The few texts that I enjoyed, though, and which touched me in some small way included: King Lear, Middlemarch, The Remains of The Day, Pearl (a medieval poem that I found incredibly haunting), and Disgrace (by J.M. Coetzee). King Lear moved me with its tragic rendition of the father-daughter relationship while Dorothea’s winding path to significance made me reflect on my own path in life. The understated pain in The Remains of The Day and the horrific violence in Disgrace also caused these books to stick in my mind. Finally, the account of a parent’s grief at losing his infant daughter (elegiacally presented through an elaborate rhyme scheme) is the reason why Pearl is still my favourite poem of all time.

            Over the last year, I have slowly regained my love for reading. Recently, I went through a phase where I re-read old childhood favourites such as The Chronicles of Narnia and the Anne of Green Gable series. I am glad to say that these books still bring me much enjoyment. Although I have grown up (as a person and as a reader), there is a touching simplicity about these books that still tugs at my heart. I am not sure how my reading diet will evolve in the years to come, but I am very thankful for the books I have read thus far because they have all shaped me in one way or another.  

Shu May's E-Learning Website (http://home.cogeco.ca/~rayser3/unit_plan.htm)

This webpage is a unit plan that seeks to teach Grade 10 students (roughly Secondary 3 or Secondary 4 students in the Singaporean context) the different elements of plot.

3 ideas:

1. The idea of using a short story as a way of introducing students to prose analysis is good, but perhaps we could analyse Singaporean/Malaysian short stories instead of Sherlock Holmes stories. The closer cultural background will make these stories more accessible for local students.
2. Sending students out to record observations about people is an interesting idea because it will make them more aware of character details. However, we should also emphasise the adage not to “judge a book by its cover”.
3.  I like the idea of asking students to present their oral stories individually to their classmates. However, I am wondering whether this activity might be too time-consuming in a class of 40 students.

 (148 words)