Two Days a Week:
I have two days a week presently assigned to completion of my sophomore early Brit Lit iBook and the creation of my senior early Brit Lit iBook.
Sophomore book:
The sophomore book is fairly complete, but needs some work.
The Old English section is well done, but Beowulf is very difficult to read. I need to take the better translation in public domain and format it for the book, including numbering the lines. (While the poem is formatted, the formatting disappears when it is copied.) Because it was the first one done, the images are also fairly limited in that section, even though there are hundreds of great images around, especially on deviantart.com, for the story.
In addition, while I love Judith, I am having to re-think the presentation of the work, since the students tend to get the story of Judith, but not remember/recall/understand the differences between the poem and the deuterocanonical story, which we read from the King James Bible. Reviewing/revising my approach to that may also call for the revision of that section of the Nowell Codex in the OE book.
The Middle English period needs some work as well.
Canterbury Tales needs to be completed with images. The introduction to Chaucer is sparse, due to my own lack of expertise, but I don’t think I even attempted to put in an introduction to the Pearl Poet, about whom little is known, though I have significant notes on what we do know.
The text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is good, but I need to a) finish paying for images and b) include the images I purchased in the book.
The Renaissance section of the book is also problematic.
I originally envisioned a “love poetry” section, a Shakespeare’s poetry section, and a play section. However, even this semester I expanded that to add Spenserian sonnets—which actually are of significantly better quality than Shakespeare’s poems.
Perhaps the “love poetry” as I first envisioned it can be revised into a “dueling poets” section. Then I can present Donne’s love poems separately. I also need a section on religious poems. I really think that will be essential for use at my university but will also be helpful for other professors’ courses.
Finally, I need to finish going through the play and fixing the line numbers, as well as adding images—even though I still plan to use the graphic novel of The Tempest as a text in my classroom.
I should also look to see if the author has created any other romance play graphic novels. After a year of The Tempest research papers, I expect I will be ready to change focus.
For the Neoclassical period, the book is limited to Paradise Lost and Gulliver’s Travels right now. This is the section that I envision needing the most work for the sophomore book.
I need to expand those offerings and include, at least, some of Milton’s short poetry, especially “When I consider how my light is spent.” I also need to put images in the Paradise Lost books that we do not read—at least 10-12. (The rest all have images, even though we only read books 1, 2, and 9.)
There are images in the Gulliver’s Travels books, but I may need to reconsider or look for other, higher quality, images. Besides GT, I also want to add at least “A Modest Proposal,” though other short works of Swift or other golden age satirists might be appropriate.
Also, if I am going to have my lectures/lecture notes in the Neoclassical book, I need to work on developing those and putting them in. I did a cursory job on that this semester, but would like to expand and improve those offerings. That includes reworking the introductions to Milton and Swift, though I think Swift is actually fairly complete—or at least I have notes to complete it.
Senior book:
For the senior iBook, I need to decide whether I am going to keep the course focused wholly on Old English or if I will expand to include Middle English. Since the course is a one-shot replacement for a course that is basically Chaucer, and the students won’t be taking that class, I may need to do that. I will ask the other professor what she thinks and, if she thinks it should be included, I will pick her brain dry on what to do for that section with Chaucer.
For the Old English book, I want to expand the
add non-literary works, including translations of …
add historical works of note, perhaps the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles?
add some of the more famous homilies
One Day a Week:
My graduate course (see last year’s retrospective) needs development in terms of primary reading additions, project implementation decisions, AND ways to keep the students actually reading the secondary text, even without quizzes.
One Day a Week:
I need to revise the Linguistics class. I also need to go through the entire cabinet and get rid of stuff I don’t need to keep because I don’t/won’t use it or it is so out of date that it isn’t worth keeping.
I need to work on the Business Writing class and turn it in to something amazing. I should talk to Bill H and get some ideas from him.