Teaching The Great Gatsby; Teaching Macbeth

These two new releases in the "English Studies Video Library" series feature high school English teacher Richard Brodsky offering guidance for other high school English teachers on presenting the classics of English literature. The format for each program is the same. Brodsky outlines separate lesson plans which include the following headings: "aim," "motivation," "objectives," "questions," and "homework." In keeping with standard teaching practice, there is a lot of overlapping in these five areas, and it's occasionally difficult to see the "book" embedded in the educationalese built up around it. Frankly, Teaching "The Great Gatsby" put me off my feed right from the get go, because the "aim," given as a question: "why does Fitzgerald use an unbiased narrator to tell the story of the Great Gatsby?" contains a premise I can't agree with. Namely, that Nick Carraway is an unbiased narrator (the meaning of which Brodsky never really explains). Later on, as a move to modernize the teaching process and relate to today's students, Brodsky suggests playing Simon & Garfunkel's songs "Sounds of Silence" and "The Dangling Conversation." Twenty years ago, perhaps, but not today's kids. In the program Teaching `Macbeth," Brodsky delivers a good overview of the milieu in which Shakespeare's plays were originally performed, and then focuses on the meaning of the "weird sisters" within the play. At the close of the program, he suggests that students be given the assignment of checking out the BBC version of Macbeth from video stores to watch as an assignment (since the BBC version is only available from Ambrose Video at three-digit figures, it's rather unlikely that students will find it in video stores.) Still, Brodsky's idea about using a focused approach is certainly preferable to no approach at all, and teachers without a clue about the work they're teaching would benefit from these programs. Recommended, with reservations, for high school English departments. (Available from: Moonbeam Publications, Inc., 18530 Mack Ave., Grosse Pointe, MI 48236;1-800-4452391.)