Sure, “Gift of the Magi” and “The Lottery” are classics for teaching irony, but they offer little in the way of inclusive representation. There is nothing wrong with these stories, but we can serve our students better by including a wider selection of voices and identities. I’m not asking you to stop teaching “The Lottery” or “Gift of the Magi”, but encouraging you to add some more inclusive short stories and supporting materials to your curriculum. When my wife and I lived in Belfast in the late 1960s, our neighbours were an elderly couple called Wilson. In those days we had two toddlers in the house and they used to spend as much time with the Wilsons as they did at home. And one of the things Mrs Wilson used to repeat to the elder of them offers a good way into this discussion. "Michael," she would tell him, "you and Christopher are growing up, Granda Wilson and I are growing down, and your daddy and mammy are standing still." urn:lcp:isbn_9780571119769:epub:35e8a06f-4531-4df4-961e-431e5f8418ac Extramarc Brown University Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier isbn_9780571119769 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t15m7b27w Isbn 057111976X As poetry anthologies go, this is a veritable treasure trove of the great and the good; a non-formulaic collection of personal favourites chosen by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. Arbitrary riches rather than engineered instruction: that was what we were after. There were no lesson plans implicit in either the contents of The Rattle Bag or in their arrangement. What we hoped to do was to shake the rattle and awaken the sleeping inner poet in every reader. We proceeded in the faith that the aural and oral pleasures of poetry, the satisfactions of recognition and repetition, constitute an experience of rightness that can make the whole physical and psychic system feel more in tune with itself. We implicitly believed that a first exposure to poetry, the early schooling in it, should offer this kind of rightness, since it constitutes one of the primary justifications of the art. One of our inclusions, after all, was Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Woodlark", which begins:

The Rattle Bag - Tradebook for Courses The Rattle Bag - Tradebook for Courses

Including writers from Shakespeare and Blake to Sylvia Plath and T. S. Eliot, The Rattle Bag is eclectic, instructive and inspiring at the same time. What matters most in the end is the value that attaches to a few poems intimately experienced and well remembered. If at the end of each year spent in school, students have been marked by even one poem that is going to stay with them, that will be a considerable achievement. Such a poem can come to feel like a pre-natal possession, a guarantee of inwardness and a link to origin. It can become the eye of a verbal needle through which the growing person can pass again and again until it is known by heart, and becomes a path between heart and mind, a path by which the individual can enter, repeatedly, into the kingdom of rightness. Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and conceived of as a collection of their own favourite poems, The Rattle Bag has established itself as the classic anthology of our time. Heaney and Hughes have brought together an inspired and diverse selection, ranging from undisputed masterpieces to rare discoveries, as well as drawing upon works in translation and traditional poems from oral cultures. In effect, this anthology has transformed the way we define and appreciate poetry, and it will continue to do so for years to come. As editors, in other words, we were both products of a system that was fundamentally the one established by Renaissance humanists and grammarians in the 16th century. For all the revision of syllabi and inflection of the educational aims that had occurred in the intervening 400 years, there was one respect in which the 20th-century schools we attended resembled those that the Elizabethan authors in our anthologies would have attended 400 years earlier: we were still expected to fill our minds with what was on offer from the past, to remember it, to prove by examination that we retained it, and to prepare ourselves to think, feel and act in accordance with it during the years to come. Faber Members have access to live and online events, special editions and book promotions, and articles and quizzes through our weekly e-newsletter.I don’t want to give any spoilers away, but this delightfully creepy story will turn the readers’ expectations on their heads. The ending provides an outstanding example of situational irony. And as I noted, you could use this story with middle schoolers or high schoolers. It’s chilling, but not gory or graphic. In this award-winning short story, a young man remembers his Chinese mother’s efforts to connect with him through origami. Her origami, a symbol of her culture and love, is infused with a magic that makes it come to life. I don’t want to say much more about this story because it’s such a lovely read (and short!), so I’ll leave it at this: it is one of identity, class struggle, and family. Want to read more about teaching literary elements? In these posts, I share texts and ideas for teaching symbolism , setting , figurative language , suspense and pacing , conflict , metaphor, and characterization. Plus, since the new remake just dropped on Disney+, now is the perfect time to introduce our students to the classic version that we grew up with. It's probably worth remarking at the outset that Ted and I had been educated at schools and universities where there was still an adherence to Matthew Arnold's faith in literary culture as a means towards the general dissemination of sweetness and light. Our teachers still proceeded on the basis of the humanist wager. They and we operated in the faith that literary and cultural endeavour was conducted in a disinterested spirit. It was a less sceptical world where the word "higher" in the term "higher education" was still credited and where the word "education" was respected in and of itself because it promised to raise what Robert Frost once called "the plane of regard".

The Rattle Bag by Seamus Heaney | Goodreads

Condition: Good. Good condition. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included.

A very interesting and different collection of poetry, chosen by two of our most famous modern poets.