Hair Salon Musings

I took my son to get his hair cut today (which he needed badly!). I brought a book along to pass the time while I was there—Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By. I guess I took it because having written about him yesterday, I thought I'd revisit some of his writings. The more I read about what he writes, the more I become convinced that helping students make "meaty" (substantial) connections to other ideas is the right thing to do to help them "think." I tried to do the connection thing with the novel, The Road, that I taught in the Sophomore literature class. In fact, I think I most definitely tried to do it in all the classes I taught, including the other two American Lit. classes with the Juniors.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road in the Classroom

I went to see The Road (Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Schmidt-McFee, dir. John Hillcoat) today with my son and daughter. It is only playing at ONE theatre in Atlanta, so we had to drive to Midtown to see it. It was, as I expected, not nearly as touching and intense as the book, but I am glad the filmmakers didn't butcher it either. Even more so the case, because I chose to teach The Road this semester during my student teaching, and the students were anxious to see the movie when it came out.

My mentor teacher kindly allowed me to teach Cormac McCarthy's heartbreaking, award-winning, post-apocalyptic novel (2006), even though she is a self-proclaimed Fundamentalist Christian. My mentor teacher refuses to read or discuss Harry Potter novels, for example, because of the "occult" element. It is even more surprising I was allowed to teach this selection because in most schools these days things like cannibalism, catamites, and murder don't really go over well as provender for classroom studies.