Teaching classic or canonical texts in senior-level high school English courses is an underpinning of college-bound curriculum. Pairing classic or canonical texts in the secondary English classroom with contemporary texts requires students to develop self-efficacy and, more importantly, create relevance among the pieces and facilitate a deeper level of understanding of the classic or canonical texts.
Students will read five classic or canonical texts and contemporary pairings of their choice from the required reading list throughout the school year. As they read, they will interact with both pieces of literature and focus on essential questions among the pieces in order to create relevance of the classic or canonical text and increase student engagement, provide student choice, and increase student interest and comprehension. In addition, the pairs will do the following:
Provide variety and depth of information
Increase motivation and knowledge
Reveal realities of life beyond surface-level understandings
Develop a sense of history, personal perspective, and the ability to view present/future with historical perspective
Vary reading levels and multiple points of access through different levels of text complexity
Specifically, students will choose five pairs from the chart below to read throughout the school year. Students will use essential questions for each pairing to develop a deeper-level of understanding of the classic or canonical text. Text pairings include thematic pairs, parallel stories, characterization comparisons, literary concepts, text structures, and updated retellings.