Beowulf

A day late, but c'est la vie.

IRL, I am a high school English teacher. I teach a British literature course. This means I get to teach Beowulf! Now, I can say just about every English teacher loves to teach Beowulf, but I particularly enjoy it because it allows me to surreptitiously share my religion in the classroom. By that, I mean that it allows me to show students a different way of living and thinking, and I'm probably somewhat more equipped that some others to bring that way of living and thinking into the present and thereby connect students more personally to the text. (At least, that's what I like to tell myself. And to be clear, at no point do I mention my own spiritual path in class.)

So hear are some personal ramblings about Beowulf and the teaching of it.

Students always seem to love Beowulf. They feel accomplished because they are reading an old text and actually enjoying it, and they enjoy it because, as an epic, it follows certain textual constructs they are already quite familiar with through today's storytelling: the movies.

We do an activity tracing the hero cycle through different movies... The Incredibles and the new Batman trilogy fit perrrrfectlyyyy.

Since Beowulf brings up Christianity early in the text, it brings up the conversation of the difference between Paganism and Christianity. It also illustrates how literacy knowledge equates to power... it was monks who were interested in writing these stories down. Therefore, they got to put their Christian spin on it. We continue to track these Christian influences as we read.

I find that Beowulf and "The Battle of Maldon" (a shorter, nonfiction text we read before Beowulf) are prime vehicles to teach ethics. The situations are life-and-death and larger than life, but they aren't meant to be fully realistic... but those situations easily translate to smaller, everyday situations. What do you do when you hear a rumor your friend has betrayed you (as someone rides away on the leader's horse mid-battle in "Maldon")? Some in "Maldon" flee, some continue to fight. In Beowulf, all but one abandon him at the end. What do you do when the going gets rough? When you're alone? How does reputation precede you? What makes a hero? For this last one, I have a slideshow that compares Beowulf and the first responders on 9/11.

In addition, there are great, quotable words of wisdom in these texts that are easily digestible (at least in the translation in our textbook). I call them "prime material for Facebook status updates," but they are words that stick in the mind. And they have a better message than most other popular culture slogans the kids latch on to (YOLO, anyone?).

All great literature does the above things, but there's something about Beowulf that gets us every time...