Students, and their interest in studying literature are important to the high school teacher.
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How can we teach the Cavaliers The Cavalier Poets (A term paper for writing 316)
Web project for Wr. 316/Engl.339
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The students in our classrooms are in need of guidance in many ways. These students are beginning their lives as adults. It is up to all adults, including teachers in the classrooms, to help find ways they may better face their adulthood. Through literature that has withstood the test of time they can be offered life's lessons from those who have gone before them. That includes not only the teacher but also authors of texts that are based upon life and its challenges. The Cavalier Poets wrote in a different time and culture, but their writings have much to offer the students of today. According to Nancy Kirkland, "Teachers will have to be prepared to deliver effective instruction that considers various backgrounds, diverse learning styles, different value orientations, and dissimilar patterns of interaction. In so doing, students will be better prepared to live and succeed in a world where they will interact with people who think differently" (14). The texts left to us by the Cavaliers contain messages of value for students facing life decisions, which may help guide them to better choices in their lives. By studying these poems students of differing cultures and may find common ground in their studies. Young adults of high school age face similar choices regardless of culture, and the Cavalier poems may be a way of helping both the teacher and student to communicate and study different ways to respond to life's questions. In our society today, it may be questioned whether a teacher should become involved in directing students in making moral choices in life or not. Our educational system’s recent history of in-school violence may direct us to think in a positive manner toward our helping students gain a sense of values and how to think about them. According to Thomas Estes and Dorothy Vasquez-Levy, “…the debate over whether we should or should not teach values in the schools is empty, fodder for bad letters to the editor from the extremes of the political and religious spectrums. This argument is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We always teach values. The choice lies in which values and in how we teach them” (p.2). One way of working with our student’s value instruction may be as simple as what literature we use in the classroom and how we help the students approach it.
Finding their way through moral choices is not the only thought of the future we
as teachers need to consider as we consider our high school students. The
students contemplating continuing on into the upper educational system is
another we need to keep in mind. The high school literature teacher has a duty
to help prepare these students for their entrance into college. According to his
essay, "Inventing the University" David Bartholomae writes, "The
student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the
peculiar ways of knowing, selecting evaluating, reporting, concluding, and
arguing that define the discourse of our community" (589). We as high
school teachers need to help the student begin to understand the discourse of
upper division academia. How can we teach the Cavalier Poets? Reader Response New Criticism Essay Working Bibliography Home
You are here. The Cavaliers and why. URL of this web page: http://www.cocc.edu/jimh/why_teach_the_cavalier_poets.htm This page was last updated on 06/09/02.
This web maintained by Jim Hawes (jim146@bendnet.com) Student at Central Oregon Community College. I look forward to your comments and suggestions. http://www.cocc.edu/ © Jim Hawes 2002.
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