Ain't it Cool?

[Tim Strzechowski]

I have nothing against The Simpsons.  Its satire is sharp and quick, and
it's one of the few truly cerebral events on the Tube each week (which says
a lot about our society).  However, I think it's often easy to oversimplify
its relevance to schoolchildren, and many younger teachers, weaned on The
Simpsons from their own childhood, tend to use episodes in the classroom
hither and yon (the episode on "The Raven," the one on "Lord of the Flies,"
blah blah blah) to supplement instruction, sometimes forgetting that we need
not follow-up every reading experience with a Simpsons episode!

Making literature hip and cool and neat-o, man! is fine, but *especially* in
this age of No Child Left Behind and stress on reading scores (and now the
writing section of state testing in IL has been dropped!), teachers need to
make kids read.  Read.  Read complex literature.  Turn off the VCR and read.




> http://www.thesimpsons.com/episode_guide/0814.htm
>
> http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F12.html
>
>
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-146/epid-1452/
>
> > To reach disaffected students then, teachers have
> > got to make literature cool....
>


Literature can be made cool without making it a TV event, tho.