It occurred to me last week that it could be awesome to put together a sort of science-fiction children's/YA lit class. Initially, i thought an all-time-travel syllabus would be cool, but then the idea of parallel worlds occurred, so I imagined a split course, half time-travel, half parallel worlds (problem: what parallel world books would I use? and how to avoid just teaching everything Diana Wynne Jones has ever written?)
Tentative booklist:
Time-Travel:
The Story of the Amulet
A Tale of Time City - Diana Wynne Jones
The time of the ghost - DWJ
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
When You Reach Me - Rebecca Stead
HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban
something like Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series?? where does THAT fit?
Parallel Worlds:
Golden Compass, maybe even the whole trilogy - Philip Pullman
Howl's Moving Castle?
The Merlin Conspiracy?
Narnia
I'm sure there are a zillion more titles that I;m not thinking of. It would be very interesting to poke around and see what kind of 19th-century time-travel books I could scare up (Jules Verne, maybe? HG Wells, The Time Machine, a book I haven't read - ?).
I love planning syllabi! even for imaginary courses that I'll probably never teach. Making up imaginary classes/imaginary syllabi is how I discovered/decided that I wanted to be a teacher.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
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Back in the day, when my sole source of literature was a small library on a government reservation in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada, run by an odd duck of a librarian who had a penchant for purple but won my devotion by always looking for new books to meet my unusual tastes, I read a book titled The Man Who Turned Into Himself. I recall I didn't much like the author's writing style, but the multiple-universe premise was interesting.
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