I am about to teach Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to my College in the H.S. class; however, this is my first time teaching this novel. Does anyone have suggestions or advice? I have some ideas but would love to hear what you have to say.
I am about to teach Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to my College in the H.S. class; however, this is my first time teaching this novel. Does anyone have suggestions or advice? I have some ideas but would love to hear what you have to say.
I love that book. I found that it helps if kids know two things about the book: Bradbury wrote it in the early 50s when he was really concerned about the growth of television, but since that time most people read it as a cautionary tale about censorship. Either way, it’s clearly a book that appeals to people who value and love reading.
I’ve had students read the book who just don’t get that. “NO ONE,” they say, “would die to protect their books!” The set up feels false to them, so my goal when I teach it is to talk about the values inherent within books. Even non-readers can come up with important books from their childhood (Dr. Seuss, for example).
Also, the book brings up the importance of imagination, imaginative literature, and fantasy. What value resides in ghost stories? in fairy tales? in horror stories? What do people gain by playing at Halloween? What is wrong with the stance the government in the book takes that says people should only be exposed to realism? Why does Bradbury write an entire book based on defending the imaginative life of the mind? Why would he think that television works against imagination?
For that matter, why does George Orwell take such a strong stance against the possibilities of television in his book, 1984? Why does Harlan Ellison call television “The Glass Teat”? http://www.islets.net/essays/glassteat.html
If you lived in the world of Fahrenheit 451, what book do you feel so strongly about that you would rather commit the entire contents of it to memory rather than let it vanish from existence? What’s the big deal about the book that Bradbury mentions in the novel (that would be a pretty good extra credit report–what makes the titles mentioned in Fahrenheit 451 worth dying for?).
As a side note, it’s pretty funny that Fahrenheit 451 has been taught in the schools for a long time, and one publisher, over the course of several years, excised part of the text to eliminate the occasional “god damn” that Bradbury used. An English teacher or some students finally noticed it. The irony of Fahrenheit 451 being secretly censored tickles me. Look at http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/451/451.html.
If you want a really kick-butt, dynamite slam on school censorship and political correctness, give the class a copy of Connie Willis’s short story, “Ado.”
Thank you for all of the ideas. I will use some of this information immediately in conjunction with a few thoughts of my own. I do appreciate your help!
Yeah – DON’T show the movie. It was a Euro thing, very minimalist and ironic. Absolutely horrible!
Link up with the Censored Books site (forget just where, but the librarians’ association hosts it).
A good additional book is “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book” (I think that’s the title). Short, and lower in reading level.
I wrote about the problem of non-readers years ago – not UNable to read, just didn’t.
Post is here: http://rightasusual.blogspot.com/2005/02/not-illiterate-but-alliterate.html