Thinking Forward

I will be teaching straight through the summer, and not a workshop either--two comp classes, should the enrollment materialize. This is not a vain fear, these days. My classes at this point have dwindled way way down to about 10 in each. I have been told it would be good if I became an easier teacher, but how boring! How could I bear to be like some people who repeat the same things over and over for years on end and never challenge themselves or their students? How could I continue to care or to be excited about what I am doing? Besides, I could probably never be easy enough for some of these folks. I might as well do what interests me, which is why I went into this line of work in the first place.
This summer I am bringing back from the dead a form of a previous class I have taught on Obsession. I will change the focus somewhat to Hauntings. I am thinking of starting with Kelly Link's fantasy story, "Stone Animals," which I discovered quite by accident. It puts me in mind of The Shining, Kubrick's critique of the American Family, but I probably do not have time before the semester starts to get that worked into an assignment so I'll most likely stick with Vertigo, which I know well and have taught a number of times. Then The Turn of the Screw. Students don't like that one much; Henry James isn't easy. It will go with "Stone Animals" well though, and it also teaches well with Vertigo. I've done that before. I could teach The Yellow Wallpaper instead of that, but I don't think so this time.
In the fall, I am looking ahead to another semester of 2 Writing 2 classes (rhetoric and argumentation). I am thinking of making the theme adaptation from literature to film. I've scoped out a couple of textbooks on this subject and will probably teach Shelley's Frankenstein and two versions of that book--James Whales' movie with Boris Karloff, the one we always think of when someone mentions Frankenstein--and Blade Runner, which is not really an adaptation of Frankenstein so much as a comment on or reworking of it. Then students will choose their own reworked book and movie groupings and write research papers of various kinds about them. It might be hard. I suspect it will be, but when students choose their own topics, they tend to like it better. This will give them an opportunity to choose freely from among the many many books and films. I might even consider transformations of different kinds, such as the recent one in which an artist transmogrified Kafka's book The Metamorphosis into a graphic novel, with full text. If someone does that, that person will have to find their own theoretical discussions on which to base such a paper.