Out of all the readings so far in this book I've found the article on the Literary Canon the most interesting. I also found Freire's article on the Banking concept to be very interesting. It holds true in many schools and education systems. It only seems fair to me for equal partnership for teachers and students, equal interaction, that way everybody gets to contribute and everybody can gain and benefit from the knowledge obtained from both the teacher and the student.

I enjoyed reading Richter's The Literary Canon and the Curriculum after the Culture Wars much more than most of the other works in this collection. I especially liked his passage on the Theory of the Canon. I actually find myself agreeing with some of the things he says starting with his reference to Horace. These evolutions in our idea of the canon are clearly evident to me in Richter's essay.

I found that what Vendler had to say about teaching your students to love what you love may be hard to do. I think that it's crucial to teach students a large variety of things, not just what you as a teacher personally loves in literature. As a future elementary and english educator, it's great to read about these different perspectives because it may help me someday!!!!

This is my first posting on the English 86 blog website. I don't think anyone else has done it quite yet? As for the essays we've read in the first week, I didn't know what to expect- but I was pleasantly surprised (after the introduction). I thought the Eagleton essay raised a lot of discussion, but so did a lot of them. All four essays forced me to think about issues in English (and educating it) that I have never really thought about. I'm anxious to see what the other essays are in comparison (similarly) to the ones we've read.