My Students’ Favorite Short Stories
November 3, 2008 by Alfredo Deambrosi
Last week, I redeemed an electronic gift certificate to audible.com and bought a short-fiction collection, which I am listening to as I commute.
The stories remind me of last semester, the first semester that I taught an introductory college literature course: En 103 Composition and Literature. I assigned eleven short stories in this order.
- Appointment with Love (Kishor)
- Miss Brill (Mansfield)
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Thurber)
- Cat in the Rain (Hemingway)
- Araby (Joyce)
- The Son from America (Singer)
- Blues Ain’t No Mockin’ Bird (Bambara)
- Paul’s Case (Cather)
- The Most Dangerous Game (Connell)
- Pigeon Feathers (Updike)
- The Adventure of the Speckled Band (Doyle)
After the unit on short fiction, I asked my students to respond anonymously to eleven questions (for the eleven stories), each beginning with “I liked the short story” and ending with the title of one of the above short stories.
Which stories do you think ranked near the top? Near the bottom? I was surprised by some of the results, which I’ll share here soon.
Among these stories, are there any that stand out to you as stories that you especially enjoyed or didn’t especially enjoy?
(posted in Facebook, also)
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
My guess is that the girls like “Appointment with Love” (and some of the guys too), and a lot of them like “The Most Dangerous Game.” I remember when I taught that class most of them didn’t like “Miss Brill.”
I loved teaching “Pigeon Feathers,” and some of my students came to enjoy it too, but not everyone.
I’d be interested to see what your students said.
I can’t remember all of these, but really love(d) “Araby”.
Also, for the little boy in me, I could always go in for a dose of “The Most Dangerous Game”. woot!