Love is in the air… and in the curriculum! Citing a lack of participation in the notorious freshman course, LitHum professors are turning to new approaches to encourage student engagement and excitement for the required course readings.
“We’ve noticed students are constantly talking about this…’Heated Rivalry’…while we’re discussing, say, Inferno or King Lear,” one English professor explained. “After much deliberation, my fellow professors and I agreed that we’re willing to do anything to get students to interact with books again.”
Students will be asked to handle Heated Rivalry as a critical text, and those enrolled in the course should expect to be able to identify key, iconic quotations by both speaker and episode. In an effort to expand beyond the book and connect with the art further, students should expect to answer questions related to the limited TV series. Prompts may ask questions like, “From which novel appears ‘I’m coming to the cottage’?” and “Explain what happened in Episode 3 as if you were speaking to someone who skipped that episode because they got bored.”
In addition to Heated Rivalry, the Columbia English Department is considering introducing a class that will focus on popular adaptations of romance novels. One proposed novel, Wuthering Heights, follows the trend of older classics, to many professors’ delight. Another movie-adapted novel, Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, was met with a little less excitement. Hey, any reading is good reading, right?
