10/1, Critical Encounters in Secondary English

 I first want to speak to this text's (current) irrelevance to me: my student teaching placement is currently focused much more on writing than on reading and the reading within the classroom seems primarily interested in thinking a New Critical approach, focused on the features of writing which students can use within their writing. This is not to say that it is irrelevant to my future career, just mostly irrelevant within my current context.

Anyways, I think this is awesome. I want to point out lenses that are missing and can be really impactful to implement in a variety of texts which are also still relatively accessible to students: queer theory, disability theory, theory of hegemony, and technically new criticism but I think that's much more present in the secondary classroom anyways. This is sort of just "hey these schools of thought are always undervalued in general literature classrooms, and this continues to do so" but also books sometimes need to be smaller than that and I certainly understand the rationale around focusing on what is here focused on. 

I really think that implementing theory as a way of "reading the word and the world" is super important, but applying theory to the world is often ignored even when literary theory is explicitly taught. So far, it seems like Appleman hasn't really addressed that outside of using nonfiction readings (which is great). I'd just go a bit more explicit with it: maybe encourage students to apply reader response and another lens concurrently and then to apply the other lens to that well of personal experience from which they're drawing. 

I want to highlight another nonfiction resource, this time a whole news site. https://unicornriot.ninja/ is a leftist news outlet which engages with larger-scale topics like immigration or Metro area politics. I think this is relevant here because it will often explicitly take up lenses which we encourage in schools and also it is a source that is centered here in Minneapolis.