Books I Have Taught: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - The Speckled Band

The Books I Have Taught series is a personal reflection on the books I have taught in my classes. Their experiences often reveal interesting truths, not about the themes necessarily, but more about the outcomes and interactions I had with my students and the various paths it led me down. I hope you enjoy my reflection on the books that I have taught.

Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating character, mainly because he has been popular for so long and any character that can retain popularity across centuries is fascinating. In my own personal time, I read a collection of Sherlock Holmes tales in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in which I found the text for today, The Speckled Band. This text is unique in that I didn’t actively teach it, which I know defies the logic of the series, but I did plan to use the text and the other teachers that I worked with used it, but I was unable to with my class. My class at the time was the low attendance class and they simply did not work fast enough to get through the first text. Still, I designed the unit, a locked door mystery unit, exploring the conventions of the subgenre and giving an assessment that gives them the opportunity to plan their own locked door mystery and the extension of actually writing it. I had one student who was far enough along who read it, but otherwise what I planned was not used by my classes. That is sometimes how it works, but I know the other teachers made use of it, so I would not call it a waste. The mystery genre is one I have experimented with in my own writing, I actually planned my first full length novel to be a supernatural mystery, but I never finished it. From memory I wrote the first four chapters before stopping, suffering from boredom. At the time I told myself that I had to slowly build up tension and slowly drop clues, but I bored myself out of writing it. I think partly because there are moments in every piece that I write that I am excited to write, like the introduction of Thane in Tawny and Cree: Schinas Saga. I was excited the entire time I was writing it to have that scene, and those moments inspire and motivate me to keep writing, but I never reached that moment in the supernatural mystery. I knew what it was, but it was so far away, and I lost interest before getting there. I think that it is a lie that a mystery has to be slow and if I ever decided to reignite my interest for that novel then I might be less slow and write what interests me sooner, but I may also never reignite my interest, it might always lay in a state of unfinished rest. That is the thing I have noticed about my writing; I cannot write if I am not invested in it. That is actually part of the reason I wrote and published Nukunu College, because I had not published any of my work before, I had always struggled to finish it and when I was asked if I had published anything it inspired me. I have found that if I want to publish a work then I will finish it and honestly, I do not know if I want to publish my supernatural mystery. I cannot think of the reason other than currently; it does not interest me, and other projects interest me more. If I do change my mind, I will let you all know but for now, it is quietly resting in a dusty folder somewhere in the back of my laptop files.

The Speckled Band is worth teaching, it is a solid text and having your students identify the clues as they read, in an attempt to solve the mystery before the author, reveals is an effective teaching strategy.