Books I Have Taught: The Crucible
- Z.D.Boxall
- Dec 19, 2024
- 2 min read
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.
Now, after the previous two weeks you might expect a third Shakespeare play, perhaps Hamlet or my own favourite of As You Like It, but the last play that I did was found in the archives of the school library and one that I had not heard of before choosing to study it. The Crucible by Arthur Miller had the hook of relating to the Salem Witch Trials and I thought my students would enjoy it; they did not. Of all the topics that I had my year twelve English class undertake that year it was by far the one that they struggle the most with. Perhaps I overestimated them, as I had done previously with The Call of Cthulhu or, more likely, I did not provide enough support for them to succeed. I will not take all of the blame, I mean I created questions after each scene for the students to answer, so that they may gather evidence to use in their assessment, and most chose to not do them. That is the plight of a teacher, I cannot make students do work if they do not wish to. I found the film version of the text, which we watched to help them understand more of the story, which did help them, though I did have one of my female students refer to the main character from that point on as the “hot guy”.
I liked The Crucible personally because of the theme of not abandoning your beliefs regardless of the consequences. It reminds me of a choice that I put before one of my characters, where it was a choice between two evils. I know it is not exactly the same, but the outcome is what I found interesting. I never quite enjoyed a character’s moral choice when the consequence was minimal. I feel that for genuine stakes to be real, you have to have consequences. Kill characters, have them hurt, do plot altering changes that the characters can never revert to. I understand wanting to play safe and I also understand, from an audience perspective, being in that position where I want everything to be okay, but the moment it is, the stakes drop. There is a balance and I certainly do not believe that every character choice should have terrible consequences, but in the right moments, I think they are an effective tool.
I think in the right circumstance I would teach The Crucible again, though with a class that has a higher work ethic. I think the themes still work and honestly, as I have previously mentioned, studying a play in the classroom is a joy. Giving students the opportunity to make characters their own can lead to organic moments of engagement, queries and general shenanigans. If you are not able to have fun in the classroom then both you, and your students, are missing out.
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