Why I Still Teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Recently, I have been reviewing my Medium stories. Reader, something dawned on me: I teach and have taught at the General Education level so much that I sometimes forget that I am a great (Yes, I am bragging here) literature professor. For my next few posts, I will be writing about some of my favorite authors and literature that my students responded to positively.

Reader, all of my academic pals know something peculiar about me. I HATE most American literature. I hate it. As a child, somewhere around about the third grade, I began reading British literature. And from that time on, my reading habits have been split between British literature and literature of the former British empire and multi-ethnic literature of the United States (MELUS).

Reader, I teach at smaller institutions. Professors at smaller institutions do not have the luxury of teaching majors only and specialty courses while adjuncts and TAs do the “grunt” work of teaching composition and lower-level literature. We have to do it all, making us generalists and taking us away from the specialties that we may have spent many years in graduate school learning. While some professors consider this generalist tend “beneath” them, I do not. Even though I HATE American literature, literature is my jam, and I can teach it all. Plus teaching literature at the general education level allows me to dabble in my second passion of the Humanities: History.