This teaching tip came about quite by accident, but it led to a rich experience. It centers on student presentations from a slightly different angle. The problem with teaching a novel is that if students are reading it for the first time, and it is complicated by either length, language, or style, they can find plots summarized for them in any number of outside sources. Testing is one way of making sure students actually read the material, as well as papers. But for many, it is “what happens” that students read for in a novel. Student or group presentations, like discussion, can help a teacher understand students’ perspectives, but these can be repetitious or superficial.

            When I recently taught Slaughterhouse-Five in a novel class, something different happened. As usual, I had each of my students sign up for two presentations about any of the six novels we were reading. They were to disregard how many other students were signing up for an individual novel and choose exactly what they wanted. Some like to get the presentations out of the way; some like to put them off. Some choose short books, some fear there will not be enough material and choose long books. What I am hoping is that they will choose the one they are most interested in. In this case, Slaughterhouse-Five was the fourth and shortest (with The Red Badge of Courage a close second), but arguably the most complicated. Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed and Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities were the longest and certainly replete with complications, but were more clearly chronological while Slaughterhouse was not. Dickens was the first novel assigned; Hosseini was the last. This time, many more signed up for Slaughterhouse than I had anticipated.

            Their presentations would be scheduled before we were able to discuss the novel as a whole. When would there be time for my own input? What the students later told me was that they were afraid of duplicating what others were going to do and could see how many other students they were up against. Thus, they did not talk about plot or characters; they presented matters tangential to the novel. Their topics included: the firebombing of Dresden, the Children’s Crusade, flying saucers, medical care for prisoners of war in WWII, Post Traumatic Stress studies, kinds of weapons used, and the Schlacthaus Funf that saved Vonnegut’s life.

            It occurred to me that this scattered approach was exactly the way to approach this novel—and maybe any novel. A major theme of Slaughter-house Five is that the little green creatures who spirit Billy Pilgrim off to the planet Tralfamadore tell him they can see all sides of any given moment or event at once. My students had given us a multifaceted context for the novel; all we had to do was shuffle these elements into the themes, characters, and plot of the novel. It was an accident. But it could easily be engineered by teachers instructing students, particularly if doing presentations as Power Points interspersed with other Internet resources and videos, not to choose characters, theme, plot, or the author of the novel as topics, but to deal with subjects tangential to it that might help the class understand the themes of the novel. For example, I usually urge students not to write papers about resurrection in A Tale of Two Cities since it is so obvious a theme. But it would be perfectly all right as a presentation topic explaining all the kinds of resurrection there are. Jerry Cruncher’s job of “resurrection man/grave robber” could then be put into the historical context of the Victorian culture’s needs as well as its fears and thoughts about an afterlife. Presentations of “facts” like characters and plot alone lead to a dead end in a presentation, whereas all the context surrounding those facts enrich and illuminate them, not at all by accident.

Donna Rae Foran, Mount Mary University