T. S. 엘리엇 학부 강의 방법 연구

A Study on the Method for Teaching T. S. Eliot to the Undergraduates

T. S. Eliot's poetry is notoriously difficult for average undergraduates to read, and it is none the less difficult for teachers to help them read. But that doesn't mean it can be comfortably pushed aside. Eliot is too important to skip even in undergraduate classrooms. The purpose of this study is to show how the method of teaching Eliot's poetry devised by the present writer works in the undergraduate classroom, and with that to help the teacher tackle easily and efficiently the hard task of teaching some of the most difficult poetic works of Eliot. The distinctive feature of this method is the way it is adapted to the classroom. It is designed to help the teacher guide the students, through the carefully controlled teacher-student interactions, to spontaneous discovering of the meanings, to experiencing the emotions intended by the author. It is basically a response research done with special response sheets designed to guide the students to choose from options in numerous finely divided categories. One of the two major, and broader categories is for the thematic responses, and the other is for emotional responses. The general mode of the students' response to the options in these two categories regularly shows that their sensibility spontaneously reacts to the options in such a way as to justify Eliot's preference for those readers who can't read or write for his audience. They have caught the ideas the poets intended to tell them, and have felt the emotions the poets intended to share with them. Only they don't know they have. The core function of the teaching method used for this study is to help the students, through controlled guidance, process and organize meaningful intellectual and emotional data out of the chaotic jumble of the responses. This study is based on the present writer's experience of teaching Eliot's two most famous early poems: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land. It can be safely asserted that the teaching method used for, and studied in this essay, was fairly effective for teaching these poems.