5: Death of a Salesman

So, now I'll only cheat a little bit by listing the books that I taught for the first time, or at least for the first time in a long time.

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a required text for juniors at my school, which is why I read it and taught it. I'm not a huge fan of this play. In some ways it reminds me of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; it's an interesting play, I'd love to see a live performance of it, but I just don't enjoy teaching it to high school students. I focus on Biff and his issues with the ways his dad raised him, but I really am not all that great about connecting this to my students. Perhaps the biggest problems is that I don't like it, which means they end up not liking it. Oh well, I'll try again next year.