ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction -- a success story.
Today was our final day for ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction ... and, honestly, things couldn't have gone better. My students loved the course, and for the first time in my career, I got an ovation at the end of class. But they were really the best students any teacher could hope for. I'll miss them. As our last mini-assignment, I asked for an open-ended reflection on readings, assignments, life in general ... anything. Honestly, I just wanted to hear them chat about anything they pleased. The results were fascinating, so I'm sharing some of them here. So, so many of my students reported that they first learned to love reading because of fantasy -- YA fantasy in particular. One woman even admitted that she first learned how to read so she could play D&D with her dad. Others gushed about particular books they read for the course, or about general fantasy novels they loved from before. Nobody, though, ever seems to have had the chance to study in fantasy in college, at least b...