Literature Prep

I've been working on getting ready for teaching my BRITISH LITERATURE class next year (woooooooohoooooooooooooo!!!). My preliminary preparation has been reading up on the history of England. What a tale! I never took a British History class (shame on me), and things are beginning to click left and right!

"Ohhhh, THAT'S what the 100 year war was! Ohhhhh, THAT'S why Bonnie Prince Charlie should have been king! Ohhhhhh, THAT'S where the word spinster comes from! Ohhhh, THAT'S what "Tudor" and "Stuart" and all that is referring to!"

I love learning things!

But as I'm going through history like that, I have to brace myself for my strange alter-ego tendencies to emerge. I am such a conservative, and such a fan of tradition, that I just side with the Kings and Queens as a matter of course. So I'm reading along about such and such a king that was living in horrible excess, and I get annoyed when Parliament tries to check him! Weird. I really had to stop and get hold of myself when I was siding with the King against the MPs who wanted freedom of religion! Good grief. This conservative thing can go a bit too far. I mean, I'm an American, after all! I DO believe in freedom! So I decided that the Kings were pretty cool, but sometimes they did have some, er, issues.

By the way, I'm doing this study out of "A Children's History of Britain and Wales" or something like that. It's perfect! It's written for older children, who are really supposed to be learning, so there is actually serious content there. But it's not filled with humongous words, dry passages about currencies and such, or political nuances (or blatant agendas). Very nice! More history books should be written that way.