Elisa’s Reviews > The Great Gatsby > Status Update

Now, new book thoughts: Daisy and Tom are more similar to each other than we think, especially with how they're written. Tom's still an asshole and abusive, but his engagement with life otherwise ain't too different from Daisy. They're just different fonts.

6th times the charm! 6th time reading, 5th time teaching it. Teaching reflections: I forgot to do some authorial context with one of my classes until after chapter #3 and it reminded me about the joys of reading something and then later digging into context and having that aha moment. It was nice to see kids make connections after having some of the story under their belt.

I am once again teaching this again so here's to the yearly re-read.

First read this book in 2013 when I was a Junior in HS (and I logged my reading progress and talked about my frustrations with having to annotate)! Now I'm teaching it to Sophomores. Funny how time flies.

Chapter #1 reflection - it's dry and hard to get buy-in from students. But they also notice Nick's homoerotic comments immediately so now we're going to bring in some queer theory! Also - Tom's still an ass.

Annotating is almost ruining this book/reading experience for me. It's actually pretty decent thus far.