Chaucer's Reflection In The Canterbury Tales

When it comes to The Canterbury Tales, nothing is safe from scrutiny. When the idea of doing a pedagogical project was introduced for this class, my mind immediately began buzzing with ideas of what I should do. One day I hope to have a class of my own, so being able to approach an assignment in a pedagogical way is something I’ve looked forward to for a while. Though we’ve read many great stories in this class, The Canterbury Tales is one that’s become quite a favorite of mine. Since this story covers many different themes and storylines, I decided to focus on Chaucer’s satirical outlook on the class system and his portrayal of the pilgrims’ portraits. The ideal class that I would be teaching this to would be a junior or senior level high

Reading The Canterbury Tales isn’t an easy task to accomplish, even as a college student. Even though for my lesson I would be providing a slightly more modern translation, elements of Chaucer’s language can still be found in the story. According to Sarah Powrie, “Chaucer’s humor has a timeliness that remains obscured in Middle English verse. Translations enable students to understand Chaucer’s humor and contemporary relevance.” Even though my lesson plan doesn’t go into major detail about his language, through analyzing satire we can appreciate his humor. Thanks to his language we can better understand satire which is the overriding element throughout the

I will assign characters for certain students to read aloud, like one student will read the section over the cook and a different student will read the section over the miller, and so forth. Assigning roles to the students will allow for more group participation and will bring a fun theatricality to the lesson. Before we begin I will reiterate the importance of annotating and writing in the margins, so that way their thoughts are clear and concise. We will probably spend a whole class period reading the general prologue out loud together, which is okay since this is a very important part of the story. In a way to gauge their overall understanding of satire in Chaucer’s work, I will have the students write down on notebook paper all the examples of satire they can find after reading the general prologue. This will serve as more of a participation grade than an actual grade in itself. I don’t think it’s a good idea to automatically grade the students over a concept that is still relatively new to