Mrs. O'Neill is a secondary school teacher from the UK who is teaching in Minnesota. She also maintains the always interesting Mrs O'Neill's Blog.

It starts quite well. There's a sticky moment for my Minnesotan students when they realize we are not talking about those Vikings. However, they grudgingly admit they liked the short film on Anglo-Saxon Britain. They are fascinated by just how different old English is from modern English. 'Bad' spelling is always comforting. We actually have a couple of brief discussions on why we use punctuation and Beowulf's author(s) didn't. The students are willing to talk about alliteration and what it actually does in a poem. They have written a couple of their own kennings and some rather clever riddles.

Question: You punch my face and expect to hear a friend's reply. What am I?

Answer: A cell phone.

And now we come to the actual text. We look at several translations, not just the one in our book, and we choose the translation we, as a class, like best. We're off. We race through to Hrothgar's building of Heorot. We are suitably repulsed by Grendel's gory 'take out'. We can't wait for Beowulf to dispose of him. We love it when Beowulf vanquishes Grendel with nothing but the power of his hands. We can almost hear Grendel's claws cracking like walnuts.

The battle with Grendel's mother is a little more challenging. His mother? We descend with Beowulf into the murky lake and dutifully dissect the fight. Attention is waning, however, and students are starting to ask when we will 'finish off Beowulf'? The malcontents are grumbling amongst themselves. Beowulf it seems has become a bit 'boring'—an unwelcome alliteration.

And now comes the English teacher's dilemma. Do I wrap it up now, whilst they are still – apart from the usual suspects, who would be bored by Armageddon - thinking fondly of Beowulf? Or do I push on regardless, to the end of the text, anxious to make sure they 'know the poem'?

Every now and then when I am struggling with this sort of problem. I hear the voice of a wise and wonderful teacher, my last department head. "You have to ask yourself," she says, "what is in this for the kids? What exactly are you hoping they will learn from this? What is your learning objective?"

The answer comes easily. At this point in the study I want them to be making connections with the text, seeing its relevance for themselves. It's time for me to stop trying to entertain them, and have them entertain me.

I set a new assignment. 'Take the basic plot of Beowulf's fight with Grendel's mother and put it into a modern setting. We discuss a few scenarios. A small storeowner about to be put out of business by a large chain, a policeman who discovers that the killer he has put behind bars has an even more evil boss. I put the students in groups to help out the less imaginative. Each group may use the same basic plot, but each member must submit their own version of it.

The results are profoundly heartening. The students choose their own form—a page torn from a novel, a key scene in a movie, or a dramatic monologue. New talents are discovered. A few students opt to script and film a scene on their own time. Another student writes a film script that shows a deeper awareness of the themes of Beowulf than I had grasped myself. He has me cross referencing the text with his script, in delight.

Hardly any students remember their class mantra: 'How long does it have to be?'

And I re-learn something. Don't underestimate your students. Don't be afraid to change direction. Keep asking yourself: What do I want these students to learn, now?

One of these days I am actually going to put that into practice before I get into "the murky lake".

More commentary by Mrs. O'Neill:

In Minnesota, I teach 9th Grade to 12th Grade. It's a small school.

This lesson involved teaching Beowulf to a British Lit class, which is mainly aimed at juniors

who are not taking AP classes.

My school teaches it during the Junior - but I can see it being taught at any high school stage.

I think the idea of placing a scene in a modern context is applicable at most grades, to one degree or another.

In the UK I taught 12 -18 year-olds - our high schools have six grades rather than four. Most high school teachers would have students from each year group.

I have used the idea of transferring the plot to a modern setting to good effect with all of these age groups. The most difficult class I ever had - thoroughly disaffected 15 year olds- began to be enthused about Macbeth when I got them to try portraying him as a soldier suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. (a pretty serious case :)

Obviously you must take care not to 'dumb down' the material. I insist on having them read the original text. They need to know its context. However, they also need 'a way in'. Great literature isn't bound by time... but we are, I suppose.

Update on Friday, December 19, 2008 at 12:26PM by Mitch Weisburgh

Teaching Writing Tips Contest Extended

Please note that the deadline to submit or vote on tips for teaching writing has been extended to January 1.

So far, there have been some very interesting suggestions.