The Miller's Tale

Hello everyone,

Last week I taught a lesson on the Miller's Tale to three periods of ENG IV, a 12th grade class. The class had begun reading Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and just finished the prologue. I enjoy The Canterbury Tales very much, and was excited to be able to teach a lesson that, criminally, was not included in the assigned textbooks they were reading the Canterbury Tales in. I chose one of my favorite tales, and perhaps the most iconic of Chaucer's oeuvre, The Miller's Tale. It is one of the funniest and grossest of the tales, and satirizes some vary basic and eternal human vanities; greed, ego, lust, scatological humor, etc. I was fairly certain the students would enjoy the tale on a surface level, for its shock value if nothing else, but I decided to focus on the concept of satire. In their reading of the prologue, which I observed in my 30+ hours of field experience, I noticed that students could generally comprehend the text well enough, but did not understand what Chaucer was attempting to accomplish on a satirical level. For lack of a better word, I did not feel students were "getting" what makes the Canterbury Tales such a timeless part of the literary canon. I designed my lesson with the hope of giving students the tools to identify and analyze this satire in all of Chaucer's work, not just the Miller's Tale.

After asking the class about Hugh Hefner, I opened the class with this video. We watched the first 6 minutes and a half of the video. Initially, I just wanted them to be able to visualize the character sin the tale and have an example of how Chaucer's jokes still apply to people's flaws today, but the video ended up serving an even better purpose. For struggling readers or more visual learners, students often referred to the main characters of the tale as "Oh, the hot chick from the video," or "Oh, the guy in the background who had a crush on Alison." I was able to pause the video at about 6:32 and display this to the class, which gave everyone a clear picture of the tale's four main characters. I found this helped students who struggled with Chaucer's complex syntax to identify description with the appropriate character.

I split about 200 lines worth of selections from the tale I felt characterized all of the main characters and showed students the climax (and, of course, the kissing of the "nether ye"). Because I only had an hour, I wanted to be able to really focus and dig deep into excellent examples of satire. In my first two periods, I used a round robin style, as my field experience teacher usually did, hoping to keep students in their comfort zone. In the third period, I read myself in my most active and engaging storytelling voice, and felt the class was much smoother and focused for it. I found that the more enthusiastic I was, the more enthusiastic student discussion became. It was great to see some of the students' faces light up in understanding, or snickering at a joke as I explained it. The climax, of course, really gripped the students, with many oohs and aahs and eeewwws. This is pretty routine for any class reading of the Miller's Tale, but it was so satisfying for me to see students I had observed to be uninterested in class or reluctant readers previously engaged in the class reading.

I feel that the students did understand what I was trying to get at. I have not heard back from my teacher, but I sent an email inquiring how the homework went. The questions I had originally designed as class discussion and reflection after the reading was assigned as homework by the field experience teacher, which I was very grateful for and impressed by; she placed a lot of trust in me to teach her students well. Unfortunately, I was only able to model an ideal answer for two of the periods in class after reading; we ran out of time in the first period, and I am unsure how the students will feel about the questions. In the class reading, I focused on breaking down every chunk I passed out and identifying elements of satire. Thanks to a class I had taken on the Canterbury Tales with the wonderful Professor Clasby, I was well versed in the society of the time and was able to fill students in on plenty of background knowledge.

Unfortunately, the students I mentioned earlier to be reluctant or struggling readers did not seem to receive the lesson well. I am worried I failed them, and wish I had had more time to go over the text and questions with them individually. Some of said students seemed completely disengaged by my reading, sleeping or texting through my lesson at times. I also think that was a bit of respect issue. I was not their teacher and a merely a "special guest," and did not have many opportunities throughout the semester to earn that kind of disciplinary command a teacher needs to work for. I will update this post when I receive word from my field experience teacher on how the homework assignments went. Hopefully my lesson was successful. My teacher told me after she thinks it went very well, and two of my classmates were there to observe, Pascal and Olivia. Perhaps they can give a more neutral third-party opinion.