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Great Courses: How Science Fiction Works


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My son and I are really enjoying this course. We are trying to read a lot of the books, so we have only watched the first few lectures. Has anyone else used this course? We may call this literature for the rest of the semester. It might also be fun to watch some of the films based on these books.

 

I am getting a bit overwhelmed by how rich this course is. I know it is new and people may not have used it yet, but any ideas are welcome! So far we are reading Lucian, Frankenstein, some Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, The Man In the High Castle, and A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

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I am so happy to read your positive review. I bought it recently but don't plan to use until next year. I will use it for an English credit or as an elective, depending on where we are at the time. I do plan on us reading as many of the books mentioned as possible.

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I'm waiting a little more to see if price will drop. Going to use it to round out son's SciFi Lit credit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was just wondering this morning if anyone has used it yet.

 

We just finished How to Read and Understand Shakespeare and loved it.

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I'm waiting a little more to see if price will drop. Going to use it to round out son's SciFi Lit credit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was just wondering this morning if anyone has used it yet.

 

We just finished How to Read and Understand Shakespeare and loved it.

It is on sale right now. I might purchase it now to use in the future. Thanks for the heads up on the class!

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I'm waiting a little more to see if price will drop. Going to use it to round out son's SciFi Lit credit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was just wondering this morning if anyone has used it yet.

 

We just finished How to Read and Understand Shakespeare and loved it.

I would love to hear more about the sci fi lit credit!

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Does it over literary analysis in detail as well as literary terms?

From going through the course materials and watching the first few lectures, I would say no. It uses terms, such as protagonist or theme, but it doesn't go through literary terms for their own sake. It is focused on the history of science fiction, different settings such as planets or wastelands, themes such as history or time, and icons such as spaceships or robots.

 

The course goes into a lot of detail about theme, characters, plot, setting, comparing authors, historical context, society, etc.

 

So things like finding the rising action and climax, or metaphor and simile, would need to be taught separately. Then those skills can be used with this course. We have done some of this already with Teaching the Classics. As I said though we are just getting started with the science fiction course so I am still working out how to use it.

 

Each lecture has a couple of writing prompts as well. I am not sure which of these to assign or if I want him to write based more on analysis of the literature.

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I'm waiting a little more to see if price will drop. Going to use it to round out son's SciFi Lit credit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I was just wondering this morning if anyone has used it yet.

 

We just finished How to Read and Understand Shakespeare and loved it.

I'd also love to hear more about your son's SciFi Lit credit!

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I would love to hear more about the sci fi lit credit!

 

I'd also love to hear more about your son's SciFi Lit credit!

 

We are combining Sci Fi and Fantasy with the bulk of the input coming from sci fi and bulk of output coming from the fantasy portion if that makes sense. I had not planned it that way but it turned out as such and I have a happy trooper so I am not going to push too hard.

 

For sci fi, we have the following authors as primary studies so far: Mary Shelley (just Frankenstein), HG Wells, Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov and Philip K. Dick. And selections from Science Fiction by Heather Masri and Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer. I'm saving Le Guin for last.

 

For fantasy, we studied Tolkien as in depth as we could (Hobbit, the trilogy, short stories, essays and other work) and that's the bulk of his writing assignments as well. We also discussed other authors like Clive Barker and Susannah Clark focusing on the worlds they were trying to build and contrasting their worlds with the depths Tolkien went to. We don't do one lit credit a year. We are covering/ unschooling about 0.25 credits worth of two different streams of lit over a span of a few years. It works so well for my kiddo that way because he loves re-reading books and I can really see his analysis maturing as he grows with the books vs trying to do it all in one year.

Edited by quark
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