Things Fall Apart: My Experiences as a Teacher of English

This is my first time using the mobile blogger app. One of my aims in having my students blog in the English classroom is to increase their level of engagement.

In a recent conversation I had with one of last year's Metro graduates, I
learned that although this individual graduated in the top ten percent of the class, the student is overwhelmed by the demands of college. The student had never written a paper five pages or more in length and is now expected to on a regular basis.

Okonkwo, the protagonist of Achebe's modernist classic, is a beast. He drinks palm wine out of the first skull/head he ever separated from its owner. He gives his dead father no respect because like the character of Lyons in Wilson's Fences, his father Unoka was a debtor, musician and heavy drinker.

Achebe takes his title from a line of Yeats, arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Things Fall Apart comes from the poem "The Second Coming." These two works are thematically linked as they both deal with the cyclical and violent nature of political and cultural change.