Background

What we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how .

-William Wordsworth

Our Wish

The above quote from William Wordsworth sums up the motive for Got Lit? We started as a group of concerned middle and high school English teachers who noticed it was becoming increasingly difficult to teach our students literature. The students no longer posessed the background and abilities necessary to read classic literature. In short, they just don't "get lit".

It saddened us to realize that the great literary works we loved since childhood were of no intererst to our students and we resolved to work collaboratively and share ideas in hopes of developing an approach that could reach them.

The Problem

The students all exhibited similar traits:

• little or no interest in reading even though they knew how to read
• immediate rejection of any work that exhibited vocabulary that was foreign or difficult
• saw reading as a chore and isolating experience instead of seeing it as a catalyst for learning which in turn will allow them to share ideas with their peers

Re-discovering Our Target Audience

We realized this new wave of students had grown up in a different world than had existed just a short time ago, so we set out to find a way to relate to these students and teach them in a way that was meaningful to them.

Past attempts as solving this solution have failed for several reasons:

1. They underestimate the time necessary to build a good foundation thus didn't dedicate enough time for this.
2. Technology is seldom used and when it was it was utilized in a way the cirumvented the reading process, not enhance it (books on CD for example).

Our focus is on middle and high school students who can read, but are not engaged in reading, nor are they capable of reading and interpreting classic forms of literature. In other words they read, when they are forced to, but they "just don't get it".

The Solution

Got Lit? is the solution to our problem. It was developed by teacher who worked collaboratively to share ideas of what has worked for them in the past. We use existing technology in new ways to help support the reading process, not circumvent it.

The purpose of Got Lit? is to provide teachers with a framework of useful tools that will help them connect with their students, thus enabling the teacher to provide the student with the foundation necessary "get lit".