Erin, if you have free choice, pick an area that you know really well. The problem with doing a specialized seminar that you don't know inside and out is that you're going to add a ton of research and reading time to prepare and teach it well. It can be worth it (what I learned while prepping for my African American Lit. class was amazing), but I think it's easier and more fun to design an elective around one of your personal passions. If I could teach anything, I might teach a seminar like Memoir, African American Lit., Women's Voices, Creative Writing, 20th Century Literature, etc. because those are my passions and areas of expertise. Think about yours and I bet you'll come up with something great!

I think The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was probably the book that impacted me most in High School. Well, unless you count the discovery that Billy Budd is a universal cure for insomnia.

One fun thing was that AP Senior English became Men Are Pigs 101 since our teacher was going through a bitter divorce at the time.

Help a high school teacher out -- thoughts?

That Sexy, Sexy Shakespeare

My greek professor at college taught a survey course titled: Eros in Literature, which he copped to as his personal Greatest Hits of Greek Lit. But it was great and we read Sappho and the Golden Ass and Homer and the Satyricon and Menander.

I think you should teach a course like that whose secret title is: Erin Loves These Books The Best. If you love 'em, it'll be easier to teach them.

Well, unless you count the discovery that Billy Budd is a universal cure for insomnia.

Henry James.

One fun thing was that AP Senior English became Men Are Pigs 101 since our teacher was going through a bitter divorce at the time.

Similar story for sophomore and junior english, though our teacher veered more towards fawning all over the brown-nosing boys and dismissing the girls, when she wasn't badmouthing men and marriage. We wondered if there had be an affair with a much younger person. It was a bit uncomfortable.

Probably the best class I took in grad school was a seminar on the memoir.

Nice. One of the worst classes I took as an undergrad was on Nabokov's work, but the problem was the prof, not the literature.

I was going to suggest Southern lit, one of my faves as an undergrad. You could cover The Awakening, My Bondage and My Freedom (or readings from it), Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Wild Palms (or, at least, the Old Man story), Huckleberry Finn, The Souls of Black Folks, The Mind of The South, and more contemporary writings like Other Voices, Other Rooms, Wise Blood, "Why I Live At The P.O.," and/or works by Barry Hannah, Walker Percy, and their like.

Henry James wakes me up occasionally when he makes me want to throw the book across the room.

The mention of southern lit reminded me I used Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for one of the essays on the AP exam. I think it was about black humor. I do recall I got the giggles throughout writing it. Man, that book made me laugh.

One of my college classes was about southern philosophers, or something like that.

I took a high school english elective on Madness in Literature. You can get a fair amount in there - from King Lear to The Yellow Wallpaper to Salinger.

I took a class in college on The Bible In Literature. Not the Bible as literature. We read The Master and Margarita, Barabbas, I can't remember what else. But I thought it was as interesting idea.

In high school, the only English electives I took were speech and essay writing.