Crime and Punishment

This is what you combine a Heroines & Heroes class, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, sluggish students, and an impatient professor: aesthetic excellence and a teachable moment. Actually, the students are enjoying Crime and Punishment quite a bit.  As always, my colleagues are much cooler than me, so while they're having their students read Harry Potter or graphic novels in Heroines & Heroes I'm having them read Dostoevsky.  This follows in the tradition of me having them read the Ramayana, the Shahnameh and the Arabian Nights.  I think I chose Dostoevsky out of vanity and spite, which are the inspirations for most of my decisions.  I picked up a cheap copy of Crime and Punishment last year and re-read in for the first time in over thirty years, and I was blown away (as all right-thinking individuals are) by how great it was.  While talking to some of my colleagues I proposed that I might select it for Heroines & Heroes, and the response was something akin to: "There's no way to teach Dostoevsky to Champlain students," and my response, not surprisingly, was something like, "Well, I'm sure you couldn't teach Dostoevsky to Champlain students, but I can." The students figured out pretty quickly how iconic Raskolnikov is, and I think they view his as the inspiration for so many messed up characters in video games and film. As has been proposed, if I have a talent as a teacher it's the ability to somehow make incredibly nerdy things cool, or, as one student wrote on a student eval, "I don't know what black magic you use to make me care about stuff I know I shouldn't."  Now, I can see the next logical step: Heroines & Heroes: Proust.

As you might guess, the impatient professor is on the right.