Washington Irving Society

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

BY TRACY HOFFMAN

Last week, I blogged about ChatGPT’s advice for 31 ways of teaching “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in the K-12 classroom, so this week, I’m adding the university setting to the conversation.

Historical connections are listed for all learners, but cultural context was added for the university classroom. Cultural context for the story could include Dutch history, the Connecticut Yankee on stage, post-Revolutionary America, and more. Discussing Royal Tyler’s Jonathan in The Contrast (1787) probably wouldn’t work well in an elementary classroom, yet I can still imagine showing images of Connecticut Yankees to students of all ages.

Cultural context could still be relevant for younger students. But I get it. Reading Comprehension, a category set aside only for younger learners, would be more important than guiding students through the early American stage.

Lessons suggested for the university classroom, which I find particularly interesting, include:

A field trip to Sleepy Hollow sounds like the very best idea, especially if I could take my entire class from Texas. Any wealthy donors want to make an end-of-year contribution to a most deserving 501-C3? One day, perhaps, I can take a crew to New York for the fall, the best time to go. In the meanwhile, a virtual tour of Sleepy Hollow sounds like a worthwhile endeavor.

The Multimedia Project/Audio Drama reminds me of what I already do with my classes. Students work in groups to put together podcasts, but I don’t make them perform the text. They simply chat about Irving or whatever we’re studying. However, I could see myself adjusting this assignment for future semesters. Professors are often concerned about whether students have done the reading. If they perform the text, then there’s no doubting whether they’ve read it.

For the Creative Writing/Alternative Ending suggestion, I already gave a nod to rewriting the end of “Sleepy Hollow” for K-12, but it’s repeated here for college students. I shall definitely give this a whirl in the spring. We’ve already read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in all of my classes for this semester.

Cross-Cultural Ghost Stories could be worthwhile, and the suggestion of including Japanese stories fascinates me. I’m always looking for ways to merge Washington Irving with Asian-American Literature, which I’ve started teaching recently, and ghost stories would be another way of doing so.

The American Frontier, Ecocriticism, and Mapping Sleepy Hollow stand out to me since, earlier this afternoon, my Washington Irving class read and discussed “The Adventure of the German Student,” which appears in Tales of a Traveller (1824). From the very beginning of the story, Irving paints the Paris scene, as he sets up Tarry Town in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Instead of “the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson,” we get “a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution” along with “loud claps of thunder,” reminiscent of “Rip Van Winkle.”

By the way, this is what I’ve been listening to while writing this blog, in case you were wondering:

I took the advice of my blog from last week, to consider music/playlists as I’m teaching Irving’s texts. For some reason, guitar music always reminds me of Washington Irving, perhaps because of his stay at the Alhambra and my listening to many a Spanish guitar while visiting Granada and southern Spain.

With dogs barking outside my office window, the cleaning staff vacuuming outside my door, and with my office still sitting at 80 degrees, I needed noise-canceling headphones, strong Starbucks coffee, and instrumental guitar music to help me say something in a blog before 11:59 p.m. on this Washington Irving Wednesday. Hopefully, a thing or two I’ve shared will be useful to you.

My students have compiled playlists of their own, in response to one of my midterm exam questions, and I’ll share their suggestions for next week’s blog. The music selections, which remind them of Washington Irving, made me smile, and I think you’ll enjoy their suggestions, too. Until next week.