Simpsons in the Classroom

If you're looking to start a class devoted entirely to the Simpsons, this book would probably be useful to you. If you're like me (a high school teacher that doesn't get to create courses covering whatever subject matter I want), it's not nearly as useful, at least not for anyone interested in using the Simpsons in a serious and curricularly defensible fashion.

My first year of teaching, I would have found the resources in this book useful. The authors provide an episode guide that tags each episode with thematic and intertextual descriptors. For a teacher looking to cram the Simpsons into their curriculum because they need to fill up a lesson plan for a sub (which a remarkable number of teachers at my school want to do), this episode guide is a great way for looking down a list and picking an episode that has a tag that corresponds to something that might be relevant to Romeo and Juliet. It's also useful for teachers who are looking for that episode that's like Lord of the Flies but are too lazy to Google (also a remarkable number of teachers at my school). However, using the Simpsons in this fashion treats the Simpsons like Family Guy. The Simpsons is more than just a collection of references. The authors organize this book into larger themes (linguistics, literature, post-moderism/zeitgeist) but most of the chapters are collections of references and then a couple of assignment suggestions, rather than a focused means of bringing the Simpsons into a class as a serious text.

For example, I teach Lord of the Flies. My first year of teaching, I showed “Das Bus” and “Kamp Krusty”, two episode that feature references to Lord of the Flies. That was lazy teaching. That was me saying, “I've got a half-day and I need something to show that relates to Lord of the Flies.” Teaching Lord of the Flies now, I wouldn't use “Das Bus” or Kamp Krusty. I would use “Much Apu About Nothing” and discuss the ways the people of Springfield use scapegoating and scaremongering and then compare that to what Jack does in LotF. To me, that makes for a much more interesting and meaningful discussion than watching “Das Bus” (which is an awesome episode) and then having students talk about the references the show makes to the novel.

Teachers who pick up this book to try and bring the Simpsons into their classrooms are not going to find meaningful ways to use the Simpsons to broaden the learning already going on in the classroom. They will find resources to help cherry pick episodes to supplement lessons in a very generic and uninspired fashion. For those of us wanting to actually teach the Simpsons in the same way we teach Great Expectations or Antigone (I use “Trilogy of Errors” and “Homer the Heretic”, respectively) will find this book lacking. The best way to embiggen the learning experience with the Simpsons is to watch the Simpsons. If you know what you teach and you watch the Simpsons, the lessons will come to you, rendering even the most painstakingly made charts and bibliographies completely unnecessary.