All teachers of Chaucer, surely in the United Kingdom as in the United States, know the delights of teaching The Canterbury Tales. The delights may begin the moment students chuckle at the bawdy pun in the doubly directed ‘So priketh’ line in the first lines of the General Prologue –

Those delights may continue up to the intriguing ambiguity of the Retraction's ‘I revoke in my retracciouns … the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne’ (X 328, 1084–5). Throughout the term, Chaucer slowly grows to giant stature in our students’ eyes – at least when things go well. And we are allowed both to watch and to assist in the process.

To be sure, not all US courses, probably not even the majority, focus solely on the Canterbury Tales; if a department has only the one Chaucer course, many, perhaps most, instructors will choose to present Chaucer's breadth with perhaps a few of the shorter poems, a dream vision, sometimes the entirety of Troilus and Criseyde, and a representative sampling of The Tales. For a sampling of course outlines from US colleges and universities, visit the web syllabuses of Professors Edwin Duncan (Towson University), Alan Baragona (Virginia Military Institute), James M. Dean (University of Delaware), Jennifer Bryan (Oberlin College), David Wilson-Okamura (Macalester College), Tamara O’Callaghan (Northern Kentucky University), R. Alan Shoaf (University of Florida), Steven F. Kruger (City University of New York), or many others easily accessible on the World Wide Web.10 Several of those professors have chosen to focus on a variety of Chaucer's poems; this essay, however, focuses on my own course, where we read only the Parliament of Fowls and, chiefly, the Canterbury Tales. I discuss here two problems which seem to me paramount in the teaching of Chaucer in the United States: our students’ failure to read in advance, and their failure to understand Chaucer's approach(es) to Christianity. The more crucial problem is the first; I shall deal with it last.