the id, the ego, & the single misfiring brain cell

this, i (finally) understand

I'm truly, madly, deeply into teaching literature now. I'm still into composition (my first love), but I now understand how to teach literature, and why we must do so. If anything, I walk into class vastly over-prepared now. I have the students' buy-in, as well, so they come in prepared. 

Throughout my last teaching tour, I suffered from basic assumptions drawn from undergrad work in English that was not focused in literature, from not having done grad work in English literature yet and from, pretty much, a lifetime of reading literature for my own pleasure. I repeatedly walked into the classroom unconvinced that literature actually needed to be taught in the first place. (For some reason, I didn't have this problem with poetry.) I always knew that poetry needed to be read and discussed, but didn't really have a clue how or why it needed to be taught. I mean, doesn't literature teach itself? Just read it (and regular quizzes will ensure you do that much). 

Even by the time I finished the second master's degree--this time in English literature--I appreciated the instruction and the exposure to so much more literature and personalities and insights than I'd yet had. I made many good friends and I learned as much as I could, but...I guess I still didn't "get" why literature needs to be taught. I mean, I don't "get" all literature (I don't think anyone does) any more than I "get" all movies or all poetry or all song lyrics etc. But I do understand certain basic concepts which I don't ever remember not "getting." Perhaps I was taught in elementary school about the difference between the writer and the narrator, for example; I don't remember it, but I don't recall ever confusing the two. I struggled a lot with symbolism admittedly; I've suffered from insufferable literalism most of my life, so I figured that in most cases, the cigar was just a cigar. It seemed to me that my fellow students were foisting "symbols" into the narrative which were not there (and in many cases, this was so). Since, though, I have come to understand that symbolism is one of the most powerful tools in the writer's arsenal, and it is often used with clear intent--it just helps if you're first open to the idea that the writer has more to share with you than what she is saying outright. And so on. 

I cringe to remember my lit students from my first teaching tour. I feel that I failed them in many ways. I taught them how to organize their thoughts and write a good paper, yes. I helped them see the awesomeness of poetry in a lot of cases. And we got into some great philosophical discussions about the literature we were reading, but I failed to teach those things I have always taken for granted, and in so doing, I failed them. 

As I mentioned, my epiphany about how (and why) I need to teach literature didn't come with the second master's. It came during my stint at Joint and Combined Warfighting School, when I passed along a short story from Robert Heinlein's tour de force, Time Enough For Love, to my flight. I blogged about that experience here. I was dumbfounded, obviously. 

I've had time to process the experience, and I've decided that people don't just know that the plot is not just the action. They don't just know that the climax in truly great (lasting, canonized) literature is usually contained in one or two sentences, where the sometimes understated action denotes a character's realization and subsequent psychological change. They don't just know that Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" is a metaphor for the social prison in which women were hopelessly and lovingly trapped. A story's point of view--and the reasons it is chosen--is a question they rarely ask and therefore never give any serious thought to and thus do not understand. These play into our ability--or inability--to understand an author's meaning (although there is often ambiguity in that, as well), and they, clearly, must be taught. 

So now I walk into my class with information and questions and requirements that my students think about implications and meaning. And they...they are amazing me by their fully-engaged responses, their textual proofs, and the ideas they are connecting. 

***

Honestly...I just told Mich just how stupid I think I am sometimes. It took me 45 years to put that together. 

Better late than never, though. 

Y'all be excellent to one another...

d