Pedagogy musings: necessary vs. plausible interpretations

So I have been grading poetry papers, which is a thing one should never do on a gloriously beautiful Saturday in April, particularly if they are papers from a gen ed lit survey. And I have been thinking about all the things that go wrong when we teach literature, and, especially, about the different types of interpretations we talk about, and how I, at least, am very not-good at teaching students to distinguish them from one another.

First of all, there is the necessary interpretation -- something that you absolutely need to get in order to make sense of the work at all, but you still need some level of interpretative sophistication to get there. For example, in My Last Duchess, "the speaker is an irrationally jealous control freak who certainly made his wife's life miserable, regardless of whether he literally murdered her or not" is a necessary interpretation; if you don't get that out of the text, you aren't getting the poem. But many students, particularly in gen ed classes, do not get that out of the text without prompting, since the Duke isn't about to TELL you he's a control freak. (Some students do not even get "the speaker's wife is dead and he's showing somebody a picture of her" out of the text; I'm never sure what to do about those.) So most of us, in gen ed classes, spend a fair amount of time explaining HOW the poem shows that this is the case. In that sort of situation, you really do need to teach a specific interpretation, and try to make sure the class is on the same page about it.

But there's also the plausible interpretation, one that is clearly grounded in the text, but does not absolutely have to be the case. Mutually-contradictory plausible interpretations can co-exist. For example, I could argue that the Duke is so convinced of his own rightness that he has no idea how much he's just revealed about his character, and then suddenly at the end of the poem he does realize it, and his "Nay, we'll go / Together down, sir" is a desperate attempt to keep his listener from ducking out and telling the-Count-his-Master to break off the marriage negotiations right now. You, on the other hand, could argue that he knows exactly how much he's revealing, and wants the man to repeat it all to the Count's fair daughter so she will know what sort of behavior he expects of his next wife, and what will happen to her if she doesn't obey. We're both right; or at least we are if we can find sufficient textual justification for our respective interpretations.

Mostly, I want my students to accept the necessary interpretations and debate the plausible ones, but it occurs to me that I'm kind of crap at explaining how we distinguish between one and the other, and if we're lucky enough to get to the point in class where a student advances a plausible interpretation and defends it reasonably well, my first instinct is to repeat it and praise it and show the class some other stuff in the poem that could support the student's reading. But that tends to cut off discussion, because of course the other students are all thinking "well, that's it, she's clearly got it right, and I must be wrong if I didn't see that, so I'm just going to sit here on my hands and be glad nobody noticed." (This is invariably what happens in gen ed; English majors generally know that a work can have multiple interpretations, although they may be shy about openly disagreeing with someone else's.)

And then there's the plausible-interpretation-with-extra-stuff -- for example, a reading of "My Last Duchess" that situates it in the context of Victorian patriarchy, and suggests that Browning is really critiquing his own culture when he's ostensibly writing about a Renaissance Duke. This is exactly the kind of interpretation that we want our upper-level students to do in their research papers, and therefore we need to model it for them at some point, but teaching it in a lower-level survey is problematic, because it's usually not an interpretation that the students could have come up with for themselves on the basis of what they know right now, so it tends to reinforce the impression that the Professor Knows All and Poetry Is Way Too Hard For Me To Get The Right Answer By Myself. (Well, I think it's problematic; some of my grad school professors saw absolutely nothing wrong with teaching their own research, even at the sophomore-survey level.) But for some works, it's necessary (you cannot, for example, teach An Irish Airman Foresees His Death without some amount of historical context, even though it's not at all a difficult poem for students to read. At least, I do not see how to teach it.) Ideally, you could just provide the context-mini-lecture at the beginning of class, give the students what they need, and turn them loose on the texts, but this never seems to work that well when I try it in practice.

(Also, I'm suddenly remembering that I hated English lit up until tenth grade or so, because my teachers kept teaching plausible interpretations -- such as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is Really About Contemplating Suicide -- as if they were necessary interpretations, and I felt sort of stifled, because that was not an interpretation that I would have come up with, and there suddenly didn't seem to be any room for it to be a poem about how pretty the woods were at night. I don't know whether I started drawing better teachers at that point, ones who did make the distinction, or whether I just happened to get a run of teachers whose plausible interpretations didn't annoy me too much. I hope I do not stifle my students. But I am not sure I don't.)

For our Honors scholarship candidates, a piece of unsolicited advice

You know that place on the application where it asks you to write about the achievement you're most proud of? Consider not using it to tell us about your 4.0 GPA.

Tell us about that cool science project you did. Tell us how you're always starting novels and you finally finished one. Tell us how you got promoted to manager at your job. Tell us about the first meal you cooked by yourself. Tell us how you took care of your grandmother when she was dying. Tell us about the time you protested that awful policy at your school and succeeded in getting it changed. Or tell us how you didn't succeed, but you still think it was the right thing to do.

Tell us about something real. (Numbers on a transcript are not real.) Tell us about something that will stay with you. (Your 4.0 will not stay with you. One muffed test, or one cranky teacher, and it's gone forever. You will not miss it.)

If you must tell us about your grades, tell us about how you blew off ninth grade geometry for half a semester and panicked when you realized your midterm average was a 47% and your parents were absolutely going to kill you when they found out, and then you buckled down and turned yourself into a geometry machine for the next nine weeks and managed to bring your final grade up to a hard-won C. And that was how you realized you were actually good at math when you could be bothered to put in the time and effort.

Oh wait, that wasn't you, that was me. (They let me into college anyway. They even let me be a professor, eventually.) And it happened back in 1991, before parents could check their kid's grades online every single night and find out about every missed homework assignment at once; back when teachers could assign an F and make it stick.

I think I see the problem here...

Bobfest

I've really been a neglectful blogger lately, I know. (Somehow, one's third year on the tenure track is not fraught with the level of drama that the job search was, or even the first year. And that is probably just as well.)

But! It is Bob Dylan's 70th birthday today, so that seems a fine occasion for a gratuitous music-spam post. (And this IS SO related to the ostensible subject matter of this blog; you see, the thing that blows me away about Dylan is the same thing that blows me away about Shakespeare. It's the sheer variety, and versatility, and the ability to twist a phrase that is both unexpected and just right.) So: eight favorite songs, in no particular order.

1) Love Minus Zero / No Limit. Bringing It All Back Home was the first album I ever bought. (On cassette tape, for $4.99, from the bargain bin at Sam Goody's. And God, I'm starting to feel old.) I loved it all, but especially this track, which seemed to speak of this whole grown-up world (out in New York City or somewhere, before I was born) that I wanted so much to have been a part of.

2) One Too Many Mornings. Another song that takes me straight back to high school: a snow day this time, flakes drifting slowly down over the concrete-block buildings of a suburb built in the '70s, and cigarette smoke curling upward.

3) Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts. (Can't find the original version from Blood on the Tracks, but this cover by Joan Baez is nice.) Love the surreal Old West feel of this one, as well as the fact that it seems to be a sort of revenge tragedy.

4) Shooting Star. This song always makes me think of a boy named Caleb who I knew in high school. He was one of those kids who had that certain air of cool about them, so I don't think he and I exchanged more than a dozen words, but I noticed him because he loved Dylan and the Dead, and went about in tie-dyes and dreadlocks, and was reassuring proof that you could be cool and still be your own person.

He died a few years after we graduated. Suicide, apparently triggered by schizophrenia. I wish I had told him that I admired him, that he was one of the people who gave me hope that adult life would be better.

5) Chimes of Freedom. (Again, a cover version since I couldn't find the original, but the Byrds' version absolutely soars, for all that I regret the loss of the middle verses.) Possibly one of the most gorgeous songs ever written.

6) Jokerman. Because no list like this is complete without one full-on apocalypse song.

7) Every Grain of Sand. Emmylou Harris's version, which was the one I fell in love with first. (Godless, secular humanist that I am, I'm not sure why I love this one so much, but there's something about the idea of taking stock, of weighing what one's life has been and meant, that always gets to me.)

8) Mississippi. This is rapidly becoming the theme song to my life. Which is probably not so good, as I think it's a song about getting older and realizing how many choices you've closed off for yourself; but it is also a song about making the best of the ones you've got left, and that's something.

idle musings about high school English

Congrats to Horace for correctly identifying the poem from my last stick-figure lit post: Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

I've been enjoying Dr Crazy's and What Now's posts about the high school English curriculum. I have nothing very profound to add to the discussion, especially compared to What Now's firsthand expertise, but it's got me thinking about my own h.s. English experiences.

Three out of four of my high school English teachers were terrific. The fourth one (ninth grade) was fairly awful, for the simple reason that she didn't like books. Seriously. I swear, she described EVERYTHING we read that year as "stupid." Romeo and Juliet, for example, was "a play about two stupid kids who think they're in love when it's really just infatuation, and they die because they won't obey their parents, who know better." (Curiously, this is a moderately accurate description of Shakespeare's source, but I doubt she knew that.) Anyway, she didn't quite manage to ruin Romeo and Juliet for me, or "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (a stupid story about a stupid man who won't face up to reality), but I do think I would have fallen in love with Great Expectations much, much earlier if I had encountered it with almost any other teacher.

My intermediate-school teachers were similarly uninspiring, so I went into tenth-grade English with minimal expectations. It probably wasn't until halfway through the year that I realized I was actually kind of liking the class, and was good at it. The teacher was a middle-aged woman, no nonsense about her, not particularly funny or charismatic -- but she respected the written word, and that mattered. (She was also capable of conveying this respect for Dickens while at the same time pointing out that the female characters in A Tale of Two Cities were basically ciphers; this is probably the closest thing to a feminist perspective that I encountered during my high school years. My last two teachers were men with big voices and big personalities; they, too, were very, very good at what they did, but except for the odd Emily Dickinson poem, women writers weren't on the program. I didn't notice this absence until college.)

Anyway, here's what I remember of our reading list:

Ninth grade: Lord of the Flies, Black Boy, To Kill a Mockingbird, Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," "Barn Burning," Romeo and Juliet; one independent reading book (assigned by the teacher); probably some other works I don't remember. (Looking back on this list, I think some curriculum designer may have been going for a coming-of-age theme? At any rate, it didn't translate; I don't remember our teacher drawing any connections between works in the classroom.)

Tenth grade: As You Like It, Julius Caesar, A Doll's House, A Tale of Two Cities, Cry, The Beloved Country, Night, one group project book (chosen by the group from an approved list; I still bear a grudge against my classmates for picking Silas Marner). I am positive that we must have read a number of other works, but I don't remember what they were.

Eleventh grade (American lit): "Civil Disobedience," Death of a Salesman, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, Catcher in the Rye, various short stories (an awful lot of which seemed to be by Hemingway), rather a lot of poetry.

Twelfth grade (AP English lit): Huge chunks of the Bible and Edith Hamilton's Mythology (to be completed over the summer); The Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, The Infernal Machine, Antigone, Candide, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Absalom, Absalom; a whole boatload of poetry and short stories (of which I think Yukio Mishima's "Patriotism" was the sole non-Western selection). Plus one longer, college-style essay on a play of the student's choosing. (I picked Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding and fell giddily in love, much to my teacher's delight as well as my own.)

Looking back over this, it seems like a wildly unbalanced list in some ways; in addition to the near-absence of female and nonwhite writers (even canonical ones), there's the peculiar fact that I went away to college with a very good grounding in Shakespeare, a decent knowledge of ancient Greek drama, and absolutely no clue about anything in between. I can't complain; college filled in most of those gaps, and there was nothing to stop my teenage-self from going on an Alice Walker kick in my spare time (which I did). There's relatively little comedy, too; if I were going to make up a reading list of my own, I'd want to throw in some Austen or Chaucer or Wilde to lighten things up.

Also: man, my AP English class was hardcore. And I loved it. In fact, I think that was the year I fell in love with about 90% of everything we read, and surprised myself by loving Faulkner. Partly, I think that was a maturity thing; partly it was the sheer force of the teacher's personality; maybe it was also the fact that we shared a weakness for darkness and blood and family curses.

And also: You know what my eleventh- and twelfth-grade teachers did that really struck a chord with me? They framed classic literature as transgressive. (Which it totally was, most of it, in its day; we got to hear all about those wild and crazy Transcendentalists.) And I already knew, from my own experience, that reading this stuff for pleasure was more than a little countercultural in my massive concrete-block suburban public high school. I learned how to tune out the mandatory pep rallies by reading Greek tragedy. It was awesome. Maybe that's the way to sell books to teenagers.

Wherein I am annoyed by a Washington Post article. I think.

The article in question is this one, "Ripped Books" by high school English teacher Nancy Schnog. The link probably requires registration, but the gist of it is, Schnog thinks students don't read because high schools are teaching the wrong books, and teaching them the wrong way.

"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."

OK. I can kinda-sorta see Schnog's point. One correspondent, a high school senior, writes in to the online discussion about the article with a description of an all-too-typical high school English assignment: We are never given a reason Why? We are given highlighers and copies of text, told to find at least three metaphors and five similes along with the juxtaposition of this work and another. Fair enough: this is bad teaching, at least if the activity never goes anywhere. And I have to admit I've always been puzzled about why The Scarlet Letter, of all books, is standard high school fare: just how much does the average teenager know about adultery and guilt and vengeance and Puritanism?

Thus far, I'm with Schnog. I'm all for opening up the canon; I'd like to see high schools teach more contemporary lit, more science fiction, more books by nonwhite authors, and (my pet hobbyhorse) more books with happy endings. And I agree with her that some of the classics can wait, because there are books and authors students have to grow into. Dickens was mine. I remember reading Great Expectations in ninth grade and hating it. A year later, when we got to A Tale of Two Cities, something clicked. I remember exactly when it clicked, about a quarter of the way through the book:

'The old Sydney Carton of Shrewsbury School,' said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, 'the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!'

'Ah!' returned the other, sighing: 'yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises with other boys, and seldom did my own.'

'And why not?'

'God knows. It was my way, I suppose.'

And my tenth-grade self totally got this, because my tenth-grade self was not a good student, and blew off assignments that she was quite capable of doing, and let the kid sitting next to her in Algebra cheat off of her tests without really knowing why she was letting him do it. All of which seems to bear out Schnog's thesis: that students are more engaged, and learn more, when they can see at least a little of themselves in the books they're reading.

But. Butbutbutbutbut. Schnog starts to lose me when she assumes that teachers can necessarily predict which books are going to speak to high school students, and when and how and why this will happen, and in particular, when she makes some blanket assumptions about gender.

It's hard to forget my son's summer-reading assignment the year before he entered ninth grade: Julia Alvarez's "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents." Try as he did, he never got beyond the first of 15 vignettes about four culturally displaced sisters who search for identity through therapists and mental illness, men and sex, drugs and alcohol. I could hardly blame him. We ask 14-year-old boys to read novels about the travails of anguished women and want them to develop a love of reading?

IIRC, this isn't a totally accurate characterization of Alvarez's novel, since the characters are children or teenagers for large chunks of the book. And I think Schnog is being a little inconsistent here; whatever one thinks of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, it clearly isn't one of the "classics" Schnog rails about elsewhere in the article. Whoever chose this particular summer-reading assignment was trying to do precisely what Schnog suggests that teachers should do -- add more contemporary lit and more multicultural voices to the curriculum. But one problem with this contemporary novel, evidently, is that it is about girls. Schnog admits as much in the online chat: I am ambivalent about assigning "girl-oriented" stories to young male teens: Why? Because in the main, they don't like them.

Cringe. Let's assume, for the moment, that she's correct. Wouldn't the next logical step to be to ask why they don't like them, and whether there's anything we can do about it, rather than assuming that this is an immutable state of affairs? And what about young female teens -- do they have the choice of a) attending an all-girls school or b) spending four years reading only books with male authors and protagonists (because everyone knows that's all the boys will read, and girls will read anything, so their wishes and perspectives are of secondary importance)?

Actually, come to think of it, that was pretty much all we read when I was in high school. And I didn't really feel the absence of female voices at the time; by eleventh grade I'd pretty much worked out that I liked English, and I was fine with a steady diet of The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Hamlet and Greek tragedy. I enjoyed all of those books, even if I did get a C on an AP English essay for arguing that Clytemnestra was the most sympathetic character in the Oresteia. Which might, again, seem to prove Schnog's thesis...

All the same, I think a reading list like that does skew both boys' and girls' ideas about what counts as literature and, more broadly, whose voices and perspectives are worth hearing. I'm pretty sure the skewedness was accidental on my eleventh- and twelfth-grade teachers' part; both men were wonderful teachers, alert and sensitive to both texts and students. But I find it unconscionable that someone would deliberately argue that we shouldn't be teaching "girl-oriented" stories to teenaged boys, knowing that in a typical, mixed-sex public school classroom, that means we won't be teaching them to anybody.

Whew, that was a lot of very inconclusive blather. I have no high school teaching experience, and no very good solutions to the problem Schnog is trying to address: how do you keep students from becoming disaffected with the whole idea of studying literature? But I do have one insight from my own experience as a formerly disaffected student: The books don't matter nearly as much as the teachers do. I stopped hating English about midway through tenth grade. This didn't happen when it dawned on me that Sydney Carton kind of interesting (because I'd been interested in lots of books without necessarily liking the class in which they were assigned), but when my sharp-tongued, not terribly charismatic teacher somehow managed to convey to me that she liked books, respected books, and also got a lot of pleasure out of thinking and talking about how books worked. This was something of a revelation to me, because my ninth-grade English teacher, who was very funny and popular with most of her students, had not liked books, and let her disdain show.

And so I find myself wondering whether Schnog lets her disdain for The Scarlet Letter, and her love for The Great Gatsby, show, and whether this is why her students react so differently to these two novels -- both of which take place in worlds far removed from a twenty-first-century teenager's experience. And I wonder, also, whether there are enough high school teachers with a passion both for books and for the pleasures of analysis to go around, and how we can entice more of them into the schools.