Literature Pop Quiz
Q. True or false: The primary theme of The Great Gatsby is the disintegration of the American Dream during the very height of material prosperity in the 1920’s.
A. In the very act of asking that question, I have imposed two assumptions upon you.
1. You ought to have read The Great Gatsby.
2. The American Dream is related to an empty and unsatisfying material prosperity.
Maybe you agree with both of those assumptions. That is not the point. I could as easily have asked the following.
Q. True or false: The primary theme of Atlas Shrugged is the hampering of individual excellence by collectivist mediocrity.
A. Again two assumptions:
1. If you haven’t read Atlas Shrugged, you’re somehow lacking.
2. Individuals can excel only by escaping the bonds imposed by a mundane common culture.
And again, whether you agree or disagree with those assumptions isn’t the point. The point is that the texts we assign our students and the questions we ask about those texts invariably impose a set of values. Dictating titles and questions may be a more subtle form of cultural manipulation than book banning, but it is hardly more innocent.
Lately, I’ve been perusing textbooks of various literature series for K-12 students, noting common selections, reading the suggested questions and discussion topics. I’m tempted to put these books in a time capsule, so that historians centuries in the future might easily grasp the common assumptions by which we live. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear them use the phrase “lockstep.”
The trouble doesn’t lie in the titles we choose, however. Instead, it is inherent in a lecture mode of teaching, or even a teacher-led discussion. As the adult in the classroom, the person with the most life experience, the most developed vocabulary, we cast the longest shadow.
Somehow, we need to step aside to let the light fall on our students. Somehow we have to nurture a passion for reading and learning without making a bunch of little thought clones. Somehow we have to do all this without losing control of the classroom.
That somehow, according to educators such as Frank Smith and Linda Rief and Nancie Atwell and Donald Graves and others, is to teach literature as part of a writing workshop. Allow students to choose texts according to their own interests. Let me say that again: Allow students to choose what they want to read. Better to lure them into reading through their own interests than to leave them with the impression that all “school reading” is boring. Next, have them explain to their peers why they chose that text, and what they got out of it. Make sure this sharing happens sometimes in small groups, sometimes to the class at large, sometimes orally, sometimes in a more formal piece of writing. As a fellow reader and writer, model sharing your own reading choices and response writing. It’s okay to let your enthusiasm show in this, because once trusted to make their own reading choices and to present, defend, and rethink their own reactions to texts in a community of readers and writers, students naturally become enthused themselves.
Then, as a fellow reader and writer, you can even introduce them to selections from The Great Gatsby or Atlas Shrugged if you wish. Your students will be ready to decide for themselves whether they’d like to read more, what themes they discern, and just how valid those themes might be—or how much they as readers are being manipulated by someone else’s agenda.
—Les
October 9th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Well said, Les. I actually had to re-take a semester of English in high school once because I disagreed with a teacher’s interpretation of parts of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He made fun of me in front of the entire class, so I walked out his door and never back again.
Many years later, I have an English degree of my own and have written a lot. I believe that we need to introduce choice and teach the skills that lead to critical thinking–because in literature there is no “right” or “wrong” interpretation. Even the author’s opinion is only one possible of many.
I’d love to see a shift in education, but I don’t know how that’s going to happen.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Anarchy!
And: w00t!
I suspect though that the reading material they chose would be chosen by their parents instead. “I chose the Bible because it’s the greatest book ever written and the only book anyone needs to read.” Awesome.
My choice, by the by, would’ve been the Player’s Handbook. ;)
Mayhaps the solution is a mix of the two.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I completely agree but….
1. who buys the texts?
2. what happens to the parent who wants to supervise what their child reads?
3. what do you do with kids who claim they hate all forms of reading and will not be tempted by your offer?
(If you haven’t already) read Frank Smith’s obscure *Whose Language What Power? A terrific book on student autonomy.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Hi, Jerry. Thanks for the comments. I’ll definitely pick up the book you’ve recommended.
Regarding your questions…
1.) Who said anything about buying texts? I did most of my early reading in the school library, and later in the public library. My grandmother did give me a couple of Twain’s books as Christmas presents, and my folks had some classic readers laying around the house. As a teen, I finally bought sci-fi off the rack or at used-book stores. There is no shortage of texts out there for free or cheap. Nowadays, you can even find it online. Recently I got the text of *War and Peace* from Gutenburg.org, for example.
2.) How much supervision are we talking about? How much does a parent actually have right now? Again, if young students are using the school or classroom library, those texts are available for parental perusal. Beyond that, it’s up to the parents and their children to hash out. Despite their evangelical leanings, my own folks had little real control over what I read, yet I turned out to be a productive member of society.
3.) The trick is to require oral and written responses about *some* form of text, whatever it may be. In *Seeking Diversity*, Linda Rief mentions one of her students reading only motorcycle magazines—but requiring him to report on those became the avenue to get him involved in the workshop environment, where other reader/writers’ enthusiasm about their own readings began to lure him deeper into literacy. The viral popularity of the *Harry Potter* series shows just how influential young readers can be on other young readers.
October 18th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Being a vehicle of antiquated flattulence, I cannot help but take umbrage with regard to the modern tendency to vilify the “lecture” as a teaching methodology. To cast aspersions on this approach is tantamount to the vituperations against the web because there is so much trash available on its myriad pages.
Whew! Now, I’ll stop the pretentious pose and state as plainly as possible that I don’t think “lectures” are a bad teaching method (unless they are the ONLY teaching method). Maybe, I should expand that and say that I don’t think “lectures” are a bad teaching method unless they are both the only teaching method and they are being used to tediously consider the same information available in other form.
Let me also state that I do not rely solely upon “lecture” in my classrooms, but I do require myself to have some sort of formal presentation in every class session. However, my classes involve laboratory work (a variety of writing assignments and team projects designed to create (at least ultimately) faux-versions of game scripts and documents), discussion, and formal presentation by my students. Textbooks supplement my sessions; they are not “read” to students as “lecture.” Alternate readings are often available in case the textbook reading doesn’t fit a particular student’s need.
That being said, however, I think lecture is a solid tool of pedagogy for several reasons.
1) It allows a group to have a shared context for discussion, development, and departure. The egalitarian, free-flowing discussion can leave a student without a feeling that anything has happened except a bunch of opinions being harvested with no evaluation of efficacy or accuracy. This is particularly insidious when we don’t want to stifle discussion by ever injecting the idea that an opinion could be “wrong.”
2) It allows a database of facts, concepts, procedures, and approaches to be disseminated in the most economical time frame. What might take 40 minutes to an hour to steer a class toward can be presented in lecture and presentation format in less than one-fourth of the time. Naturally, I realize that retention levels may not be the same. Working for that 40 minutes to get around to one major concept may chisel that concept so deeply in a path within the brain that the student may never forget it. But what has the student NOT been exposed to while we invested 40 minutes in that discussion?
3) A well-prepared lecture should provide students with a framework or foundation they can build upon. I have found that preparing (and I know this is an obscene word to many of you) PowerPoint presentations for my lectures has forced me to reveal the structure underpinning what I’m saying. The slides help keep me from chasing rabbits and pretty birds to the detriment of finding the big game, as well as providing a visual cue to my students of what I think is interesting or important in a specific body of material. [I find the slides even help when I'm trying to generate discussion. If we're talking about describing a "setting" for a game, I put verbal descriptions of literary, film, stage, and real-life settings on the screen and ask students to identify them. By describing familiar classics as a game setting, I swing the two-edged sword of showing them what I want in a description of setting and perhaps, encouraging them to chase down films and books they haven't experienced. Although this aside isn't germane to discussing "lecture," I do try to put some slides in each presentation that allow for student input--even if it may seem overly structured to some.]
4) Although this doesn’t apply as much to the teaching value, I believe educators have a responsibility to provide “value” even as a publisher or manufacturer needs to provide “value.” Lecturing even part of a class period tells my students that I have taken the time to prepare something for them. If something has a cost (in this case, time and effort), it offers a perception of higher value than something which has less cost (in our discussion, the instructor who comes in without notes and starts asking questions, but in the lecture format, the professor who comes in with a pile of books, but hasn’t bothered to type the relevant quotations into his notes, a handout, or a PowerPoint slide before reading from those books). As a student, when I saw the the prof had put extra effort or presumed effort into a class, it inspired me to work harder and assimilate more.
While I agree that the lecture format is overused and often used poorly, I find myself getting really annoyed at instructors who have substituted poor discussion methods and badly conceived activities for the lecture. I think pure discussion classes are as inherently weak as pure lecture classes. I think educators have a responsible to use a full palette of pedagogical tools as artists need to avoid restricting themselves to one or two tubes of acrylic.
October 20th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Johnny:
Specifically for writing and reading, we recommend a workshop environment in which the teacher serves as mentor and offers targeted minilessons when necessary. This doesn’t much rely on oral discussion as a learning model. Rather, each student is self-directed in exploring whatever he or she wants to read—with the understanding that a written response to that text will be expected, and that it will be shared with the larger group. Feedback in this sort of environment tends to come in three ways:
1.) Recommendations on drafts from peer responders during the development of a piece;
2.) Oral questions and observations from the class at large if a finished piece is delivered orally (this is the closest a workshop gets to the “discussion” model you mention); and
3.) Possible position papers in response to a finished piece.
In effect, this is the same sort of process scholars and professional writers pursue, with feedback from peers during development, then audience response upon publication, or responsive position papers and such from other scholars.
Notice my mention of minilessons. Those are targeted at specific skills. The only place this model provides for “lecture” about a particular text is in the teacher’s choice of his or her own readings and writings to share as a member of the workshop.
—Les