Writing about writing—by the Write Source staff

A Response to Response to Literature

Dave Kemper recently asked me to explain more fully my objections to response-to-literature essay assignments. As I’ve mentioned before, I love literature and will read nearly anything—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Bruce Sterling to Fritz Leiber to Harlequin romances (listed in no particular order)—and I love to discuss books with other people. Lately, I’ve even begun posting recommendations of recently read books on my personal blog. So why this distaste for forcing third-graders to read and report on How to Eat Fried Worms or high-schoolers to read and write about To Kill a Mockingbird?

After doing some clustering to figure that out, I’ve come up with two answers. The first deals with the core of what English class is. The second with the more encompassing issue of what works best for students.

English class is something of an amorphous beast, especially in the higher grades. Ostensibly it is intended to foster writing, and in a larger sense thinking, and those are noble goals. If we were to focus upon them, we might get somewhere.

The trouble is, we—and by we I mean you, me, and everyone else who has attained the age of majority in this civilization—don’t really want students to think for themselves. What a frightening idea! They might think something that would lead to chaos. What we want instead is for them to think as broadly as possible within socially acceptable norms. This is where literature comes in. By dictating what they read, and then controlling discussion of that reading, and finally pasting a grade on what they write about that reading, we seek to shape what they can think.

Don’t believe me? Consider the history of English Literature instruction.

Before the 1900s, as Gerald Graff explains in chapter two of Professing Literature, literary education pretty much meant the classics (Homer, the Bible, Ovid, etc.)—in the original languages. The point of studying this stuff was as much to master the languages as to garner a gentlemanly sense of history and philosophy. I say “gentlemanly” intentionally, because women were not allowed to attend university—Oxford or Cambridge, let alone the relatively new schools Yale, Harvard, or Princeton—until the late 1800s, and then only on a very provisional basis.

Once they got even that toehold, however, the question almost immediately arose as to what “women…and the second- or third-rate men…who become schoolmasters” (to borrow the words of a Royal Commission witness in 1877; see chapter 1 of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction) could be expected to learn—certainly not the classics! Fortunately for college administrators, Dante Alighieri and Martin Luther had earlier published in their own common tongues, so these new students could justifiably now be given novels in their native English for their study. What’s more, the very works to be studied could be chosen to restore the moral compass that civilization was losing with the decline of religious power.

At this point, I’m reminded of the English 101 classes I taught during grad school, and the imposed requirement that I introduce incoming freshmen to collegiate-level understanding of topics such as gender bias, racism, and plagiarism. What topics guide your own choice of reading for your English class? (Are you even allowed to choose?)

So, this explains the role of literature in English classes, and the hidden agendas behind the choice of texts. But to confuse things even more thoroughly, at K-12 we present English primarily as a writing course.

Now, on the face of things, this would seem to make sense. Writing is about language and ideas, and so is literature. The trouble is, this is not how students perceive things. For them, literature is apparently an altar to be worshiped at, where transcendent truth is presented in symbolism that they must puzzle out. They are prone to feeling that the puzzle itself is too lofty an effort for their skills, let alone to then write about it, so they clumsily attempt to adopt an elevated language, hoping the priesthood will recognize in this the sincerity of their offerings. (Some few instead rebelliously seek to undermine the text, to demonstrate that “it ain’t so hot.”)

This is no way to teach writing. Studies show that the best writing instruction is student centered, concerning topics that mean something to them, with feedback from real readers—i.e. peer responders who also care about those topics.

Nor is this any way to promote a love of reading. Reading can be infectious, if we let it (consider the so far eleven-year boom of the Harry Potter series, excitement spread by word of mouth). But assigned texts work like an inoculation to prevent that infection.

Further, this is no good way to promote thinking. Thinking requires honest engagement and investigation, and neither of those can be imposed from the front of a classroom. They can only be encouraged. (Also, we have to trust our students that they can think for themselves, that they can find their way.)

In closing, I’d like to make a confession. When I asked myself, What about poetry instruction? a strong impulse arose to make an exception. After all, teaching appreciation of poetry would be for their own good, right? Then I brutally throttled that traitorous impulse. If poetry is any good, it will lure students in, and they will want to learn more about what makes it work. The same is true for literature in general. Then we can ask them for essays explaining a work’s attraction to them.

Postscript: Revisiting my cluster, I suddenly realized it didn’t include grammar instruction at all. Somehow I had neglected to even consider its role in teaching writing. Let me correct that error here: Teaching writing by drill in grammar and mechanics is—as my friend and colleague Rob King put it—like trying to save a drowning man by critiquing the angle of his hands and feet.

(If you’re curious about the origins of grammar drill, and its inevitable dulling effect, let me point you again to the aforementioned section from Graff’s text, Professing Literature.)

—Lester Smith