The quote in this entry are from Chapter 2 of The Message In the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy. Chapter 2 is entitled “The Loss of the Creature.” I found this excerpt through a friend of mine.
“A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented.”
This quote pretty much embodies my views on teaching literature. It gives examples of a dogfish and a Shakespeare sonnet, material for a biology student and a literature student, respectively. The dogfish is of little importance to literature so I will speak of the sonnet. The author describes how the student is unable to clearly see the sonnet through the many layers in which it is presented. It is in a certain textbook, with a certain type, taught by a certain teacher, in a certain place with certain sights, sounds and smells. The mechanics and specific words or lines of the poem are focused upon rather than the poem as a whole. With all of these distractions and covering layers hindering the student, it is no wonder that he has a hard time truly understanding the poem. The learner who is out on his own and discovers the sonnet is the one who will easily gain knowledge from it. Their own curiosity drives them to read the sonnet rather than some teacher or grading system convincing them they must study it. They can see the poem as a whole, for they have the advantage of being able to choose to read the work itself rather than the words with which it is composed. This is why I believe that our current approach to teaching literature is all wrong. We need to give the students more freedom with what they read. You can’t force a student to learn from a classic novel, they won’t get much out of it. If a student actively chooses to read something, he will learn much more than if he is forced. We also need to center lessons on the work as a whole rather than picking it apart until you can no longer see what it was before you began. If you show a fish to someone who doesn’t want to look at it, pulling it apart and showing them all the pieces isn’t going to make them want to look, it’s just going to leave you with a jumbled bloody mess.
I agree with a lot of your ideas here, Chris. Throughout middle school and even early high school, I hated the concept of having to learn algebra. As someone who, even then, I was fond of English and language in general, I didn’t see it having much of a point for me to go that high in mathematics. But something changed some time during high school. I realized that at a certain point I would have to try to get through to students who are just the opposite that I am. I would eventually have to try to teach literature to a student who hates learning it, who sees no point in understanding the concept of it. I think it was then that I opened my mind more and started to pay more attention to mathematics, for example, to try to find a way to teach literature to a student who envisioned themselves in the field of mathematics in the future. Once I did that, I started actually even liking math a bit more. I started becoming more adjusted to math and its concepts and I honestly started to do well in math classes. It was only once I had an interest in it, however, that I did well.
Literature would work the same way, I would think. You can preach and lecture all you want to a student, but there has to be some remote desire there in order for the student to perform well. In response to your “jumbled bloody mess” part, I know that end of the spectrum fairly well. Another example that I have in my personal life actually involves marching band, oddly enough. In high school, we were forced to do both marching and concert band. It showed, too. You could easily see that the majority of our marching band had no interest in being there and could care less about how we actually looked. To use your own words, it was a jumbled bloody mess. But once I got here, to Grand Valley, it was obvious that every single person on that field really wanted to be there. And the difference is obvious. We’re all in unison and our sound is beautiful, but we couldn’t get that without some desire to be there in the first place. I definitely agree with your theory on teaching, and realize that it’s our jobs as teachers to help students strive to find a way to be interested in whatever subject matter you’re teaching currently.
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