In literature, as in life, stuff is just messy…

One of my biggest challenges as a teacher is my own totally uninspiring memory of high school.

Actually, it’s really a lack of any memory that frustrates me.  I can recall a few teachers by name.  I can tell you a few of the texts that we read.  But beyond the fact that I now know Hamlet’s fatal flaw was indecision (haven’t you heard?), I’d be hard-pressed to explain much about any of those works that I studied.  I’m also not exaggerating when I say that I cannot recall a single poem I read the entire time I was in high school.  I’m sure we read some, but I’ve totally forgotten about them.

What literary knowledge I have retained was gained during my undergraduate years, when I majored in English at a college with very small classes and absolutely no multiple-choice tests.  It occurs to me, now that the topic has been raised, that it was during these years that the messiness of literary analysis was allowed to flourish in my presence.  There were seldom pat answers from my professors – only what seemed like more irritating questions.  The Type A “closer” in me hated the loose ends.  It was like geometry instead of the neatness of Algebra.

Ten years after graduating with my B.A. in English, I first set foot in a classroom as a teacher.  I was desperate to figure out how to teach the texts I’d never, myself, studied.  I felt like I was a fraud, and that any “real” teacher would have read them all before.  Clearly, I thought to myself, I had huge, embarrassing holes in my education.  I filled those holes guiltily by stealthily researching the unfamiliar works on the web and using textbook support materials offered by other teachers.  At the end of my first year, I announced to my family (with some surprise) that even the works I’d read before seemed much more enjoyable now that I had to teach them.  To know them so intimately and struggle alone with their meanings had actually improved them for me.

Reading “Elements,” I realize this should not have been a shock.  Like most people (even those good at literature, who got A’s in school) I thought that the study of literature was about having professors tell you what the “official” meaning of a work was.  I really thought that.  And a lot of other people are out there, teaching, who still think it…like most of the people I worked with at my high school teaching job.  I look back now on my feelings of guilt about using the textbook support materials and I realize that these instincts were actually good ones.  What I was lacking wasn’t the education in literature.  It was the realization that the most important part of being literate isn’t the possession of information – it’s the ability to discover it for yourself.

So…difficulty?  BRING IT.

2 thoughts on “In literature, as in life, stuff is just messy…

  1. nikki

    Alicia, I love your honesty about feeling like you don’t always know the answers and that you have huge holes in your education. I’m intimately acquainted with that feeling! I loved reading “How Experts Differ From Novices” because it finally gave me a term for what I am as a developing teacher: an accomplished novice. I realize “what [I] know is miniscule compared to all that is potentially knowable” (36) about literature and teaching. And I totally agree (and LOVE) that “this model helps free people to continue to learn”–no matter how long we’ve been teaching a content area. I’m right there with you!

  2. Professor Sample

    Like Nikki, I appreciate your candidness with us and yourself (and maybe even your students?) about your relationship with “interpretation” and literature. It just now occurred to be that simply by using the word “interpretation” we raise the stakes for ourselves (and our students) in a way that can be very intimidating and counter-productive. I wonder what alternative word or phrase we might use that brings the activity down to a level that feels attainable.

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