Like many of my fellow ENG 610ers, I have found Blau’s book exceptionally helpful.  Thinking back through all of my experience with education classes, I cannot recall another book that relied on, or even included, scripts in order to propose a teaching strategy.  What better way is there to share with teachers how to implement a strategy than to model for them the exact thing you propose in the form of an imagined (or sometimes real) dialogue?  I love how Blau includes students’ criticism and diatribes, and the way “T” comfortably moves students towards a consensus, or in the case I’m going to discuss next, towards stronger interpretations of difficult passages.

I find myself particularly drawn to Ch. 3: “Which Interpretation Is the Right One? A Workshop on Literary Meaning.”  I particularly enjoyed his example of a literature workshop on “My Papa’s Waltz,” and I’d like to try to have my AP students read the script aloud in order to model for them the kind of ambiguity that we find in the kinds of passages that show up on the AP exam.  I have been fortunate to have some conversations like this in my classroom, though I’m sure they have never been this organized or well-led so I’d like to aim for more planning when I try to implement a literature workshop in my classroom.

Along with this literature workshop in Ch. 3, Blau discusses the multiple possibilities inherent in interpretation, which certainly got me thinking.  Without meaning to constantly connect everything we read and do to the AP course I teach, I cannot help but wonder how an AP teacher is supposed to balance allowing students to interpret passages (particularly ambiguous passages) in multiple ways while also preparing them to answer multiple-choice questions that suggest there is only one correct way to read that passage.  I really do love the openness of the AP English Literature curriculum (because I really can teach whichever higher-level texts I want to teach), but the AP exam’s much more rigid multiple-choice section certainly causes me some concern. 

For example, for part of this year’s AP midterm, I had my students annotate the Dunya Mikhail poem, “The War Works Hard” which seems to literally suggest, through a laundry list of the war’s effects, that war can be productive and useful.  Of course, when we read the piece more carefully, it seems clear that the speaker intends this message to be ironic.  For example, the poem reads, “It inspires tyrants/ to deliver long speeches,” and “It contributes to the industry/ of artificial limbs” and “builds new houses/ for the orphans” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16991).  When some of my AP students read this poem, they took the speaker’s words literally as evidence that the speaker saw the merit in war.  While I did not entirely dismiss the notion that the speaker illustrates that certain people and industries (and even flies) benefit from war (and death), I was particularly astounded by the students who said the poem showed how good war can be for humanity.  Not only had these students simply believed what the speaker said, neglecting to identify the poem’s irony (though I told them to look for verbal irony in particular), they also seemed somewhat brainwashed by their misinterpretation of the poem’s message.

When I graded these midterm annotations, I felt I had to honor the AP exam and score the students who caught the verbal irony higher than the students who did not; however, when we went over this poem, I had one particularly precocious student try, unsuccessfully, to, as he put it, “prove me wrong.”  His line-by-line analysis was wonderful because students were actually able to see where that kind of interpretation fell flat.  In any case, as productive as that classroom dissection went, I felt oddly resentful that the AP exam requires me, the teacher, to punish students whose interpretations are not “correct enough.”  (I should explain that my school has pushed the AP teachers this year to make sure our grades align more readily with the students’ expected scores on the AP exam, which totally renders my grading more punitive than it was before this year.) 

I hate to find myself enacting the same kind of rigid interpretation that I dislike about the AP exam’s multiple-choice section, and yet I must prepare the students for that portion of the exam.  That said, I felt oddly comforted when my precocious student inadvertently proved himself wrong (and admitted his mistake) to miss the poem’s ironic tone.  Likewise, I felt I wasn’t forcing an interpretation on these studetns when another rather articulate student summed up the poem with the following words, “This poem just proves that the consequences of war simply outweigh the benefits.” 

In case any of you are interested in teaching “The War Works Hard,” I found myself emulating Blau’s tendency to rely on some sense of authorial intent (though with Roethke, the intent is much more ambiguous), so I looked up Mikhail’s background.  In my resarech, I found the following interview with Dunya Mikhail on NPR, in which she says, “When I think of war, for me, it’s by default a … lose-lose case.  I believe there’s no winner in the war because, you know, the killed one dies physically and the killer dies morally. So they are both dead.” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16991)  Thus, while Roethke’s poem may celebrate ambiguity, I would argue, and I think my students would (now) back me up on this that Mikhail’s poem is much less ambiguous in its relevation of the hardships of war.  Either way, I am only beginning to see the difficulty in teaching the analysis of poetry, something which is inherently so personal in its ability to speak to us, in a high school classroom.  Thankfully, Blau has some really great suggestions on how to make this process, much like the writing process, more of a successful and meaningful experience for students and teachers alike.