People want more of the story; they want answers. [But] it’s not a position paper. It’s an “issue” novel, but it’s a story. And so, what I hope to offer people are questions, as opposed to answers.

—Heidi Durrow

Interviewed by Leonard Lopate about her novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, May 2010

“The personality of a writer does become important after we have read his book and begin to study it. . . . We can ask ourselves questions about it such as ‘What is the author’s name?’ ‘Where did he live?’ ‘Was he married?’ and ‘Which was his favourite flower?’ Then we are no longer reading the book, we are studying it and making it subserve our desire for information. ‘Study’ has a very solemn sound. ‘I am studying Dante’ sounds much more than ‘I am reading Dante.’ It is really much less. Study is only a serious form of gossip. It teaches us everything about the book except the central thing, and between that and us it raises a circular barrier which only the wings of the spirit can cross. The study of science, history, etc., is necessary and proper, for they are subjects that belong to the domain of information, but a creative subject like literature—to study that is excessively dangerous, and should never be attempted by the immature.”

—E.M. Forster, ‘Anonymity: An Enquiry’, from his collection, Two Cheers for Democracy.

By constantly encouraging students to explore the questions raised in a text—instead of searching for its ‘messages’—we will help them learn to be sensitive, perceptive readers.

A great work of literature, as evocative as a tree or as the world itself, invites us to respond with our minds and our hearts, but it does not prescribe those responses. It invites us to explore, to reflect, to read and re-read. It does not say to us, ‘This is life’ or ‘This is the world’ or ‘This is what people are like’. Instead it shows us life, the world, and people, from a certain angle (or, more often, from a variety of angles) and asks: what do you think? what are you feeling now?

Unfortunately, many students learn in school that stories, plays, and poems are cryptic messages meant to be deciphered. As I wrote in one of my examiner’s reports* a while back,

Most students have been taught that literature is filled with hidden messages and meanings cleverly disguised with symbols, metaphors, and other ‘literary devices’. Their job is to decode the messages and file them under various standard headings such as ‘existentialist’, ‘nihilist’, and ‘archetypal’. Every realization is an ‘epiphany’; everyone who thinks is ‘Apollonian’; everyone who feels is ‘Dionysian’; every unusual event is an example of ‘Magical Realism’. One candidate actually made this theory of literary criticism the opening sentence of her essay: “It is important to understand the intentions of authors as most of the time they are trying to convey hidden messages.”

Not surprisingly under such circumstances, most students simply retail ideas that their teachers or other sources have fed them. When the same interpretation of a work is repeated by student after student, it’s clear that they are repeating what they have been taught.

In my own school days I learned to hate poetry because each poem was presented as a riddle to be solved. I remember wishing I could confront these poets in person. “Dammit,” I would say, “if you have something important to say, then why don’t you come right out and say it?! My teachers, evidently, were not particularly bad or out of the ordinary in this respect, as one can infer from Billy Collins’s wonderful “Introduction to Poetry”:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.**

To be sure, it is perfectly possible to tell a story, or write a play or poem, with the intention of sending a message or making an argument. Most such works quickly fall by the wayside and are easily dismissed. Perhaps they have some historical significance, but they are not taken seriously as works of art.

Equally clear is the case that certain stories written for children and adolescents are written with the intention of teaching their readers to be kind to others, or to avoid illegal drugs and unwanted pregnancies. Again these are not serious works of art.

Some children’s stories, of course, do achieve a standard recognizable as art, and they illustrate my argument here quite well. What is the ‘message’, for instance, of A.A. Milne’s ‘Pooh’ stories, or of Arnold Lobel’s ‘Frog and Toad’ stories? Like all good stories, these tales for children create an imaginary world that raises questions: Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing here, and what should we be doing? These are the questions raised again and again by literature and by other forms of art. What distinguishes literature from propaganda or moralizing tales? For one thing, the questions remain open: it is up to the readers or audience to answer them.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina makes an interesting example. From the epigraph alone (“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay”) one could infer what the historical record shows: Tolstoy began his tale with the moralistic idea of showing us that Anna was a sinful woman deservedly punished by God. But along the way, a funny thing happened: Tolstoy seems himself to have fallen in love with Anna, at least temporarily, and at least enough to bring his moral certitude into doubt. Indeed, his alter-ego protagonist, Levin, visits Anna when she and Vronsky are living at Vronsky’s country estate. Levin, prepared to meet an immoral woman, finds her delightful and charming. Only when he gets home to his wife is his newly-sympathetic view of Anna brought down to earth with a bump. Anna does suffer a famously terrible end, but as readers we are not at all certain that she deserves her fate. As critics have often remarked, Tolstoy the artist wins out over Tolstoy the Christian moralist. The story that Tolstoy apparently set out to write would perhaps have ‘sent a message’; but if it had finished up that way, it would not be regarded today as one of the greatest novels ever written. The novel does not leave us with a message; instead it leaves us pondering a multitude of questions.

I am not arguing, of course, that an author’s tone—his or her attitude toward characters and events—cannot be inferred. It’s clear that Tolstoy sympathizes more with certain characters than with others, but these sympathies and antipathies are not ‘messages’ that close off alternatives. On the contrary, when Tolstoy treats Oblonsky with comical delight, we wonder: why he should remain beloved by all—including the author—when his sister Anna (who is guilty of the same ‘sin’) becomes a pariah doomed to a tragic death?

Shakespeare remains the supreme example in our literature of an author who does not send messages. His plays are filled with ideas, with characters and events that raise questions, but at no time can we imagine Shakespeare sitting down to write, thinking, “Ah, now I will write a play with the message, ‘if you need to take revenge, act quickly!’ “

The search for messages in literature usually includes the notion that the author intended to send those messages, and that we can figure out the author’s intentions. Literary criticism has demolished this idea over the past century, and yet it persists. But why? It seems to be part of the moralistic theory of literature, going back to the Middle Ages, in which art is supposed to improve or uplift society. A story in which evil triumphs would corrupt the morals of the people. Therefore authors, by this account, should tell tales in which good is rewarded and evil punished. Clearly the morally uplifting message lies at the heart of such stories, and the intention of the author is to send that message. That this theory of literature persists can be seen in the familiar attempts to ban a book from the school curriculum or library.

But the search for the author’s intention is even more elusive and pointless than the search for the story’s message. Even if the author were present, and we could ask her—”What was your intention in writing this story?”—we still would not know. Perhaps the author would lie to us, or would just make something up, not knowing herself what her intention was; or would tell us, “I had no intention; I just wrote the story”. Or what if, like Tolstoy, she began with an intention that the story does not fulfill, or only partially fulfills?  Let’s take Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant of Venice’, for example. What if Shakespeare were here to answer: “Did you intend for us to sympathize with Shylock or despise him?” Would the answer, whatever it might be, help us to read, view, and respond to the play? No. Whatever Shakespeare intended or did not intend, we have to make up our own minds.

We have to read the text, think about it, discuss it, and make up our own minds. There is no ‘right answer’. Adolescents, however, tend to think very concretely: they want right answers. Years ago I used to teach Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales back-to-back, and almost universally the students loved Dante and hated Chaucer. Why? In Dante ‘bad guys’ are punished in ways that are not only vivid and ghastly, but just. In Chaucer, on the other hand, we don’t know where we are morally. Everything is deeply ironic. The goodness of the good guys is doubtful; the bad guys seem to be both admired and worthy of forgiveness. Chaucer, in other words, is much more like the real world.

Because adolescents tend to think in concrete, black-and-white terms, it’s even more important for us to avoid binary, reductive discussions of literature. We need to expand their comfort zones, help them relax with the idea that there is no ‘answer’ in literature, and give them the analytical tools to observe the details of a text, see how they form patterns, and explore the possibilities that they offer.

————————

*As an examiner for the International Baccalaureate Organization, I mark World Literature essays for English A1.

**http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html

America needs a culture that respects education. A culture in which learning is admired. A culture that honors the achievements of educated people and recognizes their importance to the entire society.

Anti-intellectualism has deep roots in American history and culture. Educated people are far too often subjected to suspicion and ridicule. These are the names Americans use to demean the educated:

Eggheads. Pointy-headed intellectuals. Ivory-tower academics. Bookworms. Nerds. Geeks.

If President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan hope to improve the dreadful state of America’s public schools they must tackle this culture of anti-intellectualism head-on. Just as President Kennedy launched a national drive to put men on the moon, President Obama should launch a national campaign to make learning respected among adults and cool among young people. So long as it’s cool to be a ‘jock’ or a ‘fox’ with barely passing grades, all attempts at educational reform will fail.

Of course I trade in stereotypes with ‘jocks’ and ‘foxes’. But far too many young Americans over-value sports, clothes, and cosmetics, and under-value learning. America needs a culture in which young people admire their classmates who are excellent students; in which it’s the norm for young people to value learning and strive to achieve the best education they can.

Advertising really does work: why doesn’t the U.S. government use the power of advertising to promote education? Companies granted use of the ‘public airwaves’ should be required to broadcast constant reminders of the value of learning to individuals, communities, and nations. If we can sell Barbies and Nikes, we can sell respect for learning. The government must take the lead here because left to their own devices, advertisers and the mass media will continue selling cosmetics and plastic and the latest fashions. There’s no profit for them in selling respect for learning.

Great American thinkers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers should be national heroes. Their names—not those of pop-culture celebrities—should be known among both young and old. Streets, public squares, parks, and public buildings in every town and city should be named for great intellectuals. They should be honored, and their stories told, at every opportunity. They should be the heroes that every young person idolizes.

In such a culture, teaching would become a respected profession, sought after by top students just as today they aim to become doctors, lawyers, and scientists. Higher salaries, merit pay, and other such ‘incentives’ won’t motivate the right people to teach. The chance to answer a respected calling that serves the community and earns its gratitude will.

Once the culture changes, many reforms involving curricula, teaching methods, graduation requirements, post-secondary education, vocational education, etc., become possible in a way they are not so long as the current culture persists. And then we can argue, too, about what education taxes should fund, and why. But until the culture is changed, the schools will continue to struggle, however their immediate circumstances are adjusted.

I’m not arguing that everyone should get a Master’s degree. Rather, I imagine a culture in which factory workers, plumbers, carpenters, etc., all value learning and all participate somehow in the conversations, debates, and discourse that educated people engage in. These ideas go way back in American history to Jefferson’s yeoman farmer and the New England town hall meeting. All citizens should know the plays of Shakespeare, and understand science well enough to engage in an intelligent discussion of global warming or the theory of evolution. If they can’t, then they are excluded from the culture, and excluded from any constructive role in the decisions that must be made in a democratic society. I maintain that everyone of sound mind is capable, with the right education, of talking intelligently about Shakespeare, climate science, and Darwin.

In my first teaching job we had a debate in the English department about tracking students who weren’t ‘academically inclined’ into classes where Shakespeare never appeared. I’ve yet to hear a good answer to the question I asked then: what right do we have to exclude people from the culture? If the illiterate groundlings could ‘get’ Shakespeare in the 16th century, then teachers can find a way to share him with all of our students today. The groundlings never read the text. And notice that poverty is not really the problem; one can cite many examples of poor people who value learning and strive to become highly educated. I once had a job helping a group of teenaged boys in ‘court school’ prepare for their high-school equivalency tests. I soon discovered that cramming for tests was not their problem. Their problem was the narrow world they inhabited. They knew about cars, beer, rock music, chasing girls, and not much else. Their problems were essentially cultural, not intellectual or academic. Change their culture and everything becomes possible; leave it as is, and very little is possible.

I know Americans hate to hear that other countries do some things better than America does, but . . . it’s true. In France, for example, people of all classes have a much better level of general background knowledge than the average American (not that that is a difficult standard to exceed). Are Europeans genetically smarter than Americans? Of course not; it’s cultural. And culture can be changed, with effort. If the culture remains unchanged, no amount of fiddling with standards, curricula, length of the school year, etc., will work.

A culture that respects learning would benefit America, of course, but it would benefit the rest of the world almost as much. A world superpower whose citizens don’t understand science, don’t know history, and take little interest in learning, threatens everyone on the planet.

[Thanks to my cyber-colleagues at the English Companion Ning (http://englishcompanion.ning.com/) whose comments have helped me improve this piece.]

[An open letter to my fellow English teachers near and far.]

Thought flows in terms of stories – stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories.

—Frank Smith, Canadian psycholinguist

Dear Colleagues,

As the IBO prepares to join the crowd swimming downstream and dilute its English A1 course by splitting it into two ‘options’, one for Language and the other for Literature*, the Wiser Voice in my head says to me, “It’s over. Just shut up.”

But of course I won’t.

Humans are the only animals that tell stories. The most important stories we tell delve into the most profound questions about our existence, the questions at the heart of life and learning: Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing, and what should we be doing?

We do not, contrary to the inane compartmentalizations of The School, tell stories only in English class. Religious beliefs consist of a series of interconnected stories: how the world was created, who created it, for what purpose, why we suffer, how we should live, etc. History (another core subject that has been devalued by the utilitarians and dethroned in the curriculum by “social studies”) is collective storytelling. Scientific theories are, at their core, stories explaining how things work. Even mathematics is based on certain ‘stories’ that assume, for example, that space is three-dimensional and parallel lines don’t meet.

We think in metaphors, and metaphors are nothing but little stories, or the germs of stories, or comparisons rooted in a certain story about how things are. This, we say, is like that.

Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us.

(“Thinking Literally” http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/27/thinking_literally/).

It is virtually impossible to think without using metaphors, and thus storytelling is at the very heart of how we understand the world and ourselves. Any curriculum that makes the study of history and literature into ‘options’ fails utterly to understand how human beings live, think, and learn. If students do not become adept readers of stories, how can they ever hope to critically analyze and respond to the stories that will be thrown at them all their lives by politicians, by governments, by marketers, not to mention friends, family members, and perfect strangers?

We should keep the study of stories at the heart of education, and we should keep the most important stories at the heart of our curriculum. As Goethe wrote,

Anyone who cannot give an account to oneself of the past three thousand years remains in darkness, without experience, living from day to day.

How can one possibly give an account of the last 3,000 years without knowing history and literature? When I began teaching nearly thirty years ago, students in my high school whose skills were poor were shunted off into courses with titles like “Writers’ Workshop”. These students were not taught Shakespeare, because it they were thought to be incapable of understanding Shakespeare. I argued then that this was a terrible policy. One can teach Shakespeare in a variety of ways. His original audiences, after all, included large numbers of illiterates. To exclude students from the study of Shakespeare is to commit a kind of cultural apartheid. The bizarre twists and turns of American ‘culture wars’, in which the multiculturalists go to battle against the misogynistic, Eurocentric ‘canon’, should not be allowed to infect our thinking and distract us from our essential task. The culture that we have inherited from our ancestors belongs to all of us, and it is immoral, in my view, to say to a student, “You are not good enough to be part of our cultural inheritance.” It is tantamount to saying to them, “You are not good enough to be considered fully human.” It is our duty as teachers to educate children, and that does not mean simply teaching them to “decode” language and numbers. It means transmitting to them our common cultural inheritance. One cannot be considered an educated person otherwise.

This duty weighs even more heavily on secondary teachers than it used to, because colleges and universities have, with a few noble exceptions, largely abandoned any effort to provide a liberal education to their students. If a student doesn’t read Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens in high school, it is quite likely she never will.

I earnestly hope that whatever new dispensation arrives from whichever curricular source, we will hold firmly to the conviction that the study of storytelling is at the core of any good education and must not be marginalized. All students should study history and literature, every year, and any curricular options should be considered only as additions, not as substitutes, for those core subjects. In the upcoming revision to the IB Language A1 offerings, if we have a choice, we should choose not to offer the Language option. If we must offer it, we should vigorously advise students to choose Literature, not Language. And if, as I understand is the case with the new IB Language A course, we have a choice of including more literature or less**, we should include as much as possible.

Notes, Clarifications, Corrections

*The two options are actually (a) Literature, and (b) a course that is half Literature and half Language.

**I am now not sure this is the case.

Pete Kittle, who was a student of mine in the early part of my career, has written a beautiful piece concerning the death of his father which I hope you will take a few moments to read.

William M. Chace, professor of English and former president of two U.S. universities, tells the sad tale in The American Scholar.

University students who major in business are so misguided: every intelligent and successful businessman or -woman will tell you that a broad knowledge of literature, history, science, people, and the world—in other words, a liberal arts education—is the best preparation for a business career. At the same time, most U.S. colleges and universities have simply given up on the liberal arts.

The only secure bastion of liberal arts education that I know of is St. John’s College, with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Everyone who teaches Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl will be interested in Leonard Lopate’s interview of Francine Prose, whose new book is Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, in which she argues that the diary was not simply a diary, but a heavily revised work of literature that Anne hoped to publish after the war.

To listen, go to the show archives for WNYC’s ‘Leonard Lopate Show’ and scroll down to October 1, 2009. Or you can download the podcast from my public folder. The path is Podcasts / English Podcasts / Interviews with Authors / Francine Prose on Anne Frank.

A query on Twitter caught my eye this morning:

#MYP DP Theory of Knowledge … where is it in the MYP? Is it missing? Is it necessary? [from @krea_frobro747]

I replied, “ATL should be taught as a weekly or biweekly pre-TOK class.”

TOK is a great course, and the concept behind it is compelling, but its implementation in most schools falls far short. Typically, only a handful of teachers teach TOK or know anything about it. Its weighting in the IBDP grading system contributes to this marginalization, which belies the original vision of TOK at the heart of the program, the hub of the wheel connected by spokes to all the subject areas. I’ve long argued that the course should be taught by pairs of teachers, one more experienced, and that every teacher should rotate through a TOK teaching assignment. Then TOK would truly permeate the program, as it was intended to do.

But this morning’s tweet points to another issue for TOK: before the first day of Grade 11, students have little or no experience thinking about the sort of issues that arise in TOK. The first half-year of TOK is spent dealing with that deer-in-headlights shock and confusion.

Why, indeed, is there no analogous course in the Middle Years’ Programme? I can’t think of a good reason.

However, as my response above suggests, there is a solution at hand. Of all the ‘Areas of Interaction’ in the MYP, ‘Approaches to Learning’ receives the least attention. Not surprisingly. Schools have always done a lousy job of teaching students how to learn. It’s not just study skills: it’s work habits, study habits, personal habits . . . it is, in fact, ‘approaches to learning’. What could be more important? And yet, most teachers are far too busy teaching content to teach ‘approaches to learning’, except incidentally and by osmosis. Which is why I ended up writing my book, Good Habits, Good Students.

So let’s solve two problems at once. A weekly or biweekly ATL course in the Middle Years program would provide an opportunity to address learning habits and skills explicitly, and to engage in the kind of age-appropriate discourse that would give students invaluable practice thinking about how they think, so that when they arrived for their first TOK class in Grade 11 they would resemble fish in water, instead of deer in headlights.

. . . is laid out in a modest (22 slides) and minimalist (black & white, mostly) presentation that you can download either as a Keynote file or a Powerpoint document (click on the one you prefer).

Like Ric Murry, I’ve been reading Daniel T. Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, in which he applies what we know about cognitive science to what we should be doing in classrooms, and this presentation is based on Willingham’s research, along with my own experiences teaching for almost three decades (!).

Phillip Lopate, the writer, is interviewed by his older brother Leonard, the former painter and longtime broadcaster on WNYC in New York, in a podcast from ‘The Leonard Lopate Show’ that will fascinate and entertain anyone interested in literature, the arts, and brothers. Both students and teachers will enjoy it.

Two books underlie the interview. Lopate’s most recent work is Notes on Sontag, a book-length essay reflecting on the work of the late Susan Sontag, one of America’s foremost essayists and critics of the postwar era. And he contributed an essay to a recent collection of pieces written by brothers about their brothers called Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry. Phillip’s essay, of course, is about Leonard, who talks with him about both books and a variety of related topics. What follows cannot begin to convey the charm of their conversation.

On Sontag, Phillip remarks on her conviction and courage as a writer. Born in the western United States, feeling alienated by mainstream American culture, she migrated to New York, studied philosophy, and turned herself into a European-style intellectual. Her writing style, densely philosophical and aphoristic, reflects this European sensibility. Lopate talks about the persona she creates in her essays, which he says convey a very strong sense of her personality even though she didn’t use “I” and strove to write impersonally. Noting that her fiction is less successful than her non-fiction, Lopate says this is because she lacked a strong sense of humour and a ‘ready sympathy’ for people.

Phillip begins by remarking that he wanted to write about Sontag because he is ambivalent about her. Ambivalence makes for a good topic, he says, because you are then forced to work out your mixed feelings on paper.

Some of these ideas spill over into the other part of the conversation concerning brothers. Phillip implies, without ever saying it, that there is some ambivalence in his feelings towards Leonard, or else he never could have written an essay about him. What exactly this ambivalence might be is unclear, since on air they both in what they say and how they speak to each other, it’s clear that they love each other very much. This makes me want to read his essay! He also discusses the problem of personal essays: how to know where to stop. It’s a question of both revealing and concealing at the same time, revealing enough to make the essay interesting but not so much that you ‘cross the line’ and reveal what would be hurtful or embarrassing. He also has interesting things to say about the process of writing. He ‘overwrites’, he says, and then goes back with a critical eye to censor, edit, and revise. Students who get stuck because they start editing too soon can learn from this.

In another part of the conversation they talk about old poems being like old photographs—snapshots of who we were when we wrote them. Phillip contrasts W.B. Yeats, who in his old age revised poems he had written years earlier, with Walt Whitman, who simply kept adding new poems to his grand opus, Leaves of Grass.

There’s lots more that interesting and entertaining, so have a listen at WNYC.org or iTunes, or if you wish you can download the podcast from my public folder. The path is Podcasts / English Podcasts / Interviews with Authors / Phillip Lopate.

The usual attacks on ye olde 5-paragraph essay are a bit like attacks on the sonnet. Are formal constraints really the problem? After all, the vast majority of sonnets ever written—the ones that have mercifully made their way into Time’s recycling bin—were undoubtedly very bad pieces of writing. Instead of criticizing the 5-paragraph essay, shouldn’t we give our attention to the writers’ and teachers’ lack of imagination and art?

Even if we consider the 5-paragraph essay as a ‘mere exercise’, is that so bad? Musicians practice scales and chord changes. Cooks begin by following recipes. The 5-paragraph essay similarly teaches fundamental elements of good writing: beginning, middle, and end; stating a thesis; catching the reader’s interest; organizing one’s ideas; developing them with examples, illustrations, and explanation; constructing a coherent argument; concluding in a way that is both artful and interesting. Along the way, the student practices choosing the right word, crafting an effective sentence, employing rhythm and variety, and so on.

At a certain point in European intellectual history Aristotle became the whipping boy for the new philosophers, who for the most part had never read Aristotle but only the medieval Scholastic distortions of Aristotle. In the same way, I suspect that most attacks on the 5-paragraph essay are misdirected. The real problem is not five paragraphs, but bad teaching.