Literature – Page 3 – Mysteries and Manners

Teaching Archetypes; Or, Backdoor Natural Law Theory and “Myth Become Fact”

November 2, 2015

I’m in the middle of a mythology unit with my kids and we’re learning about archetypes–recurring character and event patterns that show up in stories from all different cultures, times and places.

For instance, the orphan-turned-hero archetype: the young boy in the Native American Blackfeet myth we read, Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins, Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Jane Eyre, , even Luke Skywalker if you admit that Anakin is kind of dead, practically speaking.

cfe-little-orphan-annie — And of course, Lil’ Orphan Annie.

Or the mentor figure who must die/disappear so the hero can become a hero: Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Glenda the Good Witch.

Or the flood myth archetype: Noah and the Ark, Utnapishtim in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Deucalion and Pyrrha in the Greek story, and stories in practically every culture on this planet.

Or the hero’s journey archetype. Here’s a fun video we watched in class about that:

Or, perhaps more provocatively, the dying and rising godlike hero: the Egyptian Osiris, Babylonian Tammuz, Greek Persephone, Hercules going to the Underworld and bringing Theseus back, Odysseus, Aeneas… and Gandalf the Grey coming back from the dead as Gandalf the White, and Aragorn passing through Dunharrow.

And, of course, Jesus.

Whoah. Yes, it’s true. Jesus fulfills archetypes big time.

One of the essential questions we are considering in this unit is What do Archetypes Suggest About Human Nature?

Well, what they suggest about human nature is that such a thing actually exists– and that human beings all over the world are caught up in the same search for meaning and often come to surprisingly similar answers.

Archetypes suggest there may be eternal truths about human beings. The stories we tell are similar because we are all similar. Among these standards are moral standards that all cultures recognize but some cultures realize more fully than others do.

And there you go: Backdoor Natural Law Theory. Sort of.

Next up on the unit plan: Is Christianity just another myth?

I mean, it is pretty similar to a lot of other myths. Sometimes uncannily so. There’s the whole scapegoat archetype thing going on. And isn’t Jesus basically like the half-god, half-human heroes of old? And doesn’t that prove that Christianity just adopted other mythologies and so basically our God is just an updated Zeus, or something?

We’ll have some interesting discussions, for sure. But to guide us, we will be reading excerpts from C. S. Lewis’ “Myth Become Fact.”

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens-at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. (Lewis, “Myth Become Fact”)

This is going to be a bit mind-boggling for some of my kids, but I think it’s worth a try.

Reading to Learn and Learning to Read

August 17, 2015

There are lots of assumptions about high school students you have to get rid of when you become a teacher.

The first is that most high school students know how to read.

This group of kiddos, born around the year 2000 (!), grew up with internet, cellphones and an increasingly frantic cultural emphasis on the soundbite, the status update, and the hashtag. It’s sobering to realize that most of them do not remember dial-up.

Even when I was in elementary school, computer typing classes with boxy, green-screen machines were in vogue. Judging by the widespread pushes in education nowadays about iPads for every child, I can only imagine that for many of my kids technology already was a big part of their elementary school experience – Smartboards, Youtube videos, Powerpoints, even “educational” video games… again, useful vehicles for condensing information into small, digestible bites.

Baby food, but not meat and potatoes.

The point is that unless these high school students had parents who read to them every night, access to lots of books, encouragement from their families, and a special type of intellectual thirst that can’t be quenched by television or wikipedia, they inevitably suffer from an inability to read in order to learn.

They are still too busy learning how to read for extended periods of time in the first place.

Unfortunately, in high school, most textbooks assume that you already know how to read. Most teachers do, too. For social studies you might be assigned a chapter about the origins of the American revolution and quizzed the next day, under the assumption that you learned something from reading it (or that you read the chapter tat all). Or in science you read a chapter about mitosis and meiosis and later you’re expected to explain the process yourself. Or even in math, the text gives you charts and graphs and directions – and sometimes even word problems – and you must have both sides of your brain working at once to tackle the problem.

But of course all that kind of reading requires a lot of patience, mental stamina and an awareness (learned in fairytales and other classic literature) that people often do not say what they mean, nor do they really mean what they say. But if you haven’t read about deceptive witches and foolish greedy children who eat Turkish delight, then you come into high school totally unprepared for the biases and hidden agendas sprinkled throughout most texts you encounter.

I find myself, when teaching, trying to find ways to make complex directions and concepts as short and simple as possible. I have even adopted catchy phrases to help my kids remember how to write thesis statements (“A is B because of 1, 2, 3!”) and explain quotes (“remember, quotes can’t speak for themselves!”) and even sit up straight (“SLANT!”). That is what the teacher books tell me to do.

I’m trying to meet my kids where they are, so that’s okay I guess. But sometimes with my own use of Youtube videos, graphic organizes, and gimmicks, I feel like I’m exacerbating the problem and catering to their infirmities rather than helping them learn how to really read.

I’m not saying that all my students suffer from this malady. I do have a few very strong readers – far better than I was at their age. But year after year, that number is growing smaller. And I am faced, as an English literature teacher, with introducing Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Dante’s Inferno to a group of people who need to learn how to read before they can to read in order to understand.

High school teachers are not themselves prepared to teach reading. Our own certification is based largely on our content knowledge – not on our ability to impart basic skills. There are many times when I wish I had been in ACE’s middle school or even elementary English content class so that I would have a better grasp of how children learn how to read in the first place.

It’s very difficult to teach someone how to do something you don’t remember learning how to do yourself. This is true with teaching writing but even more true of teaching reading. All I can remember is being constantly read to and suddenly — seemingly out of nowhere — reading C. S. Lewis for myself. I doubt this was the actual course of events but that is the way I remember it. And I read Lewis in order to learn – because I was curious about miracles and the problem of pain and all the rest of it.

Unfortunately, many of my kids read in order to avoid bad grades. Or to get good ones. Or they simply don’t read.

Cris Tovani, a reading strategies specialist, has been a huge help to me in the last few years in breaking down the complexities of the reading process. If you are at a high school teacher like me, often at a loss as to how to bridge the gap of years of little reading in your kids, check out her books.

You’d be reading to learn yourself – but perhaps eventually you’ll be able to pass that invaluable skill on to your students.

calvin-hobbes-read-dinosaur — source: smilingldsgirl.com

Everything That Rises

August 6, 2015

Summer is a good time to be reading Flannery O’Connor again.

On a flight to Boston a few weeks ago I read one of her more disturbing and controversial stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

You can read the full story online here.

The title comes from the philosophical work of a French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and like all of O’Connor’s titles ought to be closely attended to while reading. You can look up excerpts from Chardin’s “The New Spirit” here and try to decipher his complex mystical theology, but just considering O’Connor’s title “innocently,” with the plot of the story in mind, I would guess it could mean that as things “rise” closer to the truth, they also come closer to — that is, “converge” upon — one another.

There are also several instances of “convergence” in the story itself.

Brief summary: the plot centers around a young man (whom Flannery herself would probably call a “big intellectual”) who is bringing his mother to her exercise classes at the local YMCA. He is embarrassed by her racism and narrowness, and she is proud of his college education.

Some instances of convergence that I noticed: The mother’s ugly purple hat, described in detail at the very beginning of the story and a frequent topic of conversation, is echoed by the narrator’s description of the sky: “The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.”

So – the hat and the sky converge? I say that with a complete lack of authority.

Later, the hat comes up again while they ride the bus. A black woman who sits down across from them is wearing the exact same hat as the mother. Despite racial and societal divide between them, they match. (The son is delighted by the irony of this convergence).

The black woman also has her own son. The mother plays with the little boy and condescendingly offers him a penny — which the black woman angrily rejects.

The mother’s intellectual ignorance is matched by her son’s emotional ignorance.

And the son’s persistent judgment and disgust throughout the story is completely reversed at the end to… well, I won’t spoil the ending. If you’ve ever read O’Connor, you know it will be interesting.

But it’s the title itself that continually arrests me – everything that rises must converge – and the following story acts like a lyric poem – responding to the entitle, enfleshing the title, challenging the title – but never really explaining the title. I don’t pretend to understand it.

Still, this short story gives me hope that no matter how twisted and damaged our attempts at truth are, they nevertheless eventually converge into the truth of God, rising little by little until they finally reach His peace.

tumblr_static_everything-that-rises-banner-2 — source: everythingthatrises.com

The Art of Losing

May 31, 2015

Elizabeth Bishop’s intriguing and delicate poem always comes to my mind at the end of the school year. I hope someday some of my own students will have poems like this in their hearts, poems that come to their aid and express what cannot otherwise really be expressed.

One Art – by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
 so many things seem filled with the intent
 to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
 of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
 The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
 places, and names, and where it was you meant
 to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

 I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
 next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
 The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
 some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
 I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

 ---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
 I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
 the art of losing's not too hard to master
 though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Friday was the last day of classes. I spent part of each class visiting the freshman and explaining their summer reading assignments to them, while the junior English teacher visited my kids. For the rest of the period I answered questions about the final exam, gave them some extra study guides and rubrics and things of that sort. It was pretty mundane, actually.

Honestly I like keeping things mundane at the end of the year. No standing on desks for me, thank you. I’m so emotionally wrung out by the end of the year that it wouldn’t take much to push me over the edge.

A few students, though, came and visited me during lunch or after school to say a special “thank you” – which was very moving to me. The student who asked me at the beginning of the year “Who is Christianity?” came and gave me a big hug before I could stop her. I wish I had taken greater care in thanking each of my own teachers at the end of the year when I was in school. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. / I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

On the other hand, I also had a student infuriate me by acting out quite rudely to another teacher. I kept him after school for a while writing a lengthy apology letter. The first one was not satisfactory, so he had to start over and write another. He was frustrated because he did not believe (or at least admit, at first) that he had done anything wrong. I was frustrated because he had acted so obtusely and rather maliciously, and did not seem to understand why I was making him write the letter. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

There were the usual hordes coming in at lunchtime in desperation, hoping (for some reason) that I would give them an extension on their final paper… the day it was due. As usual, I was cruel and heartless.

But I was saddened later to learn that one student in particular would not be returning to my school next year. She has tackled my class with tenacity, hard work, and lots of sarcasm. Unsure about her own beliefs about God and Catholicism, she has asked some of the best questions I’ve ever heard a high school student ask. I have loved talking with her outside of class about her papers and her questions. I wrote in her yearbook that she should never stop asking those questions. Those who seek, will find. I will miss her. But I shan’t have lied. It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master.

All in all, it was a very typical day except for the art of losing part. A junior, who was one of my kids last year, came in at the end of the day and remarked as he was leaving, “It must be kind of hard being a teacher. You have to say goodbye to so many people so often.”

I agreed but added rather casually that one has to get used to it. So many things seem filled with the intent /

to be lost that their loss is no disaster…

Awhile later I pulled into the parking lot outside of my apartment, turned off the ignition, and suddenly found myself crying – maybe because I felt a little of what real parents feel when they send their kids off to college.

What a gift I have! To get to know these crazy people and come to care about them so much.

I definitely need a break. But give me a few weeks and I’ll be impatient for next year, for another batch of people to love and eventually to say goodbye to.

Good thing the art of losing isn’t hard to master. …though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

On Teaching Poetry, Part II

April 17, 2015

I taught my annual poetry unit at the beginning of the semester and have already blogged a little about it here. In that post I posted these key questions:

The key to teaching poetry is answering the question how. How can we help our kids get inside a poem? How can we help them admire (even if they do not necessarily like) the games poets play with language? How can we help them respect poetry even if they do not understand it? (“On Teaching Poetry“)

A lot of teachers take one of two conventional (and mistaken) approaches: have the students read easy, crappy poems, or have them read classical poems and force them to try to get some meaning out of it. I have chosen another approach.

Being a UD grad, I’m all about the Western Tradition and legit poetry. But I’m also all about respecting where my kids are and acknowledging the fact that, for most of them, poetry is pretty boring. So instead of teaching what a poem is about or even why a poet wrote it, I teach them to ask the question how.

The first thing the kids need to learn when encountering poetry is the difference between tone and mood. Why? Because recognizing tone and mood in conversation, in writing, in emails, in text messages, in any type of human communication is a basic life skill. If you can’t identify tone and mood, then you miss out on 99% of the meaning in any given sentence you read.

Tone is how the speaker feels about what he is saying. It is his attitude.

Mood is how the speaker is trying to make the audience feel about what he is saying.

I ask them, “Have you ever met someone who has a hard time picking up on sarcasm?”

They always say yes. “That person, who cannot pick up on a sarcastic tone, unfortunately misses most of the meaning.”

I then give a real life example. I walk up to Charlie and I say with sincerity and a bright smile, “Hey, Charlie, you did a great job in class today!”

Then I ask, “How does that make you feel, Charlie?”

“Uh.. good, miss,” he replies.

“Great. Because I used a sincere or kind tone, I created a positive or happy mood in Charlie. But I could easily say the exact same words and create a totally different meaning.”

I walk up to Charlie again, this time with a bored and annoyed expression on my face. “Hey, Charlie. You did a great job in class today.” I make the sarcasm as evident as possible.

Then I ask, “How does that make you feel, Charlie?”

“Uh… kinda bad, actually…”

“Exactly. This time I used a sarcastic tone and that created a hurt or slightly depressed mood.”

So then we start to apply those terms to poems – usually simple Billy Collins poems first. Ask questions like, “Okay, what do you think the speaker’s tone is in stanza 1 – positive or negative? What words or images made you say that?”

Starting with the generic terms positive or negative really helps the kids at first. After they determine if the tone is positive or negative, they can more easily find a stronger tone word like “sad” or “furious” or “calm”.

So then we work on what I call “Tone and Mood Maps.” Basically, the kids get a poem with plenty of space in the margins. Then we go through the poem stanza by stanza and put a plus sign + or minus sign – next to each stanza. Then, once we have mapped out basic positives and negatives, then we go back through the poem again and try to determine a tone word and a mood word for each stanza. Like so:

One of my students’ annotations. Notice the plus and minus signs on the left. Then the tone words on the left of each stanza, and the mood words on the right.

The next step is to put them in the place of the poet. Oftentimes students take for granted how difficult it is to write a poem. So I have them write their own “Introduction to Poetry” modeled after Billy Collins’ poem of the same name. The above picture shows one of these poems that was afterwards annotated by the student for tone and mood. Here is another one. The poem is worth reading!

photo-2 — Again, notice the + and – signs, tone words on the left and the mood words on the right.

And I really like the way this student models her poem after both Collins’ and Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”:

Approaching poetry this way changes the question from what does a poem mean to how does a poem mean.

Which, in the end, is a much more meaningful question. It prevents the student from making assumptions about the poet’s intent, and instead forces him to watch what the poet actually does in the poem.

Even if I present them with (gasp!) a real poem, they can find a way into the poem through the tone and mood. Like this student, who wrote admirably about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. Here’s his second body paragraph:

Throughout the second and third stanzas of the poem, Frost tells of many similarities between the two roads. However, he twists and controls language in these stanzas using an appealing tone to help the speaker convince the readers that the second road was the correct one to choose and kindle in them a desire for it. After looking at one road for a while, the speaker “took the other, as just as fair,/ And having perhaps the better claim,/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear,/ Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (6-10). This is what makes this poem difficult to understand. As a result of the appealing tone that the speaker uses, the reader is led to experience an intrigued mood and get caught up in the appeal of the second path, but forget that it is the same as the first.

I love that this kid is comfortable admitting that this poem is “difficult to understand”. He doesn’t pretend to get the whole thing and turn it to some carpe diem cliche, like most people do when they read Frosts’ poem. Instead, he just describes how the poem means by analyzing the tone and the mood.

Who is Emily Eden?

March 28, 2015

19tt15 — The Lady Emily Eden. Source: tribuneindia.com

I had never heard of her before, so when my friend explained to me that she was a contemporary of Jane Austen and had written a wonderful novel, I was immediately intrigued. Noel Perrin of The Washington Post, on the back cover, amusingly observes, “The Semi-Attached Couple is the answer to a good many prayers. It is the book you go on to when you have run out of Jane Austen’s novels.”

We all know Jane Austen and her enduring influence on our ideas of romance and strong women. The Wall Street Journal just posted a great article by Alexander McCall Smith exploring the mystery of her appeal even to contemporary people: “The Secret of the Jane Austen Industry”. Smith wonders,

What explains the continued popularity of Jane Austen and the handful of novels she wrote? It is, after all, rather remarkable that a woman who spent her life in quiet provincial circumstances in early 19th-century England should become, posthumously, a literary celebrity outshining every author since then, bar none. Tolstoy, Dickens and Proust are all remembered, and still read, but they do not have countless fans throughout the world who reread their books each year, who eagerly await the latest television or movie adaptation, who attend conventions in period costume, and who no doubt dream about the heroes and heroines of their novels. (Smith, “The Secret of the Jane Austen Industry.” Wall Street Journal).

After reading Emily Eden’s delightful novel, The Semi-Detached Couple, I guess my question is this:

Why has everyone heard of Jane Austen and nobody has heard of Emily Eden?

Emily Eden (1797-1869) occupied a rather distinguished position in the upper class of her day. She, like Austen, never married– but unlike Austen did quite a bit of traveling, even to India with her beloved brother, where she wrote about her experiences.

The Semi-Detatched Couple was originally written around 1830 but not published until 1860. Interestingly Eden felt the need to include a caveat right after the cover page, explaining to her audience that this novel had been written a generation ago, “before railroads were established, and traveling carriages-and-four superseded” and thus really was “a strange Chronicle of the Olden Time” (Eden, Preface to The Semi-Detatched Couple).

Unlike Austen, who always writes about the pre-marriage adventures of courtship, pursuit, and misunderstanding–Eden in this novel writes about post-married life. The novel explores the challenges of a newly married couple who have a very hard time understanding one another. Lord Teviot is desperately in love with this wife but extremely jealous of her strong attachment to her family. Lady Helen is confused by her husband’s moodiness and misses her loving home.

However, like Austen, Eden creates extremely memorable, humorous, and occasionally infuriating characters–like the next door neighbor Mrs. Douglas who

had never had the slightest pretensions to good looks; in fact, though it is wrong to say anything so ill-natured, she was excessively plain, always had been so, and had a soreness on the subject of beauty, that looked perhaps as like envy as any other quality. As she had no hope of raising herself to the rank of a beauty, her only chance was bringing others down to her own level. “How old she is looking!” — “How she is altered!” were the expressions that invariably concluded Mrs. Douglas’ comments on her acquaintances […] (Ibid 21)

Eden, like Austen, is a very opinionated narrator whose frequent use of irony and wit had me laughing out loud many times throughout the novel.

Very aware of Austen’s influence, Eden even includes an explicit reference to her work. In a letter to her mother while visiting the enviable Ecksdales, Eliza Douglas says,

I write in such haste, that I have not time for more than several very important questions which I want you to answer. What am I to give the housemaids here? and do you object to my reading novels, if Lady Eskdale says there is no harm in them? They look very tempting, particularly one called Pride and Prejudice. (Ibid)

Like Austen, Eden makes frequent use of letter writing in advancing the plot and exploring the motives of her characters. But fascinatingly, unlike Austen, she explores the servants‘ perspectives of their lords and ladies. In a letter from Mrs. Tomkinson, Helen’s ladies maid, we hear about the petty competitions between servants, their opinions on the upper-class interactions they witness daily, and their own concerns. Eden treats them with the same amused attitude she has toward all of her characters.

Notably, Jane Austen never enters into the mind or heart of any servant in her novels. They are barely mentioned in her works at all. I wonder if perhaps, because Lady Eden belonged the the upper class and was safely removed from the servants’ circle, she did not feel threatened in any way by their perspectives and could enter into them in her novels without losing ironic detachment. Austen, being somewhat closer in class, perhaps could not share in this narrative perspective.

Austen also does not comment very much on the politics of her day (although I do not hold this against her). Eden does, and reveals all the ridiculous machinations of the political process of the period. In some ways she was far more worldly than Austen and this is very apparent in her work.

Although I do not think Lady Eden’s novel reaches the depth of Austen’s finest works, (like Emma or Persuasion), I think it certainly surpasses Northanger Abbey and, in some ways, even Pride and Prejudice. She is gentler toward her characters than Austen is. And the “villains” in her story are not soundly punished like Mr. Willoughby and Mr. Wickham are, which perhaps better illustrates an irritating truth about human life.

I highly recommend The Semi-Detached Couple and wish more people knew Lady Eden.

Flannery and the Incarnation

March 26, 2015

Yesterday would have been Flannery O’Connor’s 90th birthday. I always thought it was so appropriate [read: providential] that she was born on the feast of the Annunciation, when God became incarnate. In fact it was her stories and letters that first really helped me to appreciate the Incarnation and Catholicism’s insistence on the sacramentality of the world.

I read C. S. Lewis long before I read O’Connor, and yet for all of his generous help to me in navigating Christianity, and his beautiful exploration of Christianity as a story in the Chronicles of Narnia, “Myth Became Fact” and other writings, I never really got the sacramental approach from him. It was in O’Connor’s bizarre works that are almost overwhelmingly “of the flesh” that I began to experience Christianity in a new way.

Christianity always seems to struggle in every age from gnosticism – from a desire to separate the body and the spirit. Flannery O’Connor’s writings are a very strong antidote for this chronic malady, I think because she herself was struck by the Church’s teaching on sacramentality and had to overcome a certain natural resistance to it:

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. (Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being)

When I was a junior in high school, I chose The Violent Bear It Away as my novel to read and to write about for the major paper we were writing in English class. This novel disturbed me and irritated me to no end (it still does), but I was arrested by how the moments of grace in the book were not abstract but firmly grounded in earthly imagery–fire and blood and bread and landscape. In this powerful scene, the protagonist, a young boy running away from his calling to be a prophet, is coming to terms with the fact that the mysterious “hunger” inside of him which has haunted him throughout the story cannot be satisfied:

He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood. (O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away)

Reading Flannery O’Connor is very much like reading the Old Testament. There is violence and sin and some very unlikable people — and yet somehow it is only in this broken realm that grace chooses to work.

Oddly enough, that previous sentence also aptly describes the Catholic Church. It is not noble and abstract, nor clean and tidy, nor even very holy (except insofar as it is the vessel of the Holy Spirit). Rather it is full of violence and sin and some very unlikeable people. And yet somehow Christ has chosen to work his grace in it and through it.

As Flannery says, “Sometimes you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it.”

I love that. It comforts me when I’m impatiently enduring a banal liturgy or rolling my eyes about my Catholic friends’ Facebook posts or gaping at the comment some cardinal made or fuming over yet another scandal.

And of course I too am sometimes (perhaps oftener than I think) the cause of someone else’s “suffering from the Church”.

But Flannery understood this and explained it beautifully in her sharp, concise way: “the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it” (Ibid).

flannery-oconnor-self-portrait1 — Flannery with her self-portrait. Source: full-stop.net

On Teaching Poetry

February 7, 2015

“I ask them to take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide” (Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” 1-3). Picture source: genius.com

More thoughts coming soon on my dramatic change in grading policy! (I sound like an advertisement…)

In the meantime, I’ve just finished teaching a poetry unit and thought I’d share some ideas.

The first time I taught a poetry unit to high school students a few years ago, I knew I was in for a rough time. I remembered how much I hated poetry when I was in high school (even though I loved reading challenging prose like Augustine and Dostoevsky). Indeed, from the moment I uttered the word “poetry” in connection to our next unit of study to my kids, I got so many groans and eye-rolls that I briefly considered skipping the thing altogether.

What helped me most was reflecting on the reasons I used to hate poetry. They were pretty straightforward and can pretty much be summed up by one idea:

I hated that poets were being difficult and obscure on purpose.

As a relatively open-minded high school student, I could forgive Shakespeare for the fact that his language reflected the 16th century and even Hawthorne for his interminable sentences and hopelessly flowery diction – he was a 19th century Romantic, after all. Charles Dickens was making money to support himself for every unnecessary descriptive paragraph he wrote in Great Expectations, and I could even forgive Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner for their mysterious and disturbing characters and plot twists.

I could not, however, forgive Emily Dickinson for her inexplicable dashes.

Nor e. e. cummings for his annoying rejection of simple capitalization and punctuation.

Nor Sylvia Path for her confessional whining.

Nor, especially, William Carlos Williams for his infuriating wheelbarrow.

What made things much worse was the fact that I felt like my high school English teachers were demanding that we find the “deeper meaning” of these stupid puzzles. But of course I had no idea what Emily meant by her “Certain Slant of Light” nor what “One Art” Miss Elizabeth Bishop was referring to nor why Edgar Allan Poe was so obsessed by some lady named “Annabelle Lee”. And yet my teachers seem to think the answers were obvious.

Like many other high school teachers, several of mine insisted upon psycho-analyzing the poets and explaining their weird defiance of all common sense writing by praising them for their “revolutionary” challenge of the “patriarchal norms” of the English language. Apparently, I was supposed to appreciate poetry and like the fact that these dysfunctional people called poets couldn’t just say what they meant like everyone else.

After thinking about my own hatred of poetry as a high school student, I saw at once that I would have to develop a different approach with my own kids.

I must not demand that they appreciate poetry, nor that they be expected to know what Wallace Stevens was up to, nor even understand it in the common sense of the word “understand.”

But my University of Dallas Junior Poet educated self, who had fallen in love eventually with Emily Dickinson and Richard Wilbur and W. H. Auden, was also unwilling to let them just rhyme along with Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss.

The key to teaching poetry is answering the question how.

How can we help our kids get inside a poem?

How can we help them admire (even if they do not necessarily like) the games poets play with language?

How can we help them respect poetry even if they do not understand it?

Marianne Moore, in her famous meta-poem “Poetry,” observes that “we do not admire what we cannot understand.” So how do we help them understand without demanding that they tackle the impossible?

I start with this poem by Billy Collins, which says better what I am getting at than anything else I have read:

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

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.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from The Apple that Astonished Paris. Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press.

Source: The Apple that Astonished Paris (1996)

via poetryfoundation.org

More to come.

Poetry Study Guide

January 28, 2015

My kids are taking their poetry test on Friday and I thought I’d share the study guide I created for them with you, especially for any teachers out there who teach poetry.

The “basic concepts” are all things we discussed in class and they took notes on. But the “critical thinking” sections are meant to push them – we talked about these questions a little bit, but they are open-ended and I want them to consider them as a part of their preparation for the test.

Unit 4 Poetry Study Guide

Overall Test Goal: ___________________________________________

(Find this in your Table of Contents Unit Goal)

4.1 SWBAT explain the differences between poetry vs. prose.

Basic concepts:

Explain three differences between poetry and prose

What is compressed language? What is expanded language?

What is the difference between writing in lines/stanzas and writing in paragraphs?

What is rhythm? (Do not confuse it with rhyme!)

The three people ALWAYS involved in a poem are….

How are the author and the speaker different from each other?

How to cite a poem the first time and subsequent times.

Critical Thinking: How would you define poetry?

Why is poetry often so difficult to understand at first?

Do poets make their poems difficult on purpose? Why?

4.2 SWBAT apply tone, mood and shifts to poetry.

Basic concepts:

What is tone? What is mood? How are they different?

What is a shift? How do you find one?

How do you create a tone and mood map?

How do you use quote sandwiches to explain tone and/or mood?

Critical Thinking: How can tone and mood help you understand a poem better?

How does tone create mood?

How are tone and mood relevant in everyday conversation?

Ongoing: SWBAT identify and explain literary and poetic devices.

Be able to define and find:

Metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, assonance, alliteration, apostrophe, hyperbole, understatement, onomatopoeia

4.3 SWBAT apply poetic form and meter to poetry.

Basic concepts:

What is poetic form? What are some examples?

What is meter?

What is a foot?

Identify and define: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee

Be able to scan poetry for stressed and unstressed syllables

Critical Thinking: Why do poets sometimes restrict themselves to a poetic form?

What does writing in a particular form (like the villanelle) teach you about poetry?

What are some advantages and disadvantages of free verse?

Why do poets use iambs, trochees, spondees, etc? How do these feet contribute to rhythm?

How is poetry similar to and different from music?

The Matthean Effect

October 15, 2014

At the very end of the parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30), Jesus gives a very enigmatic explanation:

“For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance; but to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Matthew 25:29)

This has always bothered me.

It hardly seems fair.

Don’t we want Jesus to say — and doesn’t He usually say — something like “For to everyone who has, what he has will be shared with others; and as for him who has not, he will be given even more“?

I mean, isn’t that the sort of thing “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and the other Beatitudes illustrate? And isn’t Jesus always telling us to help the poor (the ones who “have not”)?

Turns out, Jesus’ words perfectly describe high school students and how they learn. To those who have, more will be given. But for those who have not, even what they have will be taken away.

I just finished grading a whole pile of reading quizzes. Over the weekend, I had my kids read this great article by Dr. Mark Lowery (from UD!) entitled “Myth Become Fact” as a way to help them with the answer that exceeds the question.

This article simplifies C. S. Lewis’ more complex essay, which shows how Christianity is BOTH mythological AND true. Basicially, the thesis is this:

Myth and Christianity are not, therefore, antagonistic to each other. Various myths exist either as anticipations of Christianity or as echoes of Christianity. (Lowery)

We have been learning about reading strategies, annotating, etc. I thought this article wouldn’t be too hard for them.

But, alas.

An alarming number of them couldn’t even pick out the main idea.

I mean, some of them definitely did. There were several perfect scores on the quiz.

However, some of the kids did not read the article at all. My village atheist may have read it, but if he did, he did it with such a closed mind that he was able to honestly claim “Having Christianity be a foreshadow in myths in ridiculously insane. […] I chose to ignore answer b [the quote above] because it is a stupid thought – everything and anything can have something wrong” (Student A, “Reading Quiz”).

Sigh.

But even worse, some of the kids clearly tried to read the article but still had no clue what it was saying. Some of them thought Dr. Lowery is an atheist. Others believed he was showing that all religions are equally true. There was even one girl who thought the article was talking about how Joel Olsteen converted to Christianity.

I’m serious.

And I know that when I give back these quizzes, some of the kids will be confirmed in their view that English class is too hard, or the article was far beyond their reading level, or what’s the point in trying anyway, or that they are always going to fail.

It’s the Matthean effect.

To my kids who read, who try, who want to learn — in other words, who “have” something already — they can get something more out of my class. They get excited by these ideas. They push themselves harder. They learn.

To my kids who don’t read, don’t try (or don’t know how to try), who don’t want to learn – in other words, who “have not” — they seem to lose, and keep losing. They get discouraged, then bored. They blame the article. They blame me. They blame school. They give up. Because who cares, anyway. Mythology is stupid. And so is reading.

I want to help them. But I don’t know how.

I am baffled sometimes by their ignorance. I’m not trying to say that in a judgmental way. I’m trying to describe this sense of bewilderment I feel when I read what some of them write on these reading quizzes.

And I do know that in the end, a large part of all this lies within the mysterious realm of their freedom. My students can come and ask for extra help – or not. They can do the reading – or not. They can develop a growth mindset – or not.

Luigi Guissani, in a different context, has words that seem to nevertheless apply. He even quotes the passage of the Gospel which describes “the Matthean effect”:

For God tends to give value to the position our freedom has already assumed. God seconds a decision our freedom has already made and forces it to reveal more clearly what it is willing to do. When one’s freedom is disinclined, when it adopts a closed attitude, everything that happens encourages it to close itself even more and vice-versa. ‘For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance; but to him who has not, even what he has will be taken away’ (Matthew 25:29).” (Guissani, At the Origin of the Christian Claim 71)

Thoughts?

Have other teachers experienced this? What do you do?

I originally discovered “the Matthean effect” idea in my Childhood Development class at Notre Dame. I think the following article coins the term (APA citation format):

Sameroff, A. (2010) A unified theory of development: A dialectic integration of nature and nurture. Child Development, 81, 6-28.