“Miss Smith, why we gotta know this?” This comment has haunted me again and again in my short teaching career – first with Beowulf then with The Canterbury Tales. To be honest, I cannot always answer this question. I know why I would read Beowulf, but my salute to the older cultures and their beauty falls on deaf ears with my students. When I read Appleman’s (2000) explanation of why we teach literary critical theory in her book Critical Encounters, I was heartened and felt confident again concerning my beloved literature. “If you are going to live intelligently in the modern world, you have to recognize that there are conflicting ideologies and that there is no simple direct access to the truth” (p. 19). Next time, I will be ready.
“Miss Smith, why we gotta know this?”
“You don’t have to know it, but you do need to learn from it. The pieces offer a new look from a very different culture into issues that still concern us today: fear, hypocrisy, greed, bragging, glory, and duty.”
“What’s this gonna teach us?”
“Well, why go through something and learn the hard way when you can read about it and get the same message without the pain and risk? This is just offering a new perspective. It’s all about perspectives…” From here, literary critical theory is very easy to introduce. Reading the series of fairytales and their different interpretations made me think of another twist I have read – Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn Garner. He does this very same thing with his own humorous flare. Once my students can see the different ways there are of viewing a text, I believe it can actually turn into a sort of game. Garner may become a standard classroom text for my students at this rate.
1 response so far ↓
1 Dr. M. // Sep 19, 2006 at 10:05 pm
Perhaps instead of trying to tell your students that there is a connection between the issues explored in the classic literature in the English classroom and those they confront daily in their worlds today a better way will be to guide your students to discover those connections themselves. As you read more in our course and participate in our discussions, I invite you to look for the ideas that will help you to accomplish this goal. I also encourage you to share these discoveries with us on your blog.