When the Light Goes On

This week’s post offers a change from the policy orientation of my recent posts. It’s a personal essay, a reflection on a key time in my own educational history triggered by a visit from my high school English teacher, a guy who had an enormous influence on the direction of my life.

I apologize for its length, but I didn’t think it would work to break the essay into two parts. A slightly different version of “When the Light Goes On” appeared in The American Scholar, spring 2010.


The old grade book sits between baskets of corn chips and bottles of beer, Visionaid in slanted print across the blotchy cover, a record of the year I found my way in school. The book is eight by ten inches and has quadrille-ruled pages with slots for 48 student names along the left margin, then four half pages that turn on the spiral binding to record grades and more grades as the term progresses: week 5, week 6, week 7….

I am leaning in alongside Jack McFarland, the man who taught me English in my senior year of high school well over 40 years ago. He and his wife Joan are in town for his college reunion, and we are settled in over a meal. Mr. McFarland (it still feels a little odd to call him Jack) never throws anything away. His den is floor-to-ceiling – his wife has shown me pictures – with teetering stacks of papers and books. Before coming to L.A. for the reunion, he unearthed the gradebook from my senior year. He runs his finger down the left column: Ramirez, Ray, Rose. M. Rose.

Mr. McFarland came to our small Catholic high school straight out of Columbia. He was in his mid-twenties, having second thoughts about his graduate program, and wanted to take a break to teach school. He was intense, rumpled, cigarette and coffee stained, and unlike anything I or my classmates had seen before. He paced back and forth across the front of the room jiggling a piece of chalk in his hand, turning again and again to write on the board the span of Western intellectual history, Homer to Brave New World. He brought an elite mid-century education to our unassuming and unexpecting high school.

He reads down the names – “Oh, I remember him; hmmm, don’t remember him” – and I prod his memory about the students I can recall. His wife moves to our side of the table, next to me. He turns those half-pages, noting the quizzes on The Iliad, The Aeneid, Dante and the papers we wrote on Homer, on Virgil, a book and a paper every two or three weeks, returned soon after, covered with comments. Except for a few super-achievers, we were in the deep end of the pool.

Most of the guys who attended our school – Catholic schools were then segregated by gender – came from blue-collar families. Some of us, myself included, were poor, but the parents of a fair number had worked their way into a solid middle-class life. A few came from professional families. Regardless, even the brainiest student had not worked so hard before, as the grades in that Visionaid demonstrate. During the first term of the first semester there were Cs and Ds galore.

I had several good and caring teachers in elementary school, but on the whole my education before Mr. McFarland was unexceptional. My father was ill during most of my school years, and my mother supported us by waiting tables. The only child, I had to stay close to home to care for him, and in retreat from the sickness and hardship around me, I lived a good deal in my head, not engaging much with school. I could read well, which saved me, but learned nothing of mathematics, went through the motions in social studies, couldn’t figure out grammar, and developed into the kind of average, non-descript, semi-out-of-it student I would later teach and write about.

Such kids, particularly from families who aren’t knowledgeable about school and not forceful within it, really fall through the cracks when they hit high school. My high school story is a too-typical one, not the drama of a kid in big trouble, but not a kid going anywhere either. I drifted through the curriculum, flunked algebra, got stuck in low-level courses (the coach who taught civics honest-to-God could not real aloud the textbook), was absorbed with my father’s death, oh my poor father’s slow death – and then, boom, senior year and I’m sitting in the front row of Mr. McFarland’s English class (commanded up there because I was acting the fool in the back of the room), trying to wrap my tongue around the proper names in The Iliad.

When he taught us, Mr. McFarland was serious as a heart attack. I don’t remember him laughing much, and he certainly didn’t try to entertain us. Looking back on it all, I’m a little surprised that there wasn’t a mutiny over the weight of the work. I mean, among the forty-six-soon-to-be-men packed into that room there was most of the front line of the football team, three of the school’s most feared fighters, a sampling of guys from tough neighborhoods to the south and east, and an assortment of nerdy goof-offs, me among them. But Mr. McFarland moved forward across that chalkboard: Classical Greece, to Rome, to Augustine and Aquinas, to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Hard as the work was and pissed off as some students were by it, we knew he was going all out, putting stupendous effort into reading our papers, pulling us aside after class, marching down to the administration office if he thought one of us was wronged.

Now, sitting alongside me at dinner, older, heavier, a big, bushy beard, he is in high spirits. He shakes his head at the books he assigned, and at all that writing. “You know,” he says turning to Joan laughing, “I just didn’t know I couldn’t do this…so I did it!” He starts talking about the books, full of enthusiasm, about how much he liked Conrad then, or Crime and Punishment, or, recalling his extracurricular reading in New York, Invisible Man. Then he asks me if I’ve read the new stuff he’s enjoying, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or Alice Munro. There’s the same force of intellect, the zap of ideas that I remember, though now in a different register, downright jovial. The pleasure of recollection, perhaps. Or the sense of meaningful work, a life well-lived in the classroom.

My eye catches the column labeled Heart of Darkness. We had to write a story in Conrad’s style. It was an assignment he had appropriated from somewhere in his own college education. He pushes himself back from the table and says, “I thought, ‘Why wait till grad school to do this stuff’.”

I still remember that assignment. It was one of the papers that flipped a switch in me, that somehow began to change that crowded classroom from a place of hard work to something much more, a place that caught my fancy and helped me redefine who I was.

After dinner, after the repeated goodbyes – outside the restaurant, on the way to the parking lot, and finally as they drive away – I go home and pull down the Dell paperback Three Tales of Joseph Conrad that Mr. McFarland had assigned. “The Nellie a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails….” The brown pages come off at the seam as I turn them. I don’t throw much away either.

I’m struck as I reread Heart of Darkness by what a new kind of book this must have been for me: the thickly descriptive language, the dilatory indirection of the narrator, Marlow. I suspect that I read through long stretches of it – especially at the beginning when Marlow sets up the tale – without registering much at all.

To write something in Conrad’s style led to another first for me. Up to that point, if my memory serves me, most reading of literature in school emphasized plot and character…and maybe a show-stopping symbol or two. But now I had to get in close and examine the author’s word choice. Otherwise how could I imitate this guy’s style? This was the stuff of literary analysis, McFarland’s intention, I’m sure.

Once Marlow begins his journey up the Congo, I start finding some places where I’m marking up the pages. I’d never taken a pen to text like this, other than to underline a place or a character’s name, but here I go. This comes as Marlow seeks refuge from the sun in what turns out to be a “grave of death” populated by terribly sick African laborers:

At last I got under the tree, my purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment; but no sooner within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno. The rapids were near, and an uninterrupted, uniform, headlong, rushing noise filled the mournful stillness of the grove, where not a breath stirred, not a leaf moved, with a mysterious sound – as though the tearing pace of the launched earth had suddenly become audible.

Of course, I don’t remember what I was thinking here, but I linger with the passage now, picture myself at the kitchen table bent over the book, zeroing in on sound and motion. The analysis is pretty crude. I’m underlining a lot and not differentiating very well. But I imagine myself happy, pleased with what I’m doing, using my pen to consider each word, assuming that Conrad is up to something, and I’m going to figure it out. This was heady, a skill I hadn’t learned before. Without fully understanding it, I was being guided by the assignment to a new kind of reading.

I don’t know if Mr. McFarland intended it or not, but the choice of Heart of Darkness was pedagogically astute, especially for novices like me. For though the book was difficult, and little in my background had prepared me for it, the novel’s gloomy, ominous language is thick as fog in a horror movie, discernable and available for imitation by a kid with a pretty rudimentary set of tools. Much to my surprise – and there it was right in the gradebook – I got an A-/B+ on the paper. But much, much more important, it was this kind of work for Mr. McFarland that began to turn my life around. I suppose I had been mediocre for too long and took to the challenge to think hard. And I suppose I had lived internally for too long and enjoyed this more public engagement with ideas and with school. And then there was Mr. McFarland’s unorthodox but compelling presence and the sense that in his way he was looking out for us. I wanted the guy to like me.

Until Mr. McFarland’s class, I hadn’t given much thought at all about what to do after high school. He counseled me toward his alma mater, a local Catholic university. I was admitted as a probationary student. He taught at my high school for a little while longer, and he continued to mentor me through my bumpy freshman year. Then he returned to graduate school, and from there moved north to Sacramento to teach in a community college. That’s where he met his wife. After a few years, we lost touch. I would go on to teach in elementary school, community college and job training programs, a program for returning Vietnam veterans, and an Educational Opportunity Program’s tutorial center, working for the most part with children and adults who in some way also were not prepared for school.

One day I was sitting in my office grading papers, and the phone rang. I knew the voice, felt it, before I could name it, deliberate, coming from back in the throat, elongating the vowels. It was Mr. McFarland. He had read something I wrote and looked me up. Now we see each other once or twice a year when he and Joan visit L.A.

I keep thinking about what happened to me in senior English because, long ago as it was, it directly connects to a central issue in current educational reform: how to provide a quality education to all students, particularly those who are “underprepared”, “at risk”, or in some way disconnected from school. I certainly wasn’t in dire straits, wasn’t about to flunk out or drop out, but I was aimless and unengaged, part of the great swath of the academically adrift.

I’ve taught many people since those days and have studied a lot of classrooms –some like Mr. McFarland’s, some quite different – and I’m drawn both analytically and emotionally to those moments when you see signs of the mind stirring, of people beginning to get a sense of what they can do.

Not long ago I was observing a high school program in the construction trades, a program where faculty from across the subject areas were working hard to integrate traditional academic work with trade skills. A fair number of the students had not done well in school, and the program was an attempt to better serve them, to provide a new beginning.

In the middle of the electronics classroom, the teacher had built the frame of a very small house. The frame was bare except for wires running across and through the beams, some wall switches, various light fixtures, and a power panel, door open. Students would test their skills on this simulated residence, and, on the day of my visit, two students were hooking up all sorts of lights and running the wires to the power panel.

There was a group of younger students present, new boys and girls just entering the program. The teacher got a nod from the two students that they were ready, so he walked over to the classroom’s central power source and ceremoniously flipped a switch. The whole house lit up! Ceiling lights, wall lights, floods. “Wow,” exclaimed one of the younger students under his breath. “Man,” he said, “that’s crazy!”

I know, son. It is crazy. See where it leads you. Then hold it close and run with it.

Portraits of Thinking: An Advanced Placement English Class

Over the last three or four months, I’ve been presenting portraits of people thinking – teachers and students mostly, but laborers and a surgeon too – with the intention of demonstrating the richness and variability of cognition.

I’ve done this because there are so few examples of people actually using their minds in contemporary educational policy literature or in media treatments of schooling. We don’t get inside classrooms very much, and rarely see good teachers at work or students thinking things through. This absence is not accidental. To talk about learning (not “learning outcomes,” but learning) or pedagogy in many policy arenas is to be seen as soft, off-topic, beside the point. As for media, learning and pedagogy don’t fit typical media story lines about education: educational politics, funding, or the human interest portrait. We live amid constant talk about education with minimal attention paid to the experience of being educated. It’s telling how many of the readers’ responses to the portraits have addressed this experience. I think a lot of us are hungry for such talk. In my next entry, I will focus on readers’ comments over the last few months.

Now, let’s spend some time with Steve Gilbert, a wonderful teacher I wrote about in Possible Lives, from which this portrait is drawn.

The last portrait I presented of teaching was of the two teachers in an ungraded primary (June 11, 2009). Here we go to the other end of the K-12 pipeline, an Advanced Placement English course in Chicago.

I am especially taken with this teacher’s skill in forwarding inquiry, in pushing thinking, and his admirable ability to be rigorous and supportive at the same time. He listens closely and uses what a student says to frame the next question that will nudge the discussion along. As he does so, he creates the conditions for students to be intellectually adventurous, to wade into uncertainty, and to risk being wrong. This risk-taking is something that sadly has been schooled out of many honors students.

So let’s listen in as Steve Gilbert and his students think their way through William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I’ll begin by briefly setting the context and summarizing the book, then I’ll let the discussion unfold.

I apologize for the length, but I don’t know how else to give you a sense of how Steve and his students work with this difficult novel.

* * *

Before I arrived, the class had read Fathers and Children and Brave New World, two books with an omniscient narrator and traditional narrative structure. As I Lay Dying provided a radical jolt. It was published in 1930, drafted, Faulkner claimed, in six weeks while he worked nights at the University of Mississippi power plant, written, when the furnaces permitted, on the bottom of an overturned wheelbarrow.

The novel consists of fifty-nine vignettes told by fifteen characters, most of them poor rural Southern Whites, some of whom speak in a direct and uncomplicated manner—though in regional dialect—while others speak in a mix of direct address, recollection, reverie, and stream-of-consciousness.

The story is this—though it by no means emerges this readily. Addie Bundren is dying and has asked her husband, Anse, to bury her in Jefferson, her place of birth, some forty miles away. She has asked that her oldest son, Cash, a carpenter, build her a proper coffin, and that he build it outside her window, in her line of sight, so that she can be sure of its quality.

Once Addies dies, the journey to Jefferson begins—Addie’s coffin resting unsteadily in the Bundren’s old wagon—only to be disrupted by a washed-out bridge, where the coffin is almost lost, and a barn fire that nearly incinerates it. The journey provides multiple revelations (and takes so long that Addie’s body begins to decompose), and by the time the family reaches the graveyard, we realize that many of the family had their own private motives for accompanying Addie to Jefferson.

Addie has five children, Cash, the carpenter, takes a craftsmen’s pride in building his mother’s coffin, and is compassionate in a reserved, literal-minded way. Trying to save the coffin in the flooding river en route to Jefferson, he breaks his leg, and, with bones held roughly in place by a makeshift and mutilating cement cast, rattles along in silent pain atop the box he has built for his mother.

Darl is keenly observant and introspective. Though he and Cash share some feelings, we gradually discover that two of the three siblings, Jewel and Dewey Dell, hate him. He is the most frequent speaker, and, at times, seems to be telepathic, becoming almost a central narrator. At the end, however, he is declared insane for torching the barn in which is mother’s body was temporarily stored.

Jewel, the third son, is physical and harsh, but in truth is fiercely devoted to his mother and speaks of her in a language of violence and protection. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, about seventeen, describes things in a sensual and enticing way, but is not wordly wise and is secretly pregnant. Vardaman, a child, is retarded and prone to simplified and confused associations. Fearing his mother is suffocating in the coffin, he drills holes in the top and into his dead mother’s face. Because Addie died on the same day he caught and killed a huge fish, he gradually comes to believe—in a moment that sent Steve’s class over the top—that “my mother is a fish.”

***

“I like,” Qisha was saying, “the way people aren’t what they seem to be.”

“Can you give us an example?” Steve asked.

“You take Darl,” Qisha continued. “He seems to be the only one who has a lot to say, and we kind of come to rely on him, and then he’s declared insane!”

“Qisha,” Steve said, “given the point you’re making, this would be a good time to return to something you said earlier. You said that As I Lay Dying was not like a traditional narrative, was more like real life. Can you say more about that?”

“Well,” she answered, “there isn’t somebody in your life telling you what to think, someone to organize what you see, what you hear. And, like that, this book just gives you pieces of thought.”

Steve glanced from Qisha to the rest of the class, panning the circle. “One thing we do all the time,” he said, “is tell each other stories. We organize experience into narratives. So if we don’t have a single story, if we have a series of stories, how do we determine truth?”

Ayana, quiet up till then, looked over at Steve, touching her glasses. “We compare the stories, try to determine accuracy that way.”

“OK,” said Steve. “Let’s find a good example.” And he began flipping through his copy of the novel—which was heavily annotated—and read contradictory selections from Darl, from Cora, a sanctimonious neighbor, and from Jewel himself on the topic of Jewel’s feelings for his mother. “Now,” said Steve, “how do we come to the truth about Jewel?”

“What Cora says, that’s just heresay,” Anyana continued. “She’s a busybody. But Darl, he was there.”

“Was he?” asked Steve. “Or are we getting his perception?”

Ayana pondered that. “No, actually, he sees Jewel through is eyes—and he has a funny relationship with Jewel.”

Steve came to class knowing that, at some point in the day, he would go to the board and ask the class to list all the things they thought they knew, the events they felt sure of. And at that moment, when Ayana was pushing on the provisional nature of so much in the novel, he uncurled himself from the desk and palmed a piece of chalk.

“Let’s make a list of what we think we know,” he said, turning to the board to become the students’ scribe.

“Well,” said Brian, “we know Addie died.” Steve wrote “Addie died.” “Dewey Dell is pregnant,” ventured Tequia, speaking for the first time.

“They’re taking Addie to Jefferson to bury her,” Raina said. But, as Steve was writing, Qisha interjected: “Wait, isn’t that a difficult question—I mean, what do you mean, ‘What we know?’ Do you mean what people tell us or what we finally think happened? I mean, people have different reasons for taking Addie to Jefferson—so what each one would know is different.”

“Absolutely right,” said Steve, appreciating Qisha’s tough-mindedness. “Good point. So maybe the best we can do is continue this list provisionally, listing what we think we know.” The class continued: Addie’s body is decomposing; Cash breaks his leg; Addie’s body has holes in it; Darl sets fire to the barn. Steve was keeping a watchful eye on the clock, and just before the bell, he held up his hand, palm outward, and said, “OK, nice going, class. I’d like us to test these ‘knowings’ over the next two weeks.”

And as the bell rang and everyone was wedging books into stuffed backpacks, Brian laughed and asked, “Yeah, but does anyone know why Darl set the barn on fire?”

***

Fast-forward a few class meetings.

Steve began by asking for someone to “indicate what he or she thinks a central theme might be.”

Brian: “Truths are subjective.”

Steve: “OK, how would you support that theme?”

Brian took a moment, started to page through the book, looked up, and laughed. “Ah, let me get back to you on that.”

Ayana: “How about the fact that Darl and Anse give us different versions of certain events?”

Qisha: “Also, there’s the different reasons they’re going to Jefferson.”

Steve: “Fine. Now let me ask you this. Is there a better way to summarize those examples than saying ‘Truths are subjective?’”

Alastair: “Everyone has their own version of truth.”

Brain: “People perceive reality differently.”

Steve: “OK, not bad. Let’s come back to that. Any other themes?”

Alastair: “It strikes me how religion is depicted in the book. I mean, there’s Addie and the minister; when Cash broke his leg the first time, he fell off a church; some of the townspeople talk piously but are hypocritical.”

Steve: “That sounds promising. There’s also Addie’s belief about deception…”

Alastair: “I’m not sure that’s religious.”

Steve: “All right, good point. Ethics, maybe. Can anyone see a theme developing?”

Alastair: “Some of the people who act religious aren’t religious at all.”

Steve noticed that Tequia wanted to speak. He also knew she was a religious person. “Tequia” he said, “I want to bring you into this discussion. Any thoughts?”

Tequia: “Well, Cash is faithful to carpentry.”

Steve: “What’s he say about carpentry?”

Ayana: “Regardless of the materials you have, you should do it well.”

Tequia: “It’s a kind of philosophy.”

Steve: “Who is the most famous carpenter we know?”

Aisha: “Jesus.”

Tequia: “Some of the other characters don’t realize it, but for Cash, carpentry might be a kind of religion.”

Steve: “So different characters might express religious feelings in different ways? Fine. Other themes, people?”

Qisha: “How about ‘Blood relatives don’t guarantee love.’”

Aisha: “There might be a simpler way to say that.”

Steve: “Give it a try, Aisha.”’

Aisha: “I’m not good at this.”

Steve: “That’s OK; try it.”

Aisha: “Love is tainted by obligation?”

Steve: “That’s very interesting. Can you say more?”

Aisha: [pausing, looking for words] “All the characters in the novel seem to classify their love…uh…I don’t know.”

Steve: “I think you’re on to something.”

Qisha: “That there is no simple way to define love or emotion in general…I mean, usually you can only do certain things that will be thought of as love.”

Steve: “Going back to Aisha’s word classify—is it easy to classify or categorize the emotions in this novel?”

Qisha, Brian, Aisha, Raina: “No.”

Steve: [looking at Brian] “Remember you were talking about truth being subjective?”

Brian: “Yes.”

Steve: “Well, another way to talk about that might be to say that there aren’t easy slots or categories for truth or, for that fact, for emotions. Some of the characters may feel and express something that could generally be called love, but it wouldn’t fit traditional definitions of love. It’s a wide spectrum.”

Qisha: “It’s as though emotions between family members don’t follow guidelines.”

Steve: “OK, but push yourself, Qisha—‘guidelines’ is not the best word there.”

Chris: “How about ‘Emotions can be defined with different vocabularies?’”

Steve: “That’s promising. How about what Brian was working with?”

Brian: “Appearance is not really reality?”

Aisha: “This is really clichéd, but, ‘Nothing is the way it seems.’”

Steve: “What’s wrong with that?”

Aisha: “It’s too broad, I think.”

Tequia: “Maybe ‘It’s impossible to know other people’s reality.’”

Chris: “It’s impossible to know the entire truth about someone’s life.”

Steve: “I think we’re developing some major themes, and they all seem to deal with the subjectivity of knowing, of truth, with appearance versus reality…That was wonderful.” [Turning to me] “Wasn’t that just wonderful?”

And the bell rang.

One More Round on Non-Traditional College Students: Teaching Matters

Sparked by the article in the June Atlantic Monthly, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” my last three entries on this blog have dealt with teaching non-traditional college students and, more specifically, with teaching literature and remedial writing. Readers responded with close to 35 comments, many of them long, all of them thoughtful. Collectively, they contained assignments and techniques, anecdotes drawn from personal and professional experience, educational philosophies and thoughts about the social order. In sum, they contained a great deal of the wisdom of the classroom.

I want to dwell on that on-the-ground wisdom, for we don’t get much of it in policy deliberations about remediation in college or about education in general. And, as I wrote in a previous entry, we tend to get a pretty dreary and dispiriting rendering of non-traditional students and remediation in the media. Witness the Atlantic Monthly article.

So let’s go to the readers’ comments.

They display a commitment to teaching (some from people new to the game, others in it for more than thirty years) and an affinity for writing, books, literacy. Together, the writers of these comments offer a wealth of suggestions on authors to use and how to use them, on assignments and the sequencing of assignments, on ways to play back and forth between speech and written text and among and across books and stories from very different times and places. Reading these suggestions – some of which are embedded in descriptions of teaching – you get a feel for the intellectual sizzle of these teachers’ classrooms.

Related to the above is a refreshing discussion of culture, teaching, and learning that emerges in the collective comments. The writers sometimes disagree with each other, but in the aggregate you read people thinking hard about how to understand and honor the complex cultural backgrounds of their students while not reductively defining them by those backgrounds alone.

So, too, there is a rich discussion of social class and education. There is mention of economics and who gets what kind of education, both before and during college, the funding, the resources available. And there is a good deal of discussion about the toll some students’ class backgrounds have taken on their current levels of skill. But this poor academic preparation is not a cognitive prison house, and the writers offer powerful testimony to the achievements of underprepared students, given the right conditions. (This general issue of social class and achievement is an especially important one to me, and I plan to devote a future entry to it.)

It was interesting how many writers speculate about the likely education of the author of the Atlantic article. Professor X’s discontent might well originate in his own graduate study in English, study that typically includes little serious training in teaching, particularly teaching literature to a wide sweep of humanity. Such narrow graduate education will affect the kinds of intellectual relationships a teacher is able to foster.

And I was struck by – and savored – the feel for teaching you get reading these thirty-plus comments. The detail ranges from the specific technique and strategy (reading a paragraph from “Araby” in multiple voices), to long-haul reflection on the purpose of education, to the pleasures of the work itself. “I love to pull my teaching cart out into the dark, smelling the trees and flowers that are now only shadows,” writes a community college instructor, “knowing that I and my students are tired from doing something worthwhile.”

Some of the students in the courses taught by these teachers will struggle and not do well – though I’d bet those students will be treated with dignity and with an eye toward their future development. And some students will do just fine, and from the comments we get a sense of their resilience and ability. We also get a sense of teaching as a subtle and humane art.

All of this takes us back inside the basement of the Ivory Tower and enables us to rethink what might go on in that basement and, for that fact, how the basement might be closer – might be made closer – to the rest of the tower itself.

More on Teaching "Non-Traditional" (Or Any) Students, With a Focus on James Joyce's "Araby"

There was a lot of thought-provoking response to my last entry (“On Portraying the ‘Non-Traditional’ College Student”), and so I would like to continue the discussion this week.

A number of people who posted, and some who contacted me outside of the blog, wrote letters to Atlantic Monthly about the article (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” by Professor X). I wrote one too. Editors will typically select a small number of the letters they receive – looking for representative ones, brief ones, ones that can be readily edited for the space available. So let me open this blog to those who want to post their letters here, published or not, once the July (but probably August) issue of the Atlantic Monthly comes out.

Now to this week’s entry. I am also going to try to tie in some of the response to my “The Personal is Cognitive: The Human Side of Learning” from the week before last.

What I would like to do this week is to think on paper about teaching – the art and strategy of it – and to do so by focusing on a single short story, James Joyce’s “Araby,” one mentioned by Professor X in his “Basement…” article.

“Araby,” the third story in Joyce’s Dubliners, has become part of the Western literary canon, a familiar entry in a zillion anthologies and syllabi. It was on the Humanities 1-B syllabus I was given to teach 30 years ago. Though a classic, it is arguably too much of its time, place, and language for many to connect with. Professor X writes that his students “fidget…yawn…and grimace” upon first encounter. I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering why Professor X didn’t select or substitute other stories.

So let’s think about teaching, using “Araby” as an object to turn and turn in our hands and heads, considering through it the teaching of literature – or any subject, for that matter – from a number of perspectives.

First, a refresher. “Araby” is set in Joyce’s dreary Early-Twentieth Century Dublin and is narrated in the first person by an adolescent boy who is thoroughly infatuated with the older sister of one of his pals. The boy’s language is rich, fervid, and his description of his friend’s sister is flat-out rapturous. Though he watches her from afar and only directly encounters her once in the story, “…my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.” You get the idea.

The defining moment in the story begins to develop when the girl, in that single encounter, expresses regret that she can’t go to Araby, the bazaar that’s in town, and our narrator, emboldened, says he will go and bring her something. After an agony of waiting for his drunken uncle to come home with a few shillings, the boy rushes to Araby, arriving at closing time. It is as dreary a place as the city surrounding it. He finds an open booth, eyes vases and tea sets, feels the few coins in his pocket, and realizes suddenly, painfully, the foolhardiness of his desire and quest. “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” the story ends, “and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

So let’s say, I, you, or Professor X might want to teach “Araby.” There are a lot of questions to consider in selecting any piece of literature for a syllabus. Certainly, one’s own pleasure with the text matters – it enlivens the teaching – but there needs to be further justification, since teaching literature means reading a story or poem with others to some pedagogical end, a social intellectual activity.

Here in three overlapping parts, three cycles or lines of sight, are some of the things I might think about as I consider assigning “Araby.”

I.

I’d ask myself what it is I want to achieve through teaching the story: what about literature and the appreciation of it, or about the structure of the short story, or about Joyce and his Dublin, or about symbolism and imagery, or about the cadence of a sentence, or about imagination and longing, or about conceptions of romance and gender, or….And I’d ask these questions if I were teaching “Araby” to a group of high schoolers or to a graduate seminar in English – though, of course, the specifics of what I did in each classroom would be different.

I’d intersect such questions with what I know about the students before me, high schoolers to advanced graduate students. Some of what I know comes from their location in the system: Were there prerequisite courses? What have they already been reading for me? And some of what I know is provided by their performance, by discussion in class, by tests or papers, by comments made in conference. And some of what I know emerges via relation, through what I try to make a respectful engagement with them as people with histories, interests and curiosities, hopes for the future.

II.

That last point about considering the histories of the people in the class brings into focus another set of, not unrelated, questions, questions about the politics and sociology of what gets selected into literary canons, of what authors get read. So I’d be asking myself: Does my syllabus reflect in some way, to some degree the cultural histories and practices of the students before me, particularly if those histories and practices have typically been absent from the curriculum? There can be great pedagogical power here, and all of us who have taught literature have seen it: Students lighting up when they read stories with familiar languages, geographies, family scenes, cultural practices that they haven’t read before in a classroom. This point was made nicely in several posts. Given this perspective, and depending on who was in my class, I might take a pass on “Araby.” I know that when I first read the story as a college freshman, it seemed as flat and distant as could be.

But culture is a complex business, as is teaching, and a cautionary note was raised in last week’s posts. While being responsive to our students’ cultural histories and practices, we have to be mindful of how easily “culture” can be narrowed and reduced as we try to define it. Given the tendency in our society (discussed at other times in this blog) toward either/or thinking and one-dimensional answers to complex educational questions, the point is worth emphasizing. As expressed in one post, there is “no monolithic us,” no blanket African-American, or working-class, or Puerto Rican culture, and thus no ready match-up to writers from these backgrounds. Black kids won’t automatically respond to Alice Walker. How a story of hers is taught becomes a key variable. This seems obvious, I know, but it can slip away from us.

So maybe “Araby” shouldn’t be ruled out of court….

III.

Which leads me to the third line of sight I’d take when considering “Araby.” And that is my own experience with the story: as an underprepared college freshman from a working-class background, as someone who later taught “Araby,” and as a middle-aged man reading it once again, just before composing this entry.

As I noted a moment ago, I didn’t like or get “Araby” the first time I read it. Though I had a terrific senior high school English teacher – a guy who turned my life around – and some wonderful teachers later in college, my college Freshman English instructor was awful. As I subsequently learned more about literary technique in general, and Joyce in particular, and especially as I had to eventually teach “Araby” myself, I came to appreciate it. And reading the story a few days ago – thinking back to my own adolescence – it touched me deeply.

I take a few lessons from this brief survey of my own time with “Araby.”

The first lesson has to do with how I missed completely in my freshman year the overlay of the story with my own experience. Like the narrator, I too lived in a sad and taxing place and sought release in my imagination. And, like him, I had a desperate and unrequited crush – in my case on a waitress in the Mexican restaurant down the street. My heart too picked up speed just walking past the front window, hoping that she was at the counter. The important point here, I think, is that we sometimes don’t see connection or relevance automatically, readily. This could be a place where artful teaching comes in.

Teaching also comes in, of course, in understanding literary technique, the way “Araby” works as a story: the structure of the thing, the boy’s hyperbolic language, the small touches that mean so much. I remember not getting the ending at all: how did we go so quickly from looking at vases and jingling a few coins in the pocket to the crashing “my eyes burned with anguish and anger”? But a little guided reflection on that ending would have revealed a powerful truth, surely known to me at 19, and, for that fact, to all the folks in Professor X’s literature class: that our hopes are sometimes dashed through the smallest thing – an overheard remark, a glance away, an opportunity missed by a minute or two.

If I did elect to teach “Araby,” I would probably be considering in hindsight what didn’t happen with me upon first encounter – which provides another way to think about how to open the story up to others.

I invite the readers of this blog to pipe in, to continue thinking with me about teaching – teaching a story like “Araby”… or any of the other issues about teaching raised in my last few entries.