Spoiler Alerts And The Teaching Of Literature

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My American Literature students and I were reading The Scarlet Letter, and I asked how many of them had read it before or who at least knew the story.  Most had, but two students did not.  I find it difficult to discuss a novel in discrete sections without reference to the whole work, so I find myself giving away the endings.  One year, my students bought me a t-shirt with WARNING:  SPOILER ALERT emblazoned across the chest.  Since then I’ve tried to be more sensitive about ruining the endings of books.

So when two of my current students had no idea who Hester’s husband was or who the father of Pearl was, I said, “OK, I’m going to lead you through the process of figuring out the identities so I can talk about the novel as a whole without spoiling the ending, and you can still feel you figured it out yourselves.” 

First of all, I said, “Think of the beginning of any story and the way the characters are introduced.  Every narrative is going to introduce the main characters within the first few pages or scenes.  Within minutes you meet the protagonist, the love interest, or the murderer, whatever the case may be.  In fact, if you meet an important character late in a work, that’s usually the mark of inferior literature.  Therefore, you know you have already met the husband and father.”  Then I asked the students to list the important characters, and they listed Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth, along with Bellingham and Reverend Wilson, who will not be so prominent as the novel proceeds, but who are seemingly important male characters in the first few chapters if you’re looking for candidates for a husband or a father.

Next, I pointed out that a conflict among characters requires triangulation.  â€œBoy meets girl may be interesting, but boy meets girl who then meets another boy holds far more plot potential,” I said.  “All effective stories involve some form of triangulation of desire.  Which three characters present the most interesting triangulation?”  Immediately the students realized that one of the important men—Dimmesdale, Bellingham, or Wilson—would have to be the father because, first of all, it’s impossible for any of them to be the lost husband, and having the governor or a minister violate the ethical mandates of his office would make for good theater.

From there it’s just a matter of close reading a few key passages and the students were able to put together the pieces of the literary puzzle and declare Dimmesdale the father and Chillingworth the husband.

So that was a fun exercise in and of itself, but I realized in the middle of the process that I was demonstrating for the students, even those who already knew the answers, how to recognize and apply certain literary patterns to comprehend and make predictions about a text.  Good readers do these things automatically.  But like a native speaker who knows how and when to say things but who cannot explain why, “native” readers do these things without knowing what or how or why. I thought to seize the momentum of the moment and roll out a couple other useful nuggets—like, “If there’s a gun in the first chapter it must be fired by the last,” or “Comedies begin with death and end with birth or marriage, and tragedies begin with birth or marriage and end with death.”

A few weeks later, my son was reading The Outsiders.  He put the book down about midway through, when Ponyboy, Johnny, and Dally are hiding out in the church, and Cormac said to me, “You know, this is funny because heroes usually have to descend into the underworld, except in this story they’re in a church, so it’s ironic.”  I said, “That’s a good observation.  What do you think has to happen next?”  Cormac said, “Well, if Ponyboy’s the hero, he has to be reborn somehow, or purified.”  I said, “What can purify?”  Cormac said, “Water …”  “Or …?” I asked.  “Or fire,” Cormac said, and then he got all excited and yelled, “Oh my god, they’re going to burn the church down by accident because they’re smoking, and then Pony and Johnny will have to save people’s lives and prove to everybody that they’re actually good people!”

And I smiled and thought, Yes, I have trained you well!

Don't Lecture Me, Really.

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Last Friday I had a feed for my first year students.  About twelve came to my building around dinner time to socialize over chili, corn bread muffins, warm cider, and brownies.

We sat in a circle to eat, and since they are all shy and also from two different classes, I asked them to introduce themselves, and then I asked each one to tell us about her best and worst class so far at this, the midterm of their first semester of college.

All of them had great stories to tell about exciting classes, and several even said they loved all of their classes.  But some had horror stories to share.  Many of these were predictable, like students who dislike math complaining about their math class, but several complained about courses they expected to love but found disappointing because the courses were just lecture.

One student said that she had two English classes she was excited about but that she was only doing the reading for one.  This was because the class was all student-led discussion, and if she didn’t keep up with the reading she wouldn’t be able to participate.  The other class, however, was just lecture followed up with tests based on the lectures.  All she had to do was take notes and then read over her notes before the tests.  She knew this wasn’t ideal and that she should be reading the books, but with so much to do in all her classes, this was the expedient thing to do.

This conversation came six days after Mary Worthen, who teaches history at UNC-Chapel Hill, published an op-ed in the New York Times that celebrated and called for a revival of the lecture in college classrooms.  Worthen’s piece has precipitated an array of comments and many published responses, both affirming and condemning.

I fall in with the critics, for several reasons.

Certainly there are more and less effective lecturers.  Some people are just better public speakers.  And there are professors who are ineffective at implementing active learning pedagogies.  In fact, reading the comments in response to Worthen’s piece, many people reduce their evidence to memories of professors who were engaging lecturers or professors who used group projects that turned nightmarishly unproductive.  For the record, I have had both experiences.

But anecdotal evidence aside, it’s hard to contradict the research, and there’s been a lot of it in recent years.  A 2012 piece in Harvard Magazine by Craig Lambert argued for the demise of the lecture based on more than a decade of classroom-based research at Harvard.  A much cited 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated definitively that student performance in science, math, and engineering improved dramatically when professors effectively used active learning strategies.  And in her recent NY Times piece, Annie Murphy Paul cites several 2014 and 2015 studies that demonstrate that the students who most benefit from active learning strategies are women, minorities, low-income students, and first generation college students.

So why are some defending the lecture?  As a former colleague of mine was fond of saying, you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

The other, more pragmatic thing that frightens me about the defense of the lecture is that it plays into the hands of those who would radically transform colleges to deliver content (and degrees) more cost-effectively. This would include reducing the teaching force, using even more contingent faculty, and eliminating or at least drastically reducing face-to-face instruction.  I mean, if a lecture is the ideal instructional model, then hire one person to record a series of lectures and make the podcast available for a fee to as many people as want to pay for the access.  We have seven sections of English 2407, The Short Story, being offered next semester, with a cap of 35 students in each section.  That’s 245 students and seven instructors.  Why not fire six of them and let one lecture with all 245 students watching live or remotely?  Don’t doubt that there are some who like this idea!

I had an exchange with one guy in the blogosphere about Worthen’s piece, and he asserted that he had the attention span for lectures and learned effectively from them.  I replied that I did, too.  Then I said, “Sorry for the sports analogy, but I also have the attention span to watch a three-hour baseball game, and I learn a lot about the sport from watching.  But I don’t assume I’ll be a better player than if I actually played the game.” 

I got no response.

Don't Lecture Me, Part Ii

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Last week’s post on the lecture as an instructional model produced incredibly varied responses, from enthusiastic gratitude for my support of active learning to enthusiastic defense of lecturing.  The nature of some of the replies has prompted me to revisit the topic and elaborate upon my ideas.

The first thing I think that needs to be pointed out is that neither I, nor any of the researchers I cite, claim that students do not or cannot learn from a lecture.  The cited studies claim that students learn more effectively from active learning pedagogies, not that they fail to learn in a lecture model.

Perhaps the most troubling response I received was one that bemoaned the fact that the learning style of middle-class white males was being neglected, and claimed that this group was the “least studied demographic.”  That’s patently not the case.  The studies I cite absolutely include middle-class white males.  (Does anyone think the Harvard self-study fails to include this demographic?)  Furthermore, the studies do not conclude that middle-class white males learn best from lecture and everyone else learns best from active learning.  They conclude that all students benefit from active learning, but that some students—women, minorities, low-income students, and first-generation college students—experience greater benefits than others.

Secondly (or thirdly?), the debate about the merits of the lecture versus the merits of active learning is not a debate about learning styles.  It’s not simply a debate about passive learning versus active learning or about aural learning versus hands-on learning.  In fact, as Dan Willingham is fond of emphasizing in his work, the research on learning styles has largely been discredited because no one has been able to prove that students learn more effectively when a particular style is preferenced over another.  Usually when we talk about our learning style we’re really talking about our learning preference.

For example, when I was an undergraduate, I had a political science course that met for a large lecture three times a week in Montieth.  The professor was a fairly good lecturer, but his lectures pretty much just reiterated the material in the books he assigned, and when I took my midterm exam, there was nothing on there I couldn’t have gotten from the books.  I like to read, and the class met at eight AM, so I took a risk and stopped attending the lectures but continued to diligently read the books.  And when the simpulan exam came around, I aced it.  But this does not mean that I couldn’t have decided to ditch the books and attend the lectures, instead, and done just as well.  Surely I could have.  That’s not a matter of learning style but of learning preference.

So the next question to address is whether or not this “proves” that a lecture course would work just as well as an active learning course.  The research says no, it wouldn’t.  But the difference is not one of style.  The difference is that active learning involves multiple learning modes.  Students read, write, work independently, work in groups, work one-on-one with the instructor, et cetera.  Cognitively, students are moving along (or creating) many neural pathways rather than just one.

Someone defending the lecture might add that students can and should write notes, that the lecturer could show video or audio, that the lecture can be supplemented with discussion groups or with an online component.  And yes, they can, but what you’re doing when you make these modifications is making the lecture look more and more like active learning.  Departments and individual professors make these modifications to large lecture courses all the time—because they know they improve student learning!  In fact, deans and department heads would, by and large, love to offer smaller classes with more active learning models.  The main reason they offer large lecture halls is because of cost, not because lectures improve student learning.

Finally, several people responded by trying to find a middle ground in which lecture has a place, and in response to that I’d say, yes, of course.  Lecture has a place.  For example, anyone who uses a workshop model of instruction in their language arts or English classroom uses lecture all the time in the form of mini-lessons.  They are a core component of an effective workshop model.  But they are just that—a component. 

Exclusive use of lecture, however, is not optimal for student learning.  Not for any subject matter.  Not for any demographic.  There is no research that supports this.

(Mis)Reading Emily Dickinson

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The first time I read Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” was in a graduate course.  Previous to that, I did not enjoy Dickinson’s poetry.  But I had mostly only read and taught poems like “A narrow fellow in the grass” or “I’m Nobody!  Who are you?”  These and poems like them, at least the way they were taught to me, seemed shallow and sentimental.  They were the kinds of poems that ended up on refrigerator magnets, classroom posters, and Hallmark cards. 

But that class began to change my attitude toward Dickinson, which was further altered after I read Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat, which chronicles Dickinson’s semi-erotic epistolary relationship with the writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  If you haven’t read it, do. I think even Dickinson fans will never think of her the same way again.

In my American Literature To 1880 course, we just read ten poems by Dickinson and had some terrific conversations.  I selected “‘Faith’ is a fine invention,” “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” “I dwell in Possibility,” “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” “The Bible is an antique volume,” and “My life closed twice before its close.”

I think the students were most surprised by the Loaded Gun and the Haunted Chamber poems.  The students were familiar with the same mousy, eccentric, house-bound Emily Dickinson I had known, too.  They were not expecting Gothic Emily Dickinson or gun-toting Emily Dickinson.

We read her poems in the context of the course theme of Deviance in Early American Literature, after we had already read Poe’s treatises on the human capacity for perverse behavior, Hester’s questioning of the whole relation between man and woman, Emerson’s critique of historical Christianity, Thoreau’s assertion that in an unjust society the only place for a just man is a prison, and Whitman’s celebration of the working class and of female and male homosexual desire.  So the students were primed for a Dickinson who called religious leaders “faded men” and who called the mad divine.

The students saw in the Loaded Gun poem a latent anger that was evident elsewhere, as in Much Madness, where she says that those who deviate from the opinions of the majority will be regarded as a threat and taken away in chains.  As the narrator of The Scarlet Letter says of Hester’s revolutionary ideas in “Another View of Hester,” had the ministers and magistrates known her thoughts, they would have considered them “a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the letter.”

The Haunted Chamber brought us back to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the attic scene of “The Custom-House.”  (Yes, I made them read “The Custom-House”).  When we read those works earlier in the semester, we had talked about the trope of the building as a body, in which hallways and rooms represent aspects of the human psyche, where haunted attics and labyrinthine halls and dark basements are the abodes of our guilt and fears and repressed desires—the realms of the id, to use the language of early psychology not yet available to those writers.  And there is Dickinson telling us of sequestering oneself behind a bolted door to hide from the assassin that is our spectral self.  This is not quite the Dickinson who critiques the admiring bog.

And as I have alluded to, we also talked about the representation of authors, how they—as well as descendants, editors, marketers, and teachers—present themselves to readers.  Recently, scholars authenticated the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson.  Up to then, the only photo we had of Dickinson was the ubiquitous one of her just shy of her seventeenth birthday, in which she looks young and frail and demure.  This image jibes with the persona of the harmless, inoffensive writer I thought I knew.  But the new photo is of a more attractive and confident looking 28 year-old Dickinson.  This photo looks like the image of a woman who could be angry and challenging and haunted, even.  Writing about the new Dickinson photo, Dustin Illingworth says that it causes us to attribute to Dickinson a “previously unseen strength and serenity.”

I don’t suggest we should allow a photo to shape our reading, but likewise we should resist the standard interpretations that have been presented to us of any author’s work.  As Emerson says in “The American Scholar,” “Each generation … must write its own books.”