On Literature and Teaching

  In a previous blog, I quoted Lars Svendsen in his ‘ The Philosophy of Boredom’ : ‘ Information and meaning are not identical. To simplify, one could say that meaning consists of assembling small parts which fit together to form a bigger whole, whereas information is the opposite ’. Any teacher worth their salt will have seen through this and will have related it to a well-known principle of learning: inductive vs. deductive methods. So let’s see whether this can be applied to reading books, too – and why it matters to do so. After all, 'meaning' is what we're after... As a reminder – and perhaps simplistically –   deduction is the formulating of examples from a rule; induction is the formulating of a rule from examples. In the class, deductive teaching often takes the form of a teacher writing/explaining a rule (e.g. How to form the present perfect) and asking learners to apply that rule across a body of examples/exercises. Inductive teaching would be learne

  ‘Sir, what does that story mean?’ ‘Sir, I don’t get it, why is he doing that in the book?’ ‘Tell me Mary, what’s the colour of the dog in the story?’ ‘John, why do you think the dog is of that colour?’ ‘Jan, if you were the main character, would you react this way, or that way? – and why?’ As teachers, we spend many hours asking questions – and yes, many hours giving answers, too, and many hours explaining, contextualising, deconstructing…and constructing. But ‘Asking questions’ is a bit of a vague expression really, when you consider that not all questions are identical. More importantly, the type of question you ask will give you back a certain type of answer. And the answer you have will not be an answer to everything – it might not even be the Answer, much less the-answer-you-wanted-to-hear . Of course, before even asking fitting questions, it’s important to keep in mind a couple of typical diseases we teachers often suffer from. For example, and it is one I suf