On Literature and Teaching

  Interpreting fiction: Five basic principles to start generating ideas (1)  (Today the first two principles, next time the following three) So there you are: there’s a text in front of you, right there on the table or on your lap, it’s a poem perhaps, a short-story or a novel, and the question you have is: What on earth is this about? And slowly but surely the famous cry will soon erupt from your lips: I don’t get it! You read the words and you understand them, but you have that nagging feeling that you’re not seeing ‘what you’re supposed to see’. You stare and you re-read, but no, it’s not happening. You don’t ‘get it’, you don’t know ‘what the message/meaning is’. There’s no magic formula to solve this problem, no smoking gun you can always find, no short-cut to the themes. Terminology is not going to help much, and reverting to jargon will only obscure what is already opaque. Looking it up online will only restrict your own input, and will fix in your mind inte...

Samuel Johnson (in J. Boswell, 1791): ‘It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse’.   You have a class tomorrow, and on the schedule it says that it’s a literature class – it’s part of the curriculum, and those lessons were decided upon within the English department (or whichever language you teach, of course). The thing is, you’re not quite sure what your role is going to be: guide? Explorer? Facilitator? Explainer? All-knowing, tentative, free-wheeling, directive? Impulse-giver, as Johnson says? And should you have additional activities, say, written expression, or speaking, perhaps a bit of grammar thrown into the mix? Some history, too, and a bit of culture? Or is it just about the act of reading, whatever the outcome? Well, and what about the set-up of the learners? In groups (of 3, of 4), individually, i...

  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...