Recently, I taught Art Spiegelman’s short graphic essay “Mein Kampf” to my first year composition students. I realized quickly that they were unaware of Spiegelman’s seminal work, Maus, which was something of a problem, because it’s part of what the piece is commenting on. I did my best to explain to the students to basics of Maus and found a couple of images that I could project from the computer.
We did our best to have a discussion — and in terms of my goals for the day we achieved them. I was able to have students look beyond the words to the way that the words and the images interacted and complemented one another. But I felt like something was missing from the discussion — most especially the students’ ability to truly appreciate the work.
This is something I worry about a lot. It’s also something I suspect most of us run into a lot. We know our pop culture references are lost on our students (and theirs are lost on us). That’s expected — and I’m so far past that threshold that I roll my eyes at myself along with my students.
But when it comes to other types of prior knowledge — especially the type that’s necessary to understand literature — I think we’re facing a different sort of problem. A certain amount of prior knowledge is necessary when reading any literature, and that’s even more true for those of us who teach a lot of literature from earlier eras (or “back in the day,” as my students always say, whether we’re talking the 1990s or the 1590s).
For example, in my eighteenth century class last spring, I realized that my students couldn’t make sense of the satire in the third of Gulliver’s voyages (Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan): it’s a satire based on eighteenth century advances in science and Enlightenment philosophy. If you don’t have a basic understanding of that period and the goals of physics, you’ll likely miss a great deal of the point.
I think it’s particularly easy for us to get wrapped up in frustration over such things — and I do it more frequently than I’d like to admit. But I’m working on becoming more patient with this. When I was teaching at Florida Atlantic University, I realized that I would make references to childhood games that some of my students wouldn’t understand — primarily because a good number of them did not spend their childhoods in the United States.
More importantly, we have to remember that we were once students ourselves. We started with different prior knowledge. One of the things about literature — one of the great things, really — is that once you can read, you are able to dive in. While you may not recognize every reference, you will eventually gather enough information over time that you can be a part of the larger discussion about what you’re reading. But that also requires immersion in the literature. Eventually the reader catches on and remembers things. But the reader starts somewhere.
So, as I say in the title of this post, this is a reminder to myself (and hopefully to you) that we need to recognize that our students don’t know everything we think they ought to know. But neither did we when we started. We can still have a significant classroom conversation, as clunky as it might be, because we’re teaching a set of skills that help students continue to read — and those same students will make connections that we ourselves might not see.
It’s not just literature, qua literature. I remember, back in the day, being told to read articles from the Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible. Long articles that touched on the Synoptic Question, gave details of the content of Q, demonstrated the Pauline authorship of Romans and the pseudo-Pauline nature of most of the supposed Pauline corpus. This is not to mention the mention of the Four Source Theory.
I’ve tried to get my Rhetoric students to read Rhetoric of Motives, but quickly realized that they knew neither the biblical story of Samson, much less Milton’s reading of it.
Prior knowledge, as your grandfather came to know and despair over, is a difficult subset of learning. There seems to be less and less of it and we instructors in Higher Education are faced with daunting tasks. But Higher Ed instructors always were. It’s just that an earlier generation of instructors chose not to deal with the vast middle of society. If you didn’t get it, they didn’t care – just went on with their lectures. And you got thru school, got your degree and never again thought about the things you didn’t understand. They didn’t matter.
Now we’re hearing about a potentially gnostic text that referred to Jesus’ wife – and we want to put it in some context. The only context we have is Dan Brown.
My point – your concern isn’t new, but your willingness to take it on probably is. And the “information explosion” may actually add enough relevance that folks might pay attention. For a little while anyway.
It is funny you teach literature. You were a child and turned me on to “What Do You Do With a Kangaroo” when I babysat for you, and you gave me a book on feelings which you insisted I had to take and your parents agreed. I have them both. The Kangaroo book I have bought countless copies of over the years to give to other children. You were tolerant and kind to me and my ignorance of your favorite books. Good to see you haven’t changed.
Debra, thanks. I appreciate that. I hope it’s something that my students experience — and that they don’t just think I’m a grumpy professor who is trying to make them read old stuff. To be honest, I think my own enthusiasm for what we read helps — if you’ve read my other posts, I have a great deal of fun with the students, particularly when they find anything (and everything) we read to be “weird.”
Part of my own joy in reading literature is making the connections — I remember different points in grad school where I would go from being completely intimidated by the material, because I hadn’t read a whole lot of other things related to it, to the moment where I was suddenly making connections. I’m still working on conveying to my students that that’s the joy of the humanities in general — we get to make the connections as we go along.
Also … in response to the first comment. I think that it’s something we have to acknowledge, and I know it’s been around forever. I know that my history-professor grandfather lamented the lack of prior knowledge of his own students (he was impressed when I could actually identify the ancient Roman clock figures in his office — that I actually knew who some of the relatively obscure ones were. I did minor in classics, after all). One of the great things, I think, about art and culture is that there are always new things being produced. But it also means that there’s more to learn, to read, to do.
I’m not sure that there’s an answer to dealing with the fact that a good number of our students are coming to us after almost an entire education under testing regimes of the past 10 years. But I also think that’s only part of the reason — or that if we blame that we’re leaving out a lot of other factors. I can’t quite articulate what all of them are, but I do have to say that part of my own experience as a student was informed by family and upbringing beyond the classroom (though I have to say that I had stellar teachers along the way. In fact, I think I really lucked out and only had 1-2 teachers who, in retrospect, didn’t do a whole lot for me).