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.