I had an epiphany while grading some Intro to Lit papers recently: Students do not trust their ability to make connections.

This is by no means an original observation.  But while grading those papers – and thinking about this post – I finally understood my undergraduate advisor’s admonition that I needed to learn to trust my intuition more. I always took it to mean a distrust of reason, a distrust of analysis.  And I was totally unfair to my advisor, because that’s not at all what she meant.

What she meant was that I wasn’t trusting myself when I saw connections.

I recognize this problem in my own students’ writing.  For the current paper my students are working on, I’ve instructed them to write about the importance of setting in two pieces that we’ve read so far in class.  One piece of advice that I give on the assignment sheet is that students be deliberate in their choice of texts: They shouldn’t simply select pieces because they like them. The pieces need to connect somehow.

As I read a number of their draft papers, I saw that my students had picked short stories that work together – but that many were not quite sure of why and how the stories connect.  A number admitted in their introductions that they simply picked two pieces that they liked – or two pieces that “spoke to them” somehow.

From my point of view, I could see the connections.  I found them obvious.  For example, one student wrote about “A Hunger Artist” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  She wasn’t quite sure why she paired these stories, and couldn’t say more beyond: “I found them interesting.”  I see the connection between the trapped artists.  It’s there – though it’s not necessarily a connection I would have made immediately or without that student’s impulse to pair the two.

This student isn’t yet seeing that connection, or at least isn’t quite able to articulate the connection.

In my comments on the drafts I asked a lot of questions, as I always do, most notably about the relationship between the chosen pieces; I wanted students to get beyond: “I like these.”  I made suggestions in my final note to the student writing about the Kafka and Gilman stories—suggesting the idea of cages and the idea of the artist as a possible connection.  And I made similar notes on a number of other papers, where students seemed to have some intuition about connections but weren’t quite articulating them.

In the end, this gets me thinking that what we’re doing in Intro to Lit, inherently, is dealing with creative thinking – and not just critical thinking or analytical writing.  Pushing students to see the connections that they already sense helps them build on their own creative abilities.  And part of that is a willingness to trust instinct.

This is not to suggest that any intuitive connection that someone sees is going to be right.  That’s part of the critical and analytical work we do in class.  We look for what’s most plausible, what’s most persuasive.

This sort of ambiguity, this creative thinking, is essential in any field.  My friends who are scientists are creative people – they make observations and see connections.  My friends who are musicians do the same thing.  It’s a matter of knowing what we’re actually looking at.

That, if nothing else, is what I want to convey to my students in my Intro to Lit class.  That’s what the class is good for.

It’s not a good habit, but it’s an understandable one, I think.  And I suspect that most of us give in to the temptation from time to time.

But last week, I was reminded once again why it is that I need to re-read for class – and not just because I need to be sure that I’m completely prepared.

I was preparing to teach “A Rose for Emily” (and Faulkner happens to be one of my favorite authors) – and it’s something that I’ve taught at least once a year since 2006.  So I’m pretty familiar with the story.  But I re-read it anyway.

Because we’re focusing on setting in my course right now, I tried to pay particular attention to the details of setting, as described by the narrators.  Many are the details  I’ve always paid attention to in class (Miss Emily’s house as “an eyesore among eyesores” and the dust and stagnant air throughout the story); but this time, one small detail jumped out at me at the very beginning of the story.

As the narrators describe Miss Emily, they say that she “had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery.”

The cedar-bemused cemetery.

What an extraordinary description – and one that I’ve probably read (and perhaps even noted) in the past.  But this time, I was reading a clean copy (we just switched editions, so my book has no annotations yet) – and so this simply struck me.

And that’s the point.  While it is important to re-read in order to prepare for class, it’s also important to re-read to simply recharge.  I know that I get caught up in the frustrations of the semester and the general exhaustions of life, but I also know that when it comes down to it, I actually love the stuff that we do in literary studies.  Cheesy? Sure.  But honest? Absolutely.

And that energy and enjoyment is infectious – and students will notice it.

Unlike other academic conferences that I attend, this one is particularly oriented towards practical workshop exercises, where participants engage in some of the activities that might work in the classroom.  One of my workshop leaders divided us up into groups of three, assigning each of us a role: questioner, answerer, and observer.  We were then tasked with defining a major concept (in our session, they were concepts like education, schooling and leadership).  The answerer had to define the term, the questioner then asked questions for clarification and precision, and the observer took notes and then explained back to the others in the workshop what had just occurred.

I’ve read about this sort of discussion technique, but I’ve never really been a part of it.  I found it incredibly effective, particularly because I found myself having to clarify my own thinking on certain concepts.  And so I’ve been thinking about ways that this might be productive for the literature classroom.

The basic exercise is this:

3 people in a group.

Assign each person a letter: A, B, C

Person B asks the questions

Person C gives the definition and answers the questions

Person A observes and reports at the end

Give a concept for Person C to define

Person B listens to the definition and then asks questions for clarity and precision.  These questions can be quite simple:

Clarity questions

Could you elaborate more on [x]?

Could you give me an example or an illustration?

I hear you saying … Am I correct in that understanding?

Precision questions

Could you give me more details about that?

Could you be more specific?

Could you specify your claims more fully?*

Once the questioning has gone on for a set amount of time, Person A reports what has occurred in the exchange, commenting on what was clarified and what still could be further explored.

Each member of the group then changes roles (i.e. Person A answers the questions, Person C asks the questions, Person B observes).

Do this one more time so that each person in the group has an opportunity in each role.

So.  How to use this in the literature classroom?

One way that this might be useful is as an exercise at the beginning and end of the semester.  Give each group three major terms that they’ll need to master over the course of the semester, perhaps concepts like literature, culture and author.  Then, at the end of the semester, have the students do it again, afterwards reflecting on how their understanding has changed from the beginning of the semester.

This might also be useful for brainstorming papers.  For example, if a student has a working thesis, the questioner can ask probing questions, and the observer’s notes can serve as a useful tool for the student sitting down to write.

*Questions come from Richard Paul and Linda Elder’s book Critical Thinking: Learn the Tools the Best Thinkers Use

How do the ways that various literary texts define [concept X] suggest the role of literature in creating a broader (cultural) understanding of that concept?

This question works with any number of broader concepts or themes in a literature course: I simply choose those six because they’re the ones that we’ve focused on, and they’re the ones we focus on in our final reading, Hamlet.

I like to have the students think about this question because it allows them to do a number of things.  First and foremost, it allows the students broad range in what they talk about.  In their previous assignments, I’ve dictated which texts they can select and even limited the maximum number of texts they can write about – an attempt to encourage careful, close reading.  For this assignment, I give students a minimum number of texts (three) to discuss, no maximum number, and free range over anything in the anthology.  Doing this encourages students to explore their potential sources, cull the most relevant material, and develop an argument beyond summary.  These are important skills in any academic paper.

I also do this because I think it’s important to have an open dialogue with students about why they have to do what we say they have to do.  A great number of college students are required to take some kind of literature course – whether it’s combined with a composition course like my institution’s, or whether it’s a sophomore level survey course – and non-majors sometimes bristle at having to take it.  I’ve had many a non-major insist to me that 1) he or she cannot write and 2) he or she can’t possibly interpret literature.  I think that these assertions come from a sense that literature is somehow too esoteric and irrelevant to what they want to do with their careers.

One thing I point out to students is that literature is one of the few subjects they study that involves serious intellectual engagement with material that was created as entertainment. (I’ll grant this of fine arts in general, but students aren’t always required to take art history or music history.)  While we may have fun learning about other things – the study of history is enjoyable to my historian friends; the same is true of biology for my biologist friends – literature was generally created as something that’s meant to be enjoyed, whether it’s through the entertainment of watching something onstage, or the pleasure of reading a macabre tale, or the stimulation and emotional engagement of reading a sad poem.  The point is that literature is something created to stir our emotions, and students don’t always see why they need to study it at all.

So this assignment addresses that.  I want students to think about the role literature (and, by extension, other forms of entertainment that begin with attention to language) plays in our larger culture and in our own lives.  It’s really about the big picture – the implications of study, of participating in culture.  And really, that’s an important transferrable skill for any major: the ability to see beyond the local and think about the larger network of ideas that one studies.

How do you encourage students to think about the bigger picture?  

When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.

While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:

1. Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention.
2. Drawing the poem encourages students to look things up. My experience with this particular poem is that students do not know all of the words that Shelley uses, and that they haven’t looked in the dictionary or at the footnotes. We can use this exercise to reinforce the idea that using outside resources to increase the understanding of the poem is the student’s responsibility. In class, I encourage students to use their smart phones to look up words they don’t know. Once they know, for example, what a visage is, they can draw a fair portion of the picture. Without looking this word up, they’re at a total loss about the traveler’s story.
3. Drawing the poem engages multimodal learning. I think that as people who study and write about literature for a living, we sometimes forget that not everyone focuses on language immediately and comfortably. Having students engage with literature in a variety of ways has the potential to help them gain appreciation for language, even if it’s not something that they’re primarily invested in. Constructivist educators suggest that students learn best when they can build upon what they already know. For the literature classroom, this means that we should try to engage students in modes of thinking that are comfortable for them. Some students think concretely, yet language is inherently abstract. Some students learn visually, others kinesthetically. This exercise allows us to engage all of those ways of thinking and learning.
4. Evaluating the drawings allows the students to determine what they understand about the poem – and to note what they missed. Frequently one or two of the groups will include cacti in the picture. And my students almost always miss the fact that the speaker of the poem (the “I” of the first line) is not the person describing the statue. Both of these errors open up the opportunity to turn back to the poem and to talk about not only the important details (the traveler went to Egypt; the statue is of Ozymandias – more commonly known as Ramses II), but also the implications of those details. For example, we talk about the importance of ancient Egypt for the Romantics and about the narrative layers in the poem.

I’ve brainstormed a list of other commonly taught poems that would work particularly well with this exercise. Here’s a start:

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “My Last Duchess”
• Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
• Emily Dickinson, “I Like to See It Lap the Miles” (any Dickinson, really)
• Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
• Rita Dove, “Daystar”

What would you add?