“One of the banes of educational systems today is the pressure on the teacher to work out neat outlines of the ideas about literature that his students are to acquire. Once such a plan is made, there is a great temptation to impose it arbitrarily. The teacher becomes impatient of the the trial-and-error groping of the students. It seems so much easier all around if the teacher cuts the Gordian knot and gives the students the tidy set of conclusions and labels he has worked out. Yet this does not necessarily give them new insights. Hence the emphasis throughout this book on the teacher’s role in initiating and guiding a process of inductive learning” (Rosenblatt 1995, p. 232).
It is easier to simply tell the students what I think. It is harder to listen to what the students are saying about the text and help them make the connections go a bit further. It is tempting to make their statements, force their statements, into forms which I saw before they started to talk about the text. I have discovered (originally through teaching “Twelfth Night” using performance) that if I allow the students to learn the text with me, rather than from me, then I will come to a better understanding of the text: a social construction if you will. Thereby we both gain in the extension of our knowledge about and around a text. Last Monday I suggested to my UTeach student that she watch what I did in second period, then make an attempt on her own during third. Yes, kind of a sink or swim method, but I provided lots of water wings, and I was there if she started to drown. What was interesting, and what relates to the quote from Rosenblatt, was rather than listen to what the students were saying, and letting/allowing them to go where their conversation about the poem led them, she tried to force them down the same path my second period students travelled. Not to say that my second period did not discover something about the poem, but third period were finding something else out. And that is hard to do; I think, like all humans, we get trapped by the first thought we have about something. We tend not to look for alternatives: why should we, we have an answer that works, which is why I think we are so easily trapped by our tacit ideologies. It is easier not to think. “The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for decades surely stands in a lonely place,” wrote Gary Zukav according to my daily quote calender a few days ago.
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