by Robert Rue–
I recently read with a group of 11th graders two 19th century literary works that are both fixated on issues of capitalism in the midst of the industrial revolution—Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” We read them back-to-back, and in both cases, I found myself obsessed with one thing: I wanted to make the students uneasy.
I have attended a lot of workshops over the years, run by excellent learning specialists. I have been reminded many times about varying my methods of presentation—use the board, show images, break students into small groups, let students move, preview material, deliver expectations orally and in writing, return to key ideas, provide study guides, be clear about what you want students to know. Students have different learning strengths. These are useful reminders.
I have never been told to make students uneasy.
But for many years in these professional development sessions I have been the one with an uneasy feeling. Something wasn’t speaking to me. It was only recently that I figured out why.
The assumption behind all of these workshops is that teaching, essentially, is information-delivery. I don’t doubt that this is largely true in high school math, science and language courses, though the best teachers seem to allow students to do at least some exploring and discovering. And, of course, in the humanities, too, there are facts and procedures and structures to learn. These things matter.
But what if what you’re really teaching—what matters the most in your discipline—is not just information. What if what you’re teaching is actually a way of thinking?
I conceive of my job as an English teacher in exactly those terms. In upper level courses in particular, I ask students to memorize almost nothing.
Don’t know what “ignominious” means? Look it up. Can’t remember what happens after the narrator discovers that Bartleby is living at the office? Find the relevant pages and reread. Don’t know whether “none” takes a plural or singular verb? Look it up. In class. Go ahead.
So what am I actually teaching? If someone asks me that question now, I want to say—and mostly don’t—that I am teaching truth-seeking, the embracing of nuance. Oh, and the coherence and seductive nature of narrative design.
Right. I’ll whip up that study guide tonight.
So here’s the key confession: I actually can’t teach these highfalutin-sounding things that I value so much—at least not if teaching is defined as information-delivery.
But I can put my students in position to learn them.
In position.
Ragged Dick and the whole Alger canon is notorious for stories that prop up capitalism and especially the ol’ rags-to-riches narrative. Critiquing this kind of myth-making is easy pickins for the students at my progressive school. They quickly recognized what was simplistic about this novel—how it took most of the rough edges off of what it means to be poor. I even gave them an article by a historian who emphatically claimed that the Alger myth was at the heart of American conservatism and that the myth needed to die. This novel, the historian said, implicitly blames the poor for being poor by suggesting that rising in American society requires nothing more than a little elbow grease.
We went right through the class batting order, each student giving a quick, easy presentation about a small group of chapters from the novel.
But when it came time to write the final paper, I threw my students a curveball. I created a fictional scholar—Scholar X—and attributed to him an alternative—conflicting, actually— interpretation of the story.
Your assignment, I told the students, is to write a paper that confronts these two theories of the narrative. Evaluate both claims and then situate your view on one side, the other, between, or even entirely outside of them.
Ready? Go.
I got some sidelong glances. I did not comfort them.
They wrote some brilliant papers.
Did I “teach” them how to write these papers? Mostly no. Okay, Scholar X’s theory was like a new lens. That was helpful for seeing new possibilities in the novel. Our subsequent discussion of passages through this lens helped the students too. But what if a student did poorly on the paper and a parent asked if I had adequately prepared his son for the assignment? Would I start talking about gaps and all the things I can’t teach?
Obviously, this pedagogical approach can put me and my colleagues in a dangerous position. After all, there are students applying to colleges and parents who expect “results,” and because of these things, there are grades for teachers to justify. But if you don’t have “clear” things you want students to learn, if you can’t give them a list of things to know or steps to execute to achieve the goals (I can only do this to a limited extent), are you really teaching? Even when we don’t think this is a valid question, this notion haunts English teachers who are often seen as arbiters of touchy-feely “opinions” about endlessly interpretable stories. Some teachers respond by foregrounding “concrete” things like grammar and thesis statements and topic sentences and essay transitions. They have “objective” grading formulas. All fine, but some, sadly, reduce their teaching to these elements alone, often with the caveat that the students can’t handle anything more sophisticated. “Handle” usually means “can’t get above a B.” In short, there are powerful incentives for teachers to make sure that their students get above a B, even if you’re lucky enough to work at a school, as I do, in which no administrator or colleague would ever deliver such an edict.
In fact, my colleagues for the past thirty years and my very best teachers in high school, college and grad school showed me the value of not giving in to the incentives.
Here’s how they’ve always done it:
They model the thoughtful interrogation of a text with carefully crafted questions. They follow up by challenging answers that are incomplete or imprecise. They encourage students to craft similar questions. They show models of excellent scholarly writing about literature.
And here’s the critical move: They make sure that writing assignments ask students to grapple with more than what the class has “covered.” That is, the teacher makes sure that there is a gap between what students have encountered and what the assignment requires.
In reality, the gap is the most important teacher.
Important psychological research supports this claim. Ian Leslie in his book Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It summarizes a strand of this research by saying that “curiosity is a response to an information gap. We feel curious when there is a gap between what we know and what we want to know.” (Leslie, 2014, p. 34, emphasis in original) We know intuitively that this is true, and thus asking students to confront questions to which there are complex answers—but no certain ones—ought to be a pedagogy for any historical moment. But the need for more of this now is urgent.
I repeat what you know, but this is a time when it seems as if everyone is digging in and fighting ideological wars. In these wars, certainty is one’s best friend. Shutting down one’s “opponent” is the highest goal. Win now, sort out the complexities later. Schools are racing to create mission statements in which they make claims that virtually no one would disagree with but that are in reality coded to convey a very particular set of hidden certainties, often about topics that are too complex for simply-phrased certainty. Within these institutions, there are high prices to be paid for not knowing, or not agreeing with, one of the “certainties,” for raising a question that implies that one of the certainties is in fact not certain. Because of this, the disagreements tend to be silenced, the contradictions inherent in the “verities” buried.
Responding to uncertainty with certainty is, of course, not a new human dynamic. Perhaps there are even contexts in which this is necessary. But this current trend threatens to turn education into nothing more than a receiving of the certainties—whether they be the Left’s or the Right’s. In short, this trend is an attack on curiosity itself, which has always necessitated disruptive, offensive, even revolutionary questions.
But schools should not bend with the ideological wind. What we should always stand for is truth-seeking. “Seeking” is the key word. In other words, we should always take the maddening stance that we are helping students toward an ideal—truth—and that the journey is maddening because we will never get all the way there.
School ought to be a place where, rather than ushering them away, we bring students right to the gap between what we know and what we don’t know. We ought to ask them to spend some time staring at it, and then we ought to tell them to leap, even if we can’t teach them exactly how.
In school, if nowhere else, there ought to (almost always) be a net below to catch them, to bounce them right back up for a new try.
So how did things go with “Bartleby”? Melville’s narrative is far more complex than Alger’s. Unease was the norm from the get-go, and Bartleby was not the only one who “preferred not to.”
My assignment in this case was not a traditional paper. Instead, I asked the students to write a thesis about the story’s meaning as soon as they had finished reading it. Under normal circumstances, a thesis constructed is a thesis to be defended. But this thesis was to remain undefended and was to be turned in at the end of a process that would result in a revised thesis. In between, the students would engage in a series of discussions, some led by me and some in small, student-only groups. Before writing a final thesis they had to take what I called “Discovery Notes”—that is, they needed to write down what they discussed and mark with a star any ideas, or even questions, that felt like discoveries. At the end, they would write a brief explanation, not of their new thesis per se, but of how their thinking had changed from first thesis to last.
I know this shouldn’t be the point, but I can’t help saying that I was rewarded with written work that was exciting to read.
“Bartleby haunts the reader like a ghost,” noted one student. “His starvation is a form of protest,” said another. “Regarding the Lot’s wife reference: What does it say that the narrator looks at something he’s not supposed to look at?” asked another.
There were more questions, many of them answered uneasily. I loved them.
