Teaching and making connections

One of the things I always love about teaching is the new (or at least new to me) connections that I make across literary works while teaching.

For example, I've been thinking a lot about two poems that I taught my Intro to Lit Studies students recently: Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium."  I've taught them both before -- and I've taught them even in the same course (the semester someone thought it might be a good idea to have the Shakespearean teach a class on British literature after 1800).

In Intro to Lit Studies, though, I work to encourage students to see connections across a broad range of texts -- and part of doing that is having students read things out of order chronologically; instead we tend to work thematically -- or at least we tend to work on things in conjunction with literary critical styles that are conducive to reading certain works.  So, we're less focused on how a poem or a story is of its particular moment, and more on the act of interpretation itself.  This lends itself to new ways of looking at the texts.

As I was talking to students about things that they could do for their final research projects, I pointed out, fairly spontaneously, that they might consider both of these poems together, because they use sailing as a metaphor for aging.

It's that simple.  And I had never really thought of connecting the two poems.  While this might be something that's old hat for people who work in more closely related fields, chronologically, this was new to me.  And it's that discovery that's the fun of teaching literature, even teaching the same classes, the same texts over and over again.

This is particularly on my mind, because I'm getting ready to give a presentation at SAMLA this weekend, talking about teaching critical thinking with early modern poetry.  We've seen many arguments in favor of the humanities: they often fall into two competing camps: those who want us to teach literature and the arts simply for their own sake and those who want us to talk about the practical value, the practical skills of teaching the humanities.  Part of my argument is that these are not mutually exclusive, particularly when we get down to the fundamental level of planning our classes -- particularly when we are dealing with student populations that are not exclusively English majors.  We can teach literature with an eye to both: for many students, the intuitively grasped skills that we laud in the humanities actually do need to be taught.