In our critical thinking classes, one of the elements of thinking that we discuss is point of view, and it's one that is a bit more difficult to talk about than it would seem at first. Sometimes it feels like I'm not quite explaining that my background, my role in a situation, my own present biases might make a difference in how I perceive a situation. And that this is true for the students as well. I'm better able to show students how this works in a particular narrative -- from Claudius' point of view things seem one way; from Hamlet's they're totally different. But application of it to our own lives, and particularly to our own thinking about literature, becomes more difficult for some reason. And it's true for me, just as much as it's true for my students.
This was driven home to me several times this week.
On Tuesday, I taught Richard Wright's "The Man Who was Almost a Man" to my intro to lit students. As always, with leading discussion, there are some things that I think are fairly obvious (Dave is African American, the story occurs in the deep south, most people in the rural deep south are sharecroppers), but that's because I already have a series of experiences and have prior information that helps me recognize that in the reading. Also, I've read the story at least once a year for the past 6 years. That might also help. But I think that's sort of the obvious point of view issue: I know things my students don't, and part of my job in teaching them is to lead them to discover that knowledge and use it to interpret the piece.
But the one piece of knowledge I don't have is actual knowledge of firearms. It often comes up, but this year I had a number of students who really focused on the idea in ways that I hadn't considered. And these are students who know a lot about firearms. Many of my students from more rural areas hunt, and they associate the power of the gun with manhood, or at least to adulthood (which I realize is different from the manhood of Wright's story, but the point is it raises different ideas in discussion). One of my students pointed out that for her, a gun is something that requires responsibility, which is what it takes to be able to go out hunting and to use the gun. I hadn't thought of it that way, and I told her so.
That might be an important part of my teaching -- a willingness to point out when a student not only brings up an important point, but acknowledging that a student brings to the table a different set of experiences that can influence interpretation.
It's something that I have to think about very carefully when I receive the discussion questions from my students in Restoration/Renaissance literature. Again, things that I find to be obvious are totally new to the students. I'm teaching Oroonoko for the third or fourth time,* and reading once again. And students are raising questions that I either hadn't really thought about (but that we'll deal with), or questions that might seem so obvious to me because I know the culture and the history, and particularly because I know the history of the novel. The exercise is one for me that emphasizes both the need to focus on student interests, and the need to remain humble in the face of teaching. I know a great deal of stuff (so do my students), but to get the students to a point of understanding the literature and culture of an era, I have to help them deal with their questions first. And we get there.
This week, I was also reminded of this issue -- outside of the classroom -- because we had the National Players on campus this week, performing Taming of the Shrew. In preparation for the play, I gave a lecture last Friday afternoon about Taming and a play written by John Fletcher called The Tamer Tamed (1609), during which I discussed the two different models of marriage that the plays propose and how those different models appeared in the early modern culture. I often forget that for many people who are not familiar with Shakespeare, the plays can be a bit overwhelming -- or just difficult to follow. I realize this with my students -- and I tell the students in my Shakespeare class, "Don't freak out on me ... you'll get it" -- but I sometimes forget that even when something is acted well, people may not always feel comfortable with it. I've read all of the plays -- most of them multiple times -- and I've seen a large portion of them in some form or another.
Not everyone has.
So it was somewhat rewarding when I heard from a colleague in the Religion department that my talk helped him make sense of the play; and it was particularly rewarding when a good friend explained that my talk helped him make sense of the play, because, like a Dylan concert, "it helps to know the words beforehand."
*I am now at a point where I officially cannot remember how many times I've taught some things. I've been doing this just long enough to start repeating things this much.
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