Learning how not to read
One of the saving graces of my fundamentalist high school education was our very bad English teacher. Had she been merely somewhat awful she might have proved far more destructive, but she was so superlatively bad picture Dolores Umbridge without the accent that most of her students were cornered into a defiant contrariness that thereby led us to explore ideas and to learn a great deal about literature and literacy just to spite her.
One of her favorite classroom exercises, in particular, helped to liberate me from the fundamentalist ideology she exemplified and taught. This had to do with her idea of the proper way to read and understand poetry. Our assignment was to read a given poem and then to summarize it, in prose, in one or two paragraphs. Strip away all of the florid frills and imagery and boil it down to the essential meaning the fundamentals, if you will.
(The photo isImelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and also as my high school English teacher. Photo via Harry Potter Wiki.)
In 10th grade I wasnt yet able to articulate why this bothered me so much, but I bristled at the assignment. I wish that back then Id have been able to cite MacLeishs Ars Poetica A poem should not mean / But be. But I was 15 years old, and everything our teacher was telling us about reading and understanding poems was perfectly in line with almost everything I had been taught my whole life about, for example, reading and understanding the Bible. So I sat there, dumb as an old medallion, unable to express exactly why it seemed wrong to me to suggest that a poem was just a prettier, less efficient way of communicating the same thing as a single paragraph of propositional prose. I fumbled for some half-remembered, half-understood ideas I had gleaned from, I think, Surprised by Joy, but our teacher dismissed this as she did all questions, as a form of insubordination.
And thus I stumbled into an epiphany of sorts, one which earned me an F an actual zero for the assignment. The poem we were to vivisect that day was Robert Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, for which I wrote the following prose summary:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.That was, I had realized, the densest possible form for saying all that Frost was saying. It was irreducible. To convey or express everything that Frost was getting across in those 108 words of poetry would require 108,000 words of prose. Maybe more. The meaning wasnt some lesser, shorter thing to be distilled from Frosts poem, the meaning was greater, vaster, too unrulyand immense to be contained otherwise.
Im still grateful to this very bad English teacher for that assignment and for the lesson it taught me. She helped me learn how not to read. And not just how not to read poetry, but how not to read parables and prophecies and sermons and stories. As the very worst of my many fundamentalist teachers, in other words, she helped me to unlearn one of the worst things I had been taught by many other less-awful fundie teachers. She helped me to learn how not to read the Bible.
Learning how not to read , by Fred Clark, slactivist
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When to understand something literally, and when to understand it figuratively...
The inerrancy debate in a nutshell!
Yes... and it's good to be reminded that fiction carries its own sort of truth. Which isn't true, but is true all the same...
McLuhan...
I was very fortunate to have wonderful English teachers-- all the way up to college, when I had Dr. Tucker. UGH.
Anyway, my most eccentric English teacher was Crystal Edds. Miss Eds was very tall and very thin. Her hair was cut extremely short, and she wore a procession of clothes that were odd, at best. She slicked her hair down with Olive Oil, (don't ask me why), and washed her teeth out in the drinking water fountain. She made everyone in the class sit with their backs to her, so she could watch YOU but you couldn't see HER. I never did figure out why... Anyway, despite all these oddities, she was really a good teacher. I learned a lot in her class. One day, she went up to the board and wrote down a sentence, and asked us to punctuate it:
Tom had had had while Jerry had had had had had had was correct.
After the hour's class was up, only one of us came even close, and he turned out to be a lawyer in LA, died his hair blonde, and drove fast cars and dated starlets. He died of a heart attack on a beach in CA somewhere, and I still miss him.
Try to punctuate this, and I'll give the answer later. I promise it makes sense, with the correct punctuation.
I live where Gatsby lived and I have to say, thatF.Scott Fitzgerald words rang so true to me as an adult... and even to my kids who grew up here. I had read the book in high school, and so much of it was lost on me. He really was a master.
I must preference this by saying that I had wonderful English teachers. They were all such "think out of the box" kinds, that I benefited from them,even today.
A few years ago, I read an essay... I wish I could remember where, about Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken". It challenged the conventional idea that the choice of taking the road less taken, was about being individualistic, but rather, that there was regret upon looking back on this decision. The discussion was based upon the shifting tense of the poem. It totally rocked my world.
I think the single biggest problem in Education today, is exemplified by how we teach poetry. We feed our students information, but what we don't teach them to do, is use critical thinking. Without that skill, they might as well all be lemmings.
"...which is why it has not been successfully made into a movie,"
just so you know, " The Great Gatsby is a 2013 Australian-American [ 3 ] 3D drama film based on F. Scott Fitzgerald 's 1925 novel of the same name . The film was co-written and directed by Baz Luhrmann , and stars Leonardo DiCaprio , Tobey Maguire , Carey Mulligan , Joel Edgerton , and Elizabeth Debicki . [ 4 ] It follows the life and times of millionaire Jay Gatsby and his neighbour Nick, who recounts his encounter with Gatsby at the height of the Roaring Twenties . The film was originally going to be released on December 25, 2012, but moved to May 10, 2013 in 3D. While the film received mixed reviews from critics, audiences responded much more positively, [ 5 ] and F. Scott Fitzgerald 's granddaughter praised the film, stating "Scott would have been proud". [ 6 ] As of 2014, it is Baz Luhrmann 's highest grossing film to date, earning over $350 million worldwide. [ 7 ] At the 86th Academy Awards , it was nominated for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design , winning both."
(2013_film)
Tom had had "had" while Jerry had had "had had"; "had had" was correct.
That's cool.
It doesn't matter at all which reading of the poem is "right". It's the discussion that has value.
LR,
You are forgetting the 1974 movie version:
The film received mixed reviews. The film was praised for its interpretation and staying true to the novel, but was criticized for lacking any true emotion or feelings towards the Jazz Age . Based on 30 total reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes , the film has an overall approval rating from critics of 37%. [4] Despite this, the film was a financial success, making $26,533,200 [2] against a $6.5 million budget.
I totally agree, hence my comment on critical thinking skills. But I will share:
Now we are were all taught that this poem celebrated individualism. But the author of the paper that I read, said it was a poem about regret.
The first three stanzas are written in the same tense... presumably at the moment the choice is made. The last stanza in italics is written somewhere in the future (Somewhere ages and ages hence),looking back on the choice... and clearly states looking back with a sigh, as if they had made the wrong choice, knowing now what they wished they'd knew then.
Hence a poem of regret.
But go and read any cliff notes on this and it will still say a poem about the triumph of individualism.
As far as poetry goes I had quite a lot of encouragement to not think that way due to an English teacher whose awful choices of poems convinced me this was a waste of time . Example : Keats's " Ode on a Grecian Urn " was such obvious balderdash that my mind rejected it immediately . I much prefer the NY Times version :
Truth Is Beauty, and Beauty Can Be Subversive
Very good analysis, but take it one step further.
You've got it! We sat there like dummies...
Who says a sigh is a regretful expression... (kicking back in my chair and heaving a glorius________)