Literature Provides a Bridge to New Worlds
This edition of Margin Notes is guest written by English Department Chair Lydon Vonnegut
My dirty little secret is that I really do think English is the most important subject kids learn in school. Now, I value my colleagues, so I don’t go around shouting my feelings from rooftops, but despite being a firm believer in the value of a liberal arts education, this is how I feel. The thing is that English class is where we all learn to read, write, think, and with those tools, be human. And being human is a tricky thing. On the one hand, we are pack animals - we only survive, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, when we are in community with one another. On the other, we only have direct access to one person’s experience of the world: our own. We long for connection, to know and be known, but we are existentially alone in our own heads, even in company. However, thanks to good old human ingenuity, we’ve found a way out, a way toward each other: stories. Stories are the bridge we’ve built for ourselves, the way we come to understand ourselves, each other, and the world we occupy. Books offer us all a window through which to see others, a mirror in which to see ourselves, and sometimes they’re both at the same time.
A sixth grader bounces into the room with his copy of Into the Woods open and declares: “I so get Little Red Riding Hood! Like here, where she says, ‘Isn’t it nice to know a lot/… and a little bit not.’ That is the whole problem with being eleven!”
An eighth grader looks up his copy of Brave New World, eyes wide, and says, “I didn’t know books could be like this! Do you know how many ideas I’ve had since I started this chapter?!”
An eleventh grader who has been comparing pre-colonial works by Columbus and De Las Casas asks his teacher for a meeting to talk through his ideas. “Wait,” he says, eyes darting across his densely packed page of notes. “So when De Las Casas is writing about having witnessed the massacres Europeans perpetrated against native peoples, we watch it change him. Right in his own writing, you can actually see his thinking shift, see his humanity grow.”
A twelfth grader reading Angels in America connects the play’s form and the variety of historical moments it touches on. “Angels has to be done as magical realism - the whole play is a retelling of retellings of all the bits and pieces of American mythology. Too much realism would leave the audience with no space to make those connections themselves.”
Another senior reflects with his teacher about the nature of literary pursuit: "I didn't really like any of the books," he told her, "but I'm glad for that. I wouldn't have picked them or known to pick them. I wouldn't have thought I could learn something from them. The point isn't always to like it."
We, as educators, know that sometimes parents wonder why we have assigned a book that's not a classic that they know and love, but rather, one that they think contains challenging themes, or characters in whom their child isn’t likely to see himself. It is in these very moments of boys’ struggle with these books that they are, in conditions that may not be comfortable but are always safe, beginning to grapple with the vast world around them, all while it is still at arm’s length. Much like the concept in athletic training of ‘progressive overload,’ we design curriculum that pushes the boys into what the psychologist and educational theorist Lev Vygotsky referred to as their ‘zone of proximal development’ - that space in which they bridge the gap between what they can do independently and what they can do with a teacher’s guidance. It’s the space in which the growth in skills, content, and confidence actually occurs, where what a colleague so aptly calls ‘the magic of English class’ happens.