The View From the Other Side of the Desk
One of our students shares her experiences from the other side of the teacher's desk
Welcome to From the Teacher’s Desk, where we take turns further reflecting on our episodes and applications to the classroom.
Welcome to this week’s guest post. We decided to ask a former student, who had both of us as teachers, to share her experiences and insights from two years in our classrooms. We hope you enjoy Shelby’s reflections.
Hello, I’m Shelby, a life-long lover of words, narratives, and stories much like your beloved Lit Think hosts. Though I’m currently a new professional trying to figure out the world of adulting after grad school, the reason I’m writing to you today is because I’m a former student of both Alicia’s and Sarah’s. I actually had them back to back, with Alicia as my Honors English 10 teacher and Sarah as my AP Language and Composition teacher. (Wow, it’s hard to remember that time and call them by their first names!) They asked me to share some insight into my experience of their Lit Think philosophy in the classroom.
In Alicia’s Classroom
I have so many memories of my time in Alicia’s classroom, from dressing up in crazy costumes to do satires of Arthurian legend, to rallying the whole class into calling Frankenstein’s monster Fabio, since he doesn’t have a name. (For the record, Alicia strenuously objected because Frankenstein’s monster does not have long, flowing hair, but I was victorious.) But I think the biggest thing I learned in Alicia’s class was to see how tropes are used and modified by creators across space and time to comment on the social issues of their day.
For example, we spent a whole unit on so-called zombie literature, exploring the concept of the living dead in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the 2013 film Warm Bodies, among many other selections. In all of those pieces, the living dead are those who are deeply lonely and have lost the ability to connect with others. But the cause of death for each of these zombies is specific to each author’s time and place. For Faulkner, it is the oppressive, misogynistic societal expectations of the deeply dysfunctional early 1900s American South. For T.S. Eliot, it is the social upheaval caused by the First World War. In Warm Bodies, it’s implied that technology made the world mechanical and cold, causing people to forget what made them human. In other words, what makes a zombie a zombie is in the eye (and time) of the beholder.
This taught me to see how creators stand on each other’s shoulders, taking their audience’s preconceived notions of an image, like a zombie, and using it to make a new point for their day and age. It's a lesson I’ve carried with me in the years since. I used it in undergrad when I explored in my thesis how the concept of who an “American” is has changed over time. I use it when I try to understand what argument a news article is trying to make with the phrase “the next Camelot.” And I definitely use it when I (gleefully) read yet another Pride and Prejudice retelling and figure out what it’s trying to say about the society in which it’s set.
Learning from Sarah
From Sarah’s classroom, my most prominent memory is the time she offered to show the film version of Of Mice and Men, and those of us who had read it (and been traumatized by it) for extra credit emphatically said, “NO!” I remember how watching Cinderella Man, a film starring Russell Crowe as a boxer brought to his knees by the Great Depression, brought home the desperation that Steinbeck was communicating (but I wasn’t feeling) in The Grapes of Wrath. I also remember that it was through her writing assignments that I felt like I really learned how to construct an argument of my own, not just analysis of someone else’s work, for the first time.
But I think the biggest lesson I learned from her came from our unit on the Vietnam War and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The concept from that book of how to tell a true war story, of the tension between factual truth and emotional truth, has stuck with me for a long time, and I’ve seen it in so many ways since. Sarah really drove the serious consequences of this tension home by having us do a project on propaganda. We each presented on a poster or newspaper cartoon from three different U.S. wars and had to explain how that image was itself creating a story, trying to frame the war in a certain way and intending to create an emotional reaction. The point was that, whatever the facts were on the ground, the war’s policy was going to be driven by the narrative of the war that the American public connected to emotionally.
I don’t think I realized how impactful that lesson was to me at the time. But in undergrad and grad school, a big focus of my studies was on how in the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia, the narratives that the public believed about the war, which were very skewed, fed into a cycle that impacted every single player’s decisions in the war and the aftermath, up to the present day. I don’t know if I would’ve ended up there without that first lesson in high school. And even if you don’t decide to do an academic study of the narratives of war, certainly it’s a critical lesson in this day and age, as “fake news” and the way that social media spins the facts have risen to the forefront of public debate.
Stories, Stories Everywhere
In the end, what I loved about Alicia’s and Sarah’s classrooms is that they always showed how storytelling occurs not only in literature, but in a million formats, which all build on each other. And they taught that the skills we learn to analyze and criticize those stories are relevant in a million ways and places beyond the world of literature. I know that this mindset, the Lit Think mindset, has served me very well, and I’m so glad they’re continuing to find new ways to share it with a new generation of students.
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