One argument teachers make for dumping classics from the curriculum is that students can’t see the relevance of those dusty, old, hard-to-read texts. Sorry, but that’s a lazy argument. One simple solution for students not seeing relevance is to start hooking them months before you ever introduce the work.
By the time most of my students read The Scarlet Letter, they are salivating for it. They eagerly jump into those full-page Hawthorne sentences, ready to see what this guy has to say.
But how is this possible, you say? Haven’t you warned them about what they’ll have to wade through? Haven’t you covered the fact that Hawthorne takes a symbol and beats you over the head with it until he’s sucked all the excitement out of it, like an over-obvious, cliched haunted house at Halloween? Don’t they know what they are getting into? How on earth did you trick them into it?
Simple. It all started the semester before with Marilyn Monroe.
Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, is salacious enough on it’s own, but I want my students to understand the resonance of the piece–really understand it. Understand it in a way that continues to resonate with them long after they’ve taken their unit test. I don’t want for them to have come to their understanding because I spoon fed it to them. I want them to discover it on their own so that it will stay with them.
Don’t worry. I’m making my way back around to Hawthorne. I promise.
So, I start introducing The Crucible by dropping little morsels in August when they are still asking what we’re going to read this year. I tell them we’ll be reading a scandalous play by Marilyn Monroe’s husband. (Most students still know who she is.) It gets them asking questions.
Student: Is it about her? Me: No, but the author did get sentenced to jail, denied a passport, and shunned by his friends and co-workers for being a communist sympathizer while they were married. Student: Is that what the play is about? Me: Well, yes. That and witches.
While we all know we don’t have to use much trickery to interest students in the Salem witch trials, convincing them to engage with Hawthorne is a different story. If I can get them hooked before we even open the book, we’re at least halfway there.
So, when the judges are raining down terror on the poor, innocent accused in 1692 Salem, I drop another morsel. We know what happens to the families of the convicted witches. We have historical records that show us the financial reparations they later received. Just check out all the sources on the Famous Trials website. I ask them if they wonder what happened to the judges. Did they ever feel guilt or shame?
I admit I don’t know, but I do know that their relatives did. Then I go into the fact that Nathaniel Hawthorne not only investigates the power of guilt and shame in his works, he literally changes the spelling of his name in an effort to distance himself from his family’s association with the witch trials. His ancestor was Judge Hathorne, after all, one of the three magistrates responsible for hanging 19 innocent people. Think of it–150 years later and Hawthorne still carries so much generational guilt that he literally changes the spelling of his name. In fact, he lived in Salem for a short time, and the whole time just wanted out. When he finally had the chance, he moved his family to Concord, Massachusetts to the very house where Louisa May Alcott penned Little Women.
This leads to a fun little bonus mini-lesson on Transcendentalism and the Romantics and Gothic literature. Just a morsel. Just enough to breed curiosity.
I mention Hawthorne again when we discuss the relationship of John Proctor and his wife. Did he really love her? How do we know? Well, you know how we know Hawthorne loved his wife? He actually shared a diary of sorts with her when they first married. They would take turns writing journal entries, gushing all over each other. When they spent time apart, he sent dozens of letters to his wife, each paragraph starting with an endearment like sweetest and dearest and love. You can read some of those letters on Hawthorne’s Words blog. He was so enamored with her, you’d have thought she was the 1854 version of Marilyn Monroe. In addition, Hawthorne was probably one of the first pro-women male authors in America. The heroine of his most famous book is touted as the first ever American heroine.
Student: What do you mean by American heroine? Me: Write that question down in your notes, and we’ll come back to it when we Hawthorne’s book. Now, back to Miller...
You get the idea. I don’t really ever hand students a true bio of any author. I highly encourage them to do their own research and bring it back to share with the class. Sometimes, if time allows, we’ll watch biography videos of authors we study. A&E’s An American Dreamer, the biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the History Channel’s biography of Mark Twain are particularly good. Most of the time, however, I simply drop juicy little morsels all year to create curiosity. When we finally check out The Scarlet Letter, students truly want to discover for themselves how this shame-filled, wife-loving, politically-frustrated, friend-but-not-wholehearted-believer of Transcendental philosophers creates the first ever American heroine. They read with probing minds, already analyzing the text before they even know they are doing so.
The same technique works for most authors. The Fitzgerald/Hemingway frenemy situation lends itself well to creating curiosity. When you drop enticing morsels about their friendship and professional jealousy, students immediately buy in.
Student 1: Hemingway is kind of an asshole, don’t you think? Student 2: He embodies masculine toxicity. Student 3: But he also does the work of a writer. He might envy Fitzgerald’s style, but maybe he’s disgusted because it makes him mad to see him waste his talent.
And this is before they’ve read a single Hemingway word.
So, when I ask them which one famous author hated the iconic Gatsby cover that Fitzgerald gushed over? They know, and they know why. Then when I bring out a Hemingway short story like “Hills Like White Elephants” and ask them to contrast this awkward conversation between lovers to chapter 5 of The Great Gatsby when Daisy and Gatsby meet in Nick’s flower-filled hovel, they approach the task with the same probing mind with which they opened the cover of The Scarlet Letter. Their minds are already searching for the masculine, journalistic tone of Hemingway against the flowery, feminine sappiness of Fitzgerald.
Time is a major obstacle for most English teachers. There’s not enough of it to go deep on all the stories we’d like to. I think that’s how those two-paragraph bios in text books came about. The editors saw a need to inform the reader of the author. I used to always read them to the students because I saw that need, too. Now, I rarely read them. I don’t need to. I’ve dropped enough juicy tidbits throughout the year that it’s not necessary.
Don’t get me wrong. When we finally get to a particular work, we do research more author info. Students do need deeper context than what I’ve engrossed them with earlier, but those little text book bios are boring. I’ll admit they offer some basic stuff, such as when the author lived and where she/he went to school and maybe some major thing that influenced the writing. But if we depend only on those short bios, students graduate knowing not much more than the fact that Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin and that all the actors were male in Shakespeare’s day. Which proves my point. They remember only the juicy tidbits even if they have no idea how any of it influenced an author’s work or a nation’s conscience.
When a student can understand–even a little bit– the personal, political, cultural experiences of an author, the message of the work becomes louder and clearer. I’m a firm believer that when a person reads a story, it becomes the reader’s story. However, there is a place for original author intent, also. Where the two intersect is where relevance begins.
In 1865, when Hawthorne–lover, husband, poet, father, inheritor of national shame, friend of the Transcendentalist, and biographer of the politician– pens the these words in the final chapter:
She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness…The angel and apostle of the coming revelation most be a woman indeed…
but still buries Hester alongside her weaker lover, that’s relevance. The first ever American heroine could save the world, if only the world would let her.
Seriously, I’m not sure it gets any more relevant than that.
If all we do is hand students some tattered copy of a dusty relic, we are feeding Bradbury’s fire that will ultimate destroy our culture. We don’t need to burn classics, right? Just get people to stop reading them. However, if we tell the personal tales of the bold men and women who dared shout their stories loudly enough that future generations still hear them, we can help students discover the incredibly relevant message of those voices that still resonate today. It’s not our job to throw away that which we think is too difficult for our students to wade through. It’s our job to lead them to the difficulty and to light their way through it.
I’d love to hear how you hook your readers on difficult texts. Please share in the comments below.
Read well. Be well.
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