This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from:
altany@email.wcu.edu
_________________________________________________________________
This article is available online at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i29/29b00501.htm
- The text of the article is below -
_________________________________________________________________
Finding it hard to keep up with all that's happening in academe?
The Chronicle's e-mailed Daily Report keeps you up-to-date in a
matter of minutes by quickly summarizing current events in higher
education while providing links to complete coverage on our
subscriber-only Web site. The Daily Report and Web access come
with your Chronicle subscription at no extra cost. Order your
subscription now at http://chronicle.com/4free?es
_________________________________________________________________
Surveying Billy Bob and Sophomore Lit
By LESLIE M. WILLIAMS
They lie in wait for us that first day of class -- sophomores
armed with their Norton anthologies and their expectations
that we, as professors, will not merely interest them, but
somehow make the frighteningly unreadable texts meaningful to
their lives.
Keeping in mind what Disney and Oprah (along with all good
classroom teachers) have in common, I have always tried to
know my audience. I have taught at a mammoth state university,
a tiny private university, a small state university, and a
medium-size community college, and Billy Bob shows up
everywhere I go. Billy Bob and his friends seem to make up as
much as 60 percent of the students in the sophomore-level
English survey courses I've encountered so far. Further, I
have heard rumors that Billy Bob's friends and cousins (male
and female) attend college in different guises (as good old
boys, farm kids, roughnecks, sweet young things, or even
surfers) in other parts of the country as well.
In Texas, Billy Bob's main interest in life is his heavy-duty
Chevy truck -- red, with double wheels at the back. I know
that because three of his composition papers in his freshman
year concerned fixing the engine (process paper), the paint
job (description paper), and what his truck had in common with
his girlfriend, Twila (comparison paper).
Who, exactly, is Billy Bob, in relation to the other students?
More often than not, Billy Bob has someone in his extended
family who has at least made a stab at college. Thus, he is
not part of the group of true novitiates, the first ones in
their families to enroll in higher education. Often members of
minority groups, those newcomers tend to be both eager and
shy, on occasion offering exceptionally astute insights, but
many have never been formally introduced to a footnote. Billy
Bob, I suspect, has met a footnote before; he just didn't take
to it.
Billy Bob is not one of the best students. Those delightful
beings come from all backgrounds, and in all shapes, colors,
and ages. Radiating intelligence, they will follow an
instructor anywhere. Perhaps it's only because they've been
trained in the Pied Piper school of pedagogy, but the fact
remains: Even if we bore their socks off, they will earn A's.
Most of the time, Billy Bob is to the right politically (in
rural areas, that is an understatement). Most of the time, he
has a Ptolemaic view of the universe, with Hometown as the
center. Throughout Texas, that view has been encouraged by
having one of our own in the White House.
Often, but not always, Billy Bob's religion is mainstream or
fundamentalist, creating dicey (and, in state institutions
that are supposed to conform to the separation of church and
state, potentially illegal) discussions when the class studies
any religious document written before the Reformation. Billy
Bob at his most zealous uses class discussions to try to
convert the heathen, which includes most Roman Catholics and
all Episcopalians.
Billy Bob also sits apart from the nontraditional students,
who bring a variety of backgrounds to the classroom, and who
have the ability to bridge the chasm between their personal
experience and the experience presented in a foreign text --
something written more than 10 years ago, or written by a
non-Texan.
Developmentally, the average sophomore is in the process of
decentering (to use Piaget's term), which means that by the
age of 20, Billy Bob should be able to view situations (and
literature) from a perspective other than his own. But as a
sophomore, he and many of his peers still have difficulty
understanding a text unless it coincides with their views on
the subject or their experience. That lack of ability is not a
function of intelligence or desire, but of readiness. Asking
many sophomores to read, criticize, assimilate, and discuss
texts outside their personal experience is like asking a
3-month-old to walk. They will succeed eventually, but in the
meantime, they are bored.
Finally, it is safe to assume that Billy Bob is not a reader.
(You can bet he has excellent hand-eye coordination, though,
from the years he's spent in the game room at the mall.) Billy
Bob's idea of difficult reading is the average college
syllabus.
The good news is that sophomores are developing. They should
soon be able to enjoy new ideas. We can help them reach that
point if we start with the world they know and lead them to
the world they don't. In other words, we have to grab them
before we can teach them.
For each period of literature, I find it's helpful to present
a brief history, emphasizing the flavor and ambience of the
time and including salient sensory details. I ask my students
to think about what they might have done for entertainment
before the first mall was invented. I have them read graphic
descriptions of the plague, to make them realize that the
antiseptic hospital is a relatively new invention. I tell them
that Shakespeare's audience stuffed cloves up their noses
because they thought you could catch a disease from an
unpleasant odor -- even Billy Bob can imagine what the crowds
at the theater smelled like when people bathed only once a
year. I read aloud gossipy but authentic accounts of court
intrigues.
After my students have the general picture of the past, I pick
a modern idea, event, text, or film to be a vehicle into the
literature I have assigned. For example, Mission Impossible II
(or any other best-selling thriller) is a great way to
introduce Beowulf. The questions I ask about the film are the
same questions I'll ask later about the book: What qualities
does the hero possess? Why are those qualities admired? What
does our choice of that kind of hero say about our culture?
What are the conventions of a thriller? What other cultural
values does the plot reveal?
Similarly, introducing Spenser's Fairie Queene with a
discussion of The Wizard of Oz eases students into a world of
fantasy and allegory that they already understand.
Because even the form of many texts seems intimidating to the
typical sophomore, I like to read large portions out loud,
actually using the drama training I suffered through a million
years ago when I was in college. "Listen to this description,"
I'll begin. "Can't you just see Beowulf's troops glittering in
the sun as they disembark on the beach? How would you feel if
you were the guy at the top of the cliff on lookout duty?
Think of a similar way to describe something closer to home --
say, the West Texas sky."
That approach helps allay students' fears about the text's
inaccessibility and gives them courage to face the rest of the
assigned readings on their own. It also ensures that they are
gleaning the insights I find important, and that they are
dealing with the text itself, as opposed to CliffsNotes.
Speaking of CliffsNotes, I tried something new recently in my
course on early British literature. I assigned CliffsNotes as
a secondary source for the students' major paper, then
demanded that they find four scholarly sources in addition.
Requiring the forbidden seemed to improve the quality of the
papers: After the students read the obvious interpretations,
they had to dig for a deeper or more specific analysis on
their own.
Videos, of course, provide a natural entree into a text. The
key here is making it perfectly clear that seeing the video
but not also reading the text is unacceptable, and that I will
know whether they have read the text.
The key with sophomores, I've learned, is to trick them -- to
get them marching before they know they've been drafted.
Walking into the classroom and asking them to make a list of
things they'd die for (free speech, their families, the gun
rack on their pickup) is a good way to introduce John Foxe's
Book of Martyrs. They are involved before they know what's
coming. Or, as an introduction to Wordsworth's "Lines Composed
a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," I have students describe a
landscape or location where something significant happened to
them and ask if they've ever been back to that special place.
Surprise! They've been to a place like the one Wordsworth
describes -- they just didn't realize it.
Nineteen is an exciting age: Students are nearly able to look
at a topic from a point of view other than their own.
Sophomores have survived two semesters of freshman
composition, where they learned that they do not have to take
any writer's rhetoric at face value; that they, too, can
organize their thoughts into a document of worth; and that
there is more to a story than plot (which came as news to many
of them).
As sophomores, they are ready for us to transport them from
their world of trucks, television, and jobs at Whataburger to
ancient Greece or 16th-century England -- where people died
over different views of transubstantiation, a doctrine most of
my students can't even pronounce. The reward for a professor
teaching at this level comes when Billy Bob says at the end,
"You know, I really thought I'd hate this class, but some of
that stuff was pretty interesting."
We have done our jobs.
Leslie M. Williams is the former director of the Teaching and
Learning Center at Schreiner University and an adjunct
instructor of English at Midland College.
_________________________________________________________________
You may visit The Chronicle as follows:
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
------------------------------------------------------------newfaculty-+
You have received this message because you are subscribed to this mailing list. If you wish to be removed from this list, please send an email (in PLAIN TEXT) to:
listproc@lists.wcu.edu
Leave your subject line blank and in the body of the message, type:
unsub NEWFACULTY
Or, you may choose to send an email to (a real human being): listmgr@lists.wcu.edu.
------------------------------------------------------------newfaculty--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03/24/03 EST