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Nurturing the Reader's Imagination
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by Harvard Knowles
Phillips Exeter Academy
Exeter, New Hampshire
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| | Breathing Life into Words
I have had a long career as an English teacher, including 30 years or so at the Phillips Exeter Academy. At Exeter, we take seriously the College Board's assertion that "there is no recommended or required reading list for the AP English Language and Literature courses," and we honor that assertion by choosing our own reading and writing materials. Even though the College Board does not mandate a curriculum, however, it does in its design of the examination imply a set of values. And these values, in my mind, should inform any course designed as AP.
The exam readings and the prompts reveal a sensitivity to the multiplicity of voices that have contributed to the variety and subtlety of literary expression over the centuries. AP provides the opportunity to bring back voices that may have become diminished in a world struggling to be attentive to the values of multiculturalism. We teach, for example, Toni Morrison and Tim O'Brien so that our students can hear the contemporary voice as it redefines for us, through the power of art, the world and our experience in it. As teachers, though, we must keep reminding ourselves that no single voice, no single epoch is enough. Our students must be trained to appreciate not simply the diction of their own time and place, but also to have sensibilities to hear the beat of a human heart in the high literary voice of Hawthorne or Melville. In calling attention to Cisneros, Bradstreet, Wilbur, and Sidney, AP indicates a belief in the depth, the complexity, and especially the power of language to speak to the experience of us all. If Cisneros helps us to see who we are when we go with her to "Mexican Movies," then Hawthorne puts us in touch with past selves that will be found in no history book. Students should emerge from all their classes, and especially AP classes, confident that they can read with profit and pleasure sophisticated works of literature. They should emerge as well with the knowledge that it is their imagination, effort, and commitment that breathe life into words, for they should know that it is not just the writer's words that make literature; it is, as well, the reader's imagination. Consequently, teachers must be committed to the belief that one of the first principles of education is that content is nothing until it is given meaning by a student's imaginative response to it.
Consider, for instance, this description of Nick Adams as he sits in the boat in the morning chill: "In the early morning on the lake sitting in the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die" (Hemingway 1927, 95). A student must enter fully into Nick's experience with birth and death in order to feel the energy and power that give them life. Or when the student hears Madame Olenska in Wharton's The Age of Innocence say to Newland Archer, "I can't love you unless I give you up," (1996, 189) the student who has read deeply enough will be able to sympathize with Olenska's dilemma and will feel in her words an integrity so fully developed, a morality so deeply held, that it makes imperative her self-sacrifice. When Roethke reminds us that "we think by feeling, what is there to know?" (1966, 108) he tells us it is the heart that nudges us toward our knowing, not the head.
It is our task as teachers to enliven our students' imaginations, to push them hard enough against their inertia to break through its constraints. An effective way to accomplish this is to offer students an opportunity to immerse themselves in the unfamiliar long enough and fully enough to realize some part of themselves in it. My experience teaching Silas Marner, for example, suggests that it is almost routine that students are initially so put off by what they perceive as the remoteness of the novel's setting and the density of its language that the tale itself is obscured to them. I try to ease them into the text gently at first by having them keep a journal in which they are free to react to what is happening to them as they move through the early pages of the book. Formal critical analysis, I've discovered, is better left to a later time. As they read to each other from their journals and from the quick five- or 10-minute paragraphs I may assign at the beginning of the period, they begin to talk through their confusions and frustrations. And they do talk to each other, push against each other as they thrust and parry toward understanding. The cliché at Exeter is that the student bears the laboring oar: they are active, responsive to the material and to each other, and by the time they are seniors, they are trained to define problems and join the discussion that helps resolve them. In a well-run class at Exeter, the only consistently quiet person is the teacher.
But back to Silas Marner. As discussion takes students deeper into the text and the density of the language seems less threatening, their appreciation for what Eliot is attempting deepens, and they begin to realize that, like many of us, Silas wants a life rooted in and enriched by love. When they begin to feel that the "insectlike existence" (1960, 15) that Silas has fallen into has been caused by his heartbreak at the betrayal of his friend and his betrothed, they begin to sense that his so-called greed is not an end but a means. When they read that "the money not only grew but it remained with him. He began to think it was conscious of him -- and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces" (17), the students then begin to understand that what seems to be Silas's purposeless greed is simply his attempt to fill with money the emotional void created by loss. Who of us is not familiar with the impulse? Once students reach this understanding, they express openly their sympathy for Silas, and their frustration lessens. The language and syntax -- though still a challenge -- seem more worth the effort. As they begin to grasp more firmly Eliot's purpose, the students begin to respond to the energy in her language. They are still challenged by its complexity and subtlety but no longer undone by it. Silas, at this point, is less like a visitor from an antique place, having now been transformed by the power of Eliot's language into a man struggling, as so often the students themselves do, to be worthy of the love that can and will redeem. At the novel's end the language no longer seems like a foreign tongue, and if the landscape, softened by the love that now inhabits it, is not quite home to my students, they are certainly not alien to it. Each year as I lay out my reading list, I often contemplate dropping this novel, and I confess sometimes I do just that. When after a lapse of a year or two I return to the novel, I am reminded how worthwhile it is for the students to struggle to meet the demands of this book, and I realize how much of what they do in class is simultaneously preparation for the AP Examination they will take.
As a teacher, Exam Reader, and now member of the Development Committee for AP English, I believe that if AP students have been exposed to the variety and richness of the literature of English-speaking people and if they have struggled to be equal to the challenge of this tradition, they will be prepared for whatever the AP Examination demands of them. They will not, then, feel daunted by the presence of an Elizabethan sonnet on the examination, and no Development Committee should feel any qualms about presenting that sonnet to them. The AP Development Committee accepts its role in helping to shape the intellectual experience of teenagers and puts before them each May examinations carefully designed to make use of the skills they've developed and to allow for the refined sorting that separates the good reader and thinker from those capable of the subtlest insights and the deepest perceptions.
I have found my work with the AP Program over the years to be rewarding in all kinds of ways. I have been again and again moved by the power of a prompt to animate the minds and imaginations of young writers and force them to reach inside themselves and find there possibilities for expression that they surely could not have known they were capable of. I still recall with considerable tenderness listening in a ballroom in Somerset, New Jersey, to a Question Leader's reading of a response to a poem by Emily Dickinson. The essay was subtle, profound, and lyrical and offered a sense of achieved potential that I suspect dazzled even the writer with its brilliance. If teaching is a commitment to the possibilities of the young, then we must continue to hope for an AP experience that will offer students an opportunity to stand face to face with their potential.
Harvard Knowles, Thomas S. and Elinor B. Lamont Professor of English, has taught at the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, for the past thirty years. He has been an AP Reader since 1991 and is now a member of the AP Development Committee for both AP English Language and AP English Literature. He has published several articles related to teaching English, including "The Boarding School: A Moral Environment" co-authored with David Weber, and "The Need to Love." He has been the recipient of an Independent Study Grant and three seminar grants from the NEH. |
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