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Home > Features > The Art of Teaching AP English Literature
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The Art of Teaching AP English Literature
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by Ellen Greenblatt
University High School
San Francisco , California
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Read a Condensed Version of this Article...
Building 'Justified Confidence'
We were the students who read ahead in the book, who finished the novel long before we had to, who read all the stories in the anthology, even the ones that weren't assigned. We might have labored over geometry assignments, but the tears we shed were over Pip's disappointments with Estella or Desdemona's death or Frederic's misery at the end of A Farewell to Arms when he observes, "It was like saying good-bye to a statue." Because we couldn't bear to leave all that behind, we became English teachers and then AP English teachers. Over the years, we have learned to be exhilarated and mystified by students, some of whom are very much as we were, some of whom couldn't be further away, most of whom are somewhere in between: amused and, if we're lucky, moved by our passion for what we do.
As all teachers do -- but probably even more so -- we AP English Literature and Composition teachers spend most of our days juggling. We are always thinking how best to integrate concepts, ideas, and thought-provoking conundrums into the lives and work of students who alternate, often in a flash, between the highest levels of sophistication and the deepest abysses of ignorance. One moment they will be challenging the definitions of morality in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus or Morrison's Sula, the next they will be asking to be reminded about who came first, Moses or Jesus.
Our job seems clear. At our best, we enable our students to go beyond merely tolerating the inevitable ambiguities they find in literature and, of course, in their lives; we enable them to embrace these ambiguities. Simultaneously, we make them eager to write about them, to tell us and their classmates what they're thinking. But how do we accomplish this enormous task; how do we even begin? Of course, there is neither an AP English pedagogy nor an AP English reading list, which is one of the many reasons most teachers love the course. But as Robert Scholes states in his book, The Rise and Fall of English, "the one thing a curriculum in English must do ... is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of texts" (p. 66).
The notion of justified confidence in both their reading and writing is at the heart of excellent teaching in the AP class, for it implicitly poses four major questions:
- What should students be reading? What texts should they be consuming?
- How should they be approaching that reading and consumption?
- What kinds of writing will be most productive to students both in illuminating their reading and defining their own ideas?
- How can we help them recognize when their confidence in their efforts is justified?
We certainly want students to experience a high level of self-esteem about their work, but we want that sense of self-worth to be warranted. The best among us invite students to accompany us on a demanding journey, and then we help them to prepare and to travel with us. "Invite" here is more than merely a euphemism for "assign." An invitation is inclusive: we want them to join us and the generations before and after us in a conversation about and exploration of literature. And if they don't know yet how to accept our invitation, then we need to show them how.
The invitation we offer to our AP students is to listen with us to voices that resonate from the sixteenth century to late last night; voices that have chosen to speak to us through prose and poetry, through novels, stories, essays, and memoirs; voices of men and women from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. If texts are, as Robert Scholes asserts, "the fabric of culture itself, in which we and our students find ourselves already woven, even as we try to learn and teach how to reweave those garments," then what texts, what voices we choose to present to our students becomes crucial. Here is where the AP teacher has the greatest of luxuries. Even within the constraints of local guidelines, we can display the riches of the fabric of culture. And, rather than presenting the same literature over and over, year after year, until it assumes the character of scripture in the collective minds of our students and administrators, if not in our own minds as well, we can offer new works or familiar works in new contexts.
Inviting Students to Join the Conversation
By offering texts in new contexts, we invite students not only to hear strong and eloquent voices individually, we invite them to set up conversations among the works they are reading and to become part of those conversations themselves. Here's an example. Most of our students, like most of us, have been tempted to do what they know they shouldn't do, and most humans have, at one time or another, succumbed to temptation. In literature, however, both the temptations and the stakes are almost inevitably enormous. By focusing on the dilemmas that face human beings who sometimes desire what they cannot have, we can invite students to explore with us the tension that arises from thwarted ambitions or from goals that have been attained by unacceptable means. Since the temptation to transgress knows no racial, national, or ethnic boundaries, this thematic grouping allows, naturally, a multicultural approach. Think of the titles that might work here: Shakespeare's Macbeth, The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, A Doll's House and/or Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, perhaps supplemented by films like The House of Games by David Mamet and Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou. Of course, there is nothing sacred about these particular suggestions, and another AP teacher might devise an entirely different but equally rich and challengingly inviting list.
And what about the ambiguities surrounding the notions of innocence and evil? Is innocence always desirable? What exactly is evil? Through an examination of a variety of texts, AP students and their teachers can explore the complexities of these issues and confront what seems to be the impossibility of clear moral judgments. Texts for this course or unit might, once again, be a culturally rich mix, including such titles as The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor, Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Sula by Toni Morrison, and Shusaku Endo's tale of Portuguese missionaries in Japan in the seventeenth century, Silence.
A unit or course reflecting the growing uneasiness about the impossibility of certainty is an invitation to discuss the nature of reality itself. The authors AP teachers could summon to this encounter use exaggeration, time disjunction, understatement, character displacement, the supernatural, and absurdity (among other things!) to convey their concerns. Many of these authors can be considered modernists or postmodernists, which means (very generally) that they lacked the certainty that absolute and unquestionable factors like God, religion, or universal moral codes rule the world and that their themes and narrative style reflect their uncertainty. Authors whose texts would evoke passionate, sometimes confused, and outraged reactions and heated discussions might include Franz Kafka, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and William Faulkner.
Even AP courses and units that are as apparently canonical as ones centered on Shakespeare can be organized around themes that invite our turn-of-the-millennium students into conversations with minds from the English Renaissance. The plays in such a course can be organized around the theme of difference, from gender to religion to race to culture. Sometimes the differences are a source of humor, curiosity, and love; more often they are the basis of exclusion, prejudice, and domination. Through a careful reading of plays like The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, or Much Ado About Nothing, students can both become acquainted with some of the beliefs of Shakespeare's times and examine the beliefs and stereotypes of their own society. All the while, of course, they and we are connecting with beings from centuries before us, immersing ourselves in Shakespeare's poetry and stories and linguistic inventiveness.
It's not, however, always so easy to join the conversation. Dennie Palmer Wolf begins Reading Reconsidered with an example from Kenneth Burke's book, Philosophy of Literary Form, in which Burke likens the experience of being a reader to the experience of entering a parlor where several people are engaged in heated conversation. "In fact," says Burke, "the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there," and no one, therefore, can brief the late entry about everything that has already transpired. "You listen for a while, until you decide you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him... the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart with the discussion still vigorously in progress." This is the conversation that we invite our AP students to enter and leave; this is the conversation for which we must prepare them and for which we hope their other middle and high school teachers have been preparing them.
Organizing Experience and Expressing Thoughts
When bright students who are either unaware of a literary tradition and/or simply unaccustomed to the way people talk about literature (though they may be experts at the way people talk about computers or cars) enter the AP class, they must learn what, according to Wolf, "amounts to a second language.... But just like a first language, these second languages are deep-running ways of organizing experience and expressing thoughts. Acquiring them can change how a students sees the world: sometimes opening new possibilities, sometimes threatening familiar ways of knowing and saying." Burke's metaphor of the conversation in the parlor, Wolf's assertion that readers need a new language, and Scholes's idea of students gaining justified confidence in themselves as textual consumers and producers combine to shed some light on what exactly the AP teacher's work should be.
Perhaps an example would help here. When we teach poetry in the AP English class, students must know some terminology, and this "second language" often serves to help students organize their perceptions and even perceive the riches of the poem itself. When students enter into a conversation with a Donne sonnet and discover, sometimes with our guidance, how form reinforces meaning, how biblical allusions play off against rebellion, how metaphors, with their implied tensions, mirror the competing pulls of the poem, how syntax guides us to understanding, how the change in a single word can affect denotation and connotation, then they are engaging themselves in genuine learning, merging their "second language" with their first. But how can we lead them to these discoveries without falling prey to the wry observation, "I taught a great class today. Who knows if they learned anything?"
What doesn't work in helping students to become fluent in any second language is giving them a list of terms (diction, alliteration, metaphor, metonymy) to memorize and then asking them to show that they "know" the terms by giving them a quiz. In fact, quizzes in the AP class are tools of last resort, effective only as a stick with which to prod laggards to keep up with the reading. The act of taking a quiz does not involve learning for anyone, teacher or student; it merely involves regurgitation on the part of the student and mind-numbingly boring work in correction on the part of the teacher.
Engaging Students Through Questions
Questions -- the kinds with no preset answers, the kinds that open discussions and arguments, the kinds that invite everyone into the conversation -- should be the basis of the AP English class. But questioning doesn't mean the AP teacher standing in the front of the room directing who, what, how inquiries at a classroom filled with passive students who know that all they have to do is volunteer to answer one or two every class or so in order to gain the right to snooze the rest of the time. AP teachers must make sure that their students learn to ask most of the questions, of each other, of their teachers, and ultimately and most importantly of themselves. Experienced teachers know that students often already know answers; they simply do not know how to ask themselves the questions that will elicit what they have already discovered or may yet discover.
A specific approach that almost always evokes initial resistance and subsequent surprise and pleasure is the question paper. Here students must write a page or two, in paragraph form, about the text they are examining. The trick is that every sentence must be a question. So, for example, if they are confronting John Donne's "The Flea" (always a winner with students) for the first time, they must come to class having read the poem carefully and with a paper of questions. When students approach their task, they cannot imagine how a paper of questions will be anything more than a disjointed and literal list: "Why is he writing about a flea? Is it a man or woman talking, and who is he talking to?" As they write, however, their questions start building, one on the other, and the questions become, increasingly, speculations about meaning, hypotheses about imagery patterns and their intention, contemplations about possible irony and sexual innuendo. "Why does he use the word suck twice so early in the poem and then again at the end? Isn't the diction level of that word lower than the rest of the poem? Is he (I'm pretty sure it's he now) trying to convince the woman? Are they in bed? Why doesn't the author alternate his voice with hers?" In effect, they wonder themselves into the authentic beginnings of understanding before they even come to class, before a teacher has posed a single question to them.
The question paper is, of course, only one technique to engage students, and as with even the most effective tools, it loses its potency with overuse. It does, however, show the efficacy of having students come to class after they have begun to articulate their bafflement or to write themselves into the beginnings of understanding. Another technique AP teachers use is the reflection paper or thought piece. These assignments are meant to help students to focus on a question, an issue, a stanza, a line, a word, or anything that strikes their interest in the reading assignment. Though they are informal, "writing-to-learn" assignments and they are not meant to be revised, they might well become the basis of a later, more formal writing assignment. Teachers can have all students write thought pieces on a given day and then have them hear others' reflections, either as a whole-class or small-group activity. Alternatively, teachers can have two or three students write reflections for each class and use these reflections as opening gambits for whole-class discussion. Students who know they will be reading their reflections to all their classmates as opposed to merely submitting them to the teacher tend to see the writing stakes as considerably higher.
Student-generated opening gambits like the question paper and thought pieces have several advantages: students rather than the teacher set the terms and questions for the discussion; the caliber of students' writing tends to be better since they know they are writing for a larger audience; discussions are more likely to be among students with the teacher's participation rather than dominated by the teacher. Students who come to the AP class having read, thought, and written about the assignment can feel justifiably confident about participating.
The Power of the Sonnet
Analytical writing is not, however, the only way to understanding. Students who study the sonnets of Shakespeare and then read Gwendolyn Brooks's "First Fight, Then Fiddle," or Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," or Seamus Heaney's untitled sonnet about folding sheets with his mother certainly gain a sense of the power and flexibility of this apparently most constricted of forms, but when they try writing sonnets themselves, they learn on yet another level. Similarly, reading Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" and trying their own (as their teacher tries with them) raises crucial questions about this form: Should a poet start with six words? Or perhaps it's better simply to write six lines and see what words turn up at the end of each line? And what's the difference in outcome and meaning? And why would someone want to write in this form anyway? Certainly, after writing a sestina, it is unlikely that they will forget how one works.
We can't, however, always be certain that our students are learning either the content or the independent approaches and self-reliance we hope we are teaching them. Assessing our success in teaching English literature is not like assessing success in teaching mathematics. Yet we know what we want students to accomplish. We can, for example, distinguish clearly, for them and for ourselves, the attributes of good writing. Excellent structure, content, style, and mechanics are identifiable and recognizable. In the AP class, however, we want students themselves to become good judges of their own efforts; to be able to hold their own in conversations with others, students and teachers, who might challenge their approaches and their conclusions; to be able to recognize when their confidence is justified. Students should be the center of this experience, while teachers stand back and coach rather than stand forward and lead. As students read more widely and become more comfortable and adept in their analysis and discussion of poetry, for example, teachers might encourage them to set up conversations among poets. Such conversations or dialogues demand not only that students read carefully and analytically but also that they are able to defend the comparisons they have constructed. Here's how this might work. Many AP teachers present the poetry of Sylvia Plath to their classes. Her rich verse raises rivetingly painful issues of parent-child tensions, suicide, and uncertain self-image, especially in the context of feminist readings. But the recent publication of Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, her husband, allows readers to see their often-tormented relationship through the other end of the lens, which, of course, opens up discussions of perspective and point of view. Asking students to construct a dialogue between Plath and Hughes, using only lines from their poems, invites them to evaluate, compare, contrast, analyze, and, of course, be aware of what they've done and why. Devising such approaches, with their built-in reflections on the process of learning, allows students to join with their teachers in informed evaluations of their progress and successes.
AP English Literature classes developed as a result of the AP English Literature Examination, which, in its turn, grew out of the expectations of a few established colleges for a few established prep schools. But the examination and therefore the course have changed over the decades. When we ask ourselves what outcome we want after our students have completed our AP course, of course one answer is a 5 on the exam. But that should not be our driving goal. Our obligation, our joy as teachers of AP English is to accompany our students on a journey across cultures and centuries, introducing them along the way to the most interesting texts and characters we can find, then to cheer them on their way as they move onto other arenas to continue the conversations we've invited them to enter. Our charge is to elicit from them comments, both written and oral, of the highest caliber by offering help, expertise, and encouragement. If we succeed together, their achievement of something difficult and challenging becomes the source for us all of genuine self-esteem, of "justified confidence."
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. University of California Press, 1977.
Scholes, Robert E. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a Discipline. Yale University Press, 1999.
Wolf, Dennie Palmer. Reading Reconsidered. The College Entrance Examination Board, 1995.
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