Lisa Napell Dicksteen
The 20th Century Novel
Lost in my Native Language
I read a lot – always have, and am likely to answer, “No, but I read the book,” when queried about a new film. As a person over 40, I am regularly confronted by my teenage son and many of my university classmates with unrecognizable bits of popular culture which I need to investigate.
I also talk a lot. I can talk to just about anyone about just about anything. This is a natural condition for the educated and articulate, a subset of whom become teachers. We like to read, and then we like to talk about what we have read, and then we like to talk about the conversations we have had about what we have read... Whether the topic is ways to help our students engage with the text or what is playing at the local 16-plex, as a group, we like to talk. And we are good at it.
Recently I was out with some other English majors and found myself unable to contribute to their conversation. I understood the individual words being quoted, as well as those being used to discuss the quote, but I felt no connection, had no prior knowledge on which to draw. I was utterly out of my depth.
They were talking about rap.
This, I thought, is how many kids feel when we talk to them about 18th century romantic poets, or the clown figure in Shakespeare, or the symbolism of the old guy and that damn fish. They understand the words we are referring to (often having them right in front of them), and the words we are using to talk about the text are familiar, but they have no port of entry. Nothing connects their world with the one we think we are inviting them into. They are watching a conversation, rather than having one. It is not fun.
It is important for us as teachers to remember how it feels to be completely and utterly unfamiliar with the subject being discussed. It’s not just that someone who has not read Jane Eyre or Great Expectations will not “get” ALL the in-jokes in Jasper Fforde’s delightful Tuesday Next detective series. It is that they will not get any of them – they may not even realize there is something there for them to “get.” And few things are more frustrating, and more discouraging, than being surrounded by a conversation whose most basic elements are mysteries to you.
Having had this experience, I am reminded of the importance of being sensitive to the possibility that our students are not “not trying” or “not interested,” they are genuinely confused. They are looking at words, the individual meanings of which they know, but which, as combined in the text, offer not transparency or illumination, but mud. As we blithely continue to wipe away the murk we see, many students find that, for them, just beneath the surface of the mud, there’s more mud – the murk we don’t see anymore. We need to remember both the frustration of trying to gain access to what appeared to be a solid, polished surface, and the exhilaration of finding the hidden trigger or catch to open it, in order to come up with innovative and helpful methods of helping our students to locate their own keys.