We moved this week from Virginia Woolf to André Breton, and it was if a great light was turned on. Some of our assumptions about students are true: they are, for example, drawn naturally to establishment challenges. The surrealists refused to make any distinction between art and life; Breton wanted to live his art. The historical avant-garde challenged everything about how works were created, disseminated, and received. Although they found Breton’s primary work as impenetrable as everything else in the course, the class took to his ideas, asking pointed questions and providing insightful comments.
It would be unreasonable to expect that we teach only things that engage easily our students’ imaginations. Of course, it is our job to engage their imaginations with everything from Ezra Pound to Eugene Jolas, but when our job is made easier, when the ideas sell themselves, we have to be ready to take advantage of those moments. As a result, we had the two best classes of the semester this week, and that was not just because we turned back the clocks and benefited from an additional hour of sleep.
Surrealism appeals to students, but it did cross my mind that, after a couple of months, the class does have enough background in the subject to follow enthusiastically all the discussions in a course on modernism. Is there anything we can do, I wonder, to speed along their coming up to speed? Are there more background documents, more introductory material that can be taught in the first weeks? Should we have a more restrictive set of prerequisites to ensure that students have more background before the course even begins? Would moving to full-year courses leave us bored in January, or could we look forward to months and months of informed debate?
It comes down, once again, to the hermeneutic circle. You cannot understand things until you have seen it all, and you cannot appreciate what you are seeing until you understand it. The most gratifying part of teaching is seeing that light go on and benefitting from that glow. We can do everything we can to rush to that point, but we spend each semester building to that moment, praying for it to come.
How that feels, how this week felt, is why I do this, and faith that it will come again and again is the best reason for a teacher’s optimism.
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