Tragedy and Teaching

I make a point not to take it personally whenever students don't appreciate a moving book or short story.

What do I feel? There's a kind of frustrated grief, a mild exasperation, but not at the students, at...just reality, I guess. The order of things. When you're young, you don't see how sad everything is. Deaths in books don't mean anything (unless it's the death of an animal). Personal sacrifices that are not enough and end in tragedy just seem like...stories that didn't have a point. The hero failed, if he or she can even be called a hero after failing.

Stories that are very sad seem sort of funny at best when you're young, and boring or pointless at worst. Sometimes a teacher will try to get you to think about the story more deeply, but even if you go through the motions to make her happy, the story still seems bad. Maybe you have some interesting conversations about it in class, but it doesn't touch you. The story wasn't good.

I don't think there's anything to be done about this. I've learned to brace myself for students' innocent apathy. They aren't being rude or heartless or stupid. They're just...not there yet, and that's as it should be. It's probably worse to be a teenager who has experienced enough tragedy to recognize its reflection in literature. If you "get it" when you're young, it's probably a bad sign.

But it's not like I've had any big tragedy in my life. I don't think you have to have tragedy to appreciate the deep, haunting, beautiful grief of sadness in literature. I guess you just have to have...experience? Even that sounds pretentious. I don't know what happens when you get older. Maybe it's whatever last development happens to the brain at age twenty-five, when you start to understand risk and death, that the risks you take could make you die.

It is difficult to talk about sad literature with students because I want them to feel it, know that they won't, and know that they shouldn't. I end up putting on my upbeat "let's talk about this" suit, and we do. I ask for overall thoughts ("Who liked it? Who didn't? Why?"), what the plot was ("Okay, so what all happened in the story?"), and try to draw attention to the themes ("Was that fair? Why did he do that? How did that affect the other characters? What do you think that means?") and any symbolism ("Where have we seen that before? What might that be a symbol for? What does that make us think? Remember when another character said...?").

We always have good conversations, but I leave them feeling like I didn't break through. The students still don't care. They still think the story was boring/pointless/bad/not to be recommended.

And that's okay. This post probably sounds like complaining, but I don't mean it that way—at all. I love talking with students. It is my absolute favorite part of teaching. The conversations I have with eighth graders, eleventh graders, are unlike conversations I have with any other group. I love hearing their thoughts, what they liked and disliked, similarities they see in other areas of life, weird and unsubstantiated opinions that will probably change in ten years, insights I never thought of before, things I never noticed.

I don't blame students for not "getting" sad stuff in literature, although it does make me feel farther away from them. Like we're standing on opposite banks of a river and I'm asking them to cross a bridge that's invisible to them. I make my voice welcoming and excited, describe the bridge in vivid detail, to the point that they could probably describe later it to someone else, but they can't actually see it, so they don't cross. Fair enough. I wouldn't cross an invisible bridge either*, and I appreciate their even listening to me describe it :)

Like most blog posts lately, I'm just thinking. There's no "point" to this post; I just want to get a little bit of the yearning out of my system. I yearn for students to see what I see in beautiful, sad stories.

Maybe one day some of them will be teachers too, and they'll read the same stories and be struck with how different they feel about them at age twenty-two, twenty-five, thirty. Maybe they'll call to other students across the river, voices full of eager promises, and settle for the students describing the bridge back to them.

Life is weird. Literature is weird. I love them both.

~Stephanie

* Okay, I would cross a literally invisible bridge—and most of my students probably would too—but that's not what we're talking about XD