At the edges..

I’ve been looking over a set of materials for an “American Studies” course provided by a colleague, and I can see why some English teachers wouldn’t like them.  It’s basically a history course with readings that are a mix of some “literature” and some documents that are much more culturally important than literarily so.

However, photocopying all those sources led me not just to look them over while copying (and getting unhappy with the copy machine, but that’s a separate story).  It also led me to consider two other questions, one tied into the “American Studies” idea and a bigger issue as well.

I think American Studies courses try (or should try)  to answer the question “What does it mean to be an American?”  I think that, the arguments of purist English and history teachers aside, one can make a case that that question is a very important one to have students consider. ( I also think it would be possible to choose examples of better writing that were also historically significant than the ones in that particular set of course materials, but that’s a separate issue…)

The bigger issue I thought of while photocopying was “What is the purpose of reading literature?” In other words, if I was dissatisfied with some of those works “as literature,” how was I going to define “literature” and what would I choose if I were teaching such a course (ahem).  That question (or at least the first part of it) is clearly relevant to my fall semester English course where I’m trying to teach literature and philosophy (presumably fiction and non-fiction, but I suppose those classifications depend on one’s point of view).

I then wandered around back to the “What does it mean to be an American?” question and realized that this is where interdisciplinarity comes in.  I personally think that getting students to try to answer that question for themselves is more important than reading most of what students tend to read in American literature or in studying American history from the perspective of this is what happened and this may even be why, which is pretty much how it tends to be taught most places.

I have been doing a great deal of reading laterly about how the most creative and often, in science/medicine, the most valuable work is done at the edges of disciplines.  To the argument that “you have to know the basics before you can branch out” I can offer only a qualified yes.  I would say, “yes, but…” Of course it’s important to know the basics.  But let me make my point with a personal story.

To play the piano well, you have to know the notes and develop some facility with various combinations of them.  I stopped piano lessons after six years because I had a *very* traditional teacher who wouldn’t let me play any music that wasn’t “made up” for exercise books.  It was boring.  Who wants to make music like that?

So, I didn’t play again until high school (a bit) when I wanted to play the music from the shows I was in.  Then, my music really took off again in college when a friend came over and started playing cool stuff (Mozart, mostly).  I wanted to play that and so I started playing and practicing again.  There’s a lesson here, folks lol.