On an in-class prompt for a senior English class, one of the choices last week was

“What is the most striking stylistic aspect of Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler… and what is its effect on you as reader?”

One student wrote on the idea that Calvino’s use of direct address to the reader made the novel immediately more engaging for her than anything else she’d ever read (for school, maybe).  From that comment stemmed our entire class today.  I asked the class what, assuming the student’s observation was generally true for most readers, would be the downside of such engagement?  And why?  (The idea was that if something is generally accepted as true, perhaps we should start thinking about when it wasn’t or whether the “good” of reader engagement was automatically unalloyed.)

Following from that question, I asked a sort-of-traditional-English-class question of how Calvino gets the reader engaged,  what the implications of the question were.

Then I asked the class to deconstruct the question I’d just asked (in other words, examine the hidden implications of the question–the dominant one being that in fact Calvino does get (most) readers engaged).

And then, after a short side trip to what deconstruction (viz Derrida) and Socratic questioning were (and for the latter, was not), we came back to the “How does Calvino get you engaged?”

I said that “He doesn’t” was, while possibly accurate, nonetheless a snarky response rather than a legitimate one since we’re assuming for the purposes of discussion that his writing does do so in general.  So, in such a case, the question becomes, “Well, even if it didn’t work for you, how does it probably work for those for whom it is effective?”

The next question was “who is you?” in the question of “How does Calvino get you engaged?” (more deconstruction…)

Then, moving to the “how” part, I elicited from them the observation (by referring to the advice they’d been given on writing college essays, among other things) that use of detail–the “show, don’t tell” approach–was a common device for achieving verisimilitude (and taught them that word as well, ahem).

We were only now, perhaps, ready to go back to the original question of what the downsides to reader engagement might be.  I was thinking of the question from the standpoint of the reader, but someone pointed out that there could be downsides from the author’s perspective as well.

That observation leads to two conclusions:

• Questions need to be general enough to allow for answers the teacher didn’t intend;
• Teaching the same work (even many times over the years) can continue to be fun because you can get different student insights each time you teach (assuming the first bullet point).

In another side note, we talked about Calvino’s use of “you” and “I” as characters in the first few parts of the novel and about how each of those uses had the potential both to  draw the reader in and (in another way) to push the reader away.

There was much reflection, mostly but not entirely by me, as to the value of this sort of reflection and questioning not just of other’s ideas but of one’s own.  A couple of people snorted when I pointed out that much of the material we’d discussed was an elaboration of the original questions I had of the student’s assertion in her essay–and that I felt a good teacher (technically, I suppose, a good assessor of student work) would be having these questions occur while reading student papers.

(It’s possible such comments contribute to one aspect of my reputation…)

An example of how reflection and questioning can serve real-world ends was my statement about how I dislike the use of the term “PC” (for “political correctness”) and how I see it as a matter of compassion (one of the students used the term “respect”) for others rather than a mere social convention.  I illustrated that opinion with a story about changing the St. John’s teams’ nickname from “The Rebels” to “The Mavericks.”

The class ended with my pulling everything together (the meta-lesson, actually, about the value of reflection and questioning) as I asked, “So, given that you can find the answer to any question you can ask on the internet, what’s the value of classes like this one?”

There were a few interesting responses, including

• learning how to analyze and reflect to examine the search-engine results from internet questions

I agreed but asked for a more fundamental issue (which I finally got):

• Learning what questions to ask

I find the second response to be more fundamental in the sense that it does not presuppose the implicit assumption in the original question–which is that we can already ask “the right questions.”

I don’t know how many teachers are comfortable with the question “What value do you bring to your class?”  though such a wording is essentially a rephrasing of my class-ending question. But I suspect that the most lasting answers will often involve one or the other of the responses of my students that are presented above.