#unknowingly like... maybe this is something like only the real harbinger can actually read that because even willow was surprised when he's

[leotanaka]

do you ever just stop and think about the fact that graydon translating the pnakotic words regarding the harbinger of the wyrm literally triggers a massive earthquake that nearly kills elora? 

[notanicequeen-blog]

Teaching, and Doing It Wrong

Heyo for another week. I’m Elsa, and I am not an ice queen. I am very flaky, though.

(For serious, though, whenever my ghostwriting job gets difficult, that one has to take priority, so blogging lands on the back burner for a while. Same as book reviews.)

But my reliability is not what we’re here about! So let’s just get on with it.

If you were anything like me in high school, then the words ‘foreshadowing’ and ‘symbolism’ were basically creative curse words. They were harbingers of bad things. Whenever a teacher broke out those words, it meant we had forty-two minutes of the teacher shoveling ‘this means this with no exception’ down our throats like a fussy, overly parental penguin with a full belly.

I’m happy to say that there was a decline in this trend when I got to college and I no longer had to worry about being taught to a standardized test, but by then the damage was done. Even now, to this day, I hear those words and I feel a strange, ghostly urge to roll my eyes so emphatically that I can see my brain stem.

When I sit down and think about it, I think the problem stems from one primary root. I mean, in general the American schooling system is a load of garbage that I could complain about for ages, but it would be a little off topic on a writing blog. So for our purposes, we’re just going to discuss the fact that literature and how to enjoy it is something that can only be taught to an extent.

You can teach someone how to identify various parts of the story and how to follow the plot. But you can’t actually teach someone what a story means to them. All you can do is teach them how to analyze it to decide that for themselves. But more often than not, an English class is centered more on the former.

Rather than asking you what you think a character’s body language means, they simply tell you that he almost knocked a clock off the mantle to symbolize how he fears the continued passage of time. If you happen to think he’s just fidgety and awkward and anxious and checking the time because he’s both dreading and breathlessly anticipating the moment he is reunited with his lost love, that doesn’t count.

It goes to such an extent that it no longer counts as teaching. When the teacher tells you ‘the curtains are blue because he’s depressed, yes it will be not he test, the bush is burning to foreshadow the house burning, yes it will be on the test’ you aren’t learning anything. You aren’t being taught anything. It’s more rote memorization to regurgitate later, until you’re that same fussy penguin.

It doesn’t help you identify what you think it means. Maybe whatever the teacher is talking about means something different to you. Maybe that specific detail doesn’t mean anything to you. You aren’t given a chance to ponder that. Instead, you’re probably getting bored and deciding you hate a book you haven’t had a chance to properly appreciate on your own terms.

When you get down to it, symbolism is different for everyone and foreshadowing is never that straight forward. If I foreshadow something that happens at the end of a story towards the beginning of it, odds are I either did it unknowingly because it simply made sense for the characters, or I went back and added it in at the end. So when a teacher tells you what foreshadows what, they’re guessing, and when they tell you what symbolizes what, it’s meaningless. I might have an entirely different opinion. I might say that Piggy isn’t an analogue to Jesus. I might say that Jim isn’t a surrogate father figure to Huck.

And let’s be real, shoving an opinion that a student doesn’t even agree with down their throat isn’t going to teach them anything. It’s going to make them resentful, and the last thing it’s going to do is encourage reading, so you wind up with a classroom of twenty-two sixteen-year-olds who can only read about ten words a minute.

A student should be guided, not led by the nose. They should be taught. How to form their own opinions, and how to analyze the work to more effectively do that. That’s a teacher’s job.

But until the school system is overhauled, I suppose I’m just shouting into the void. Nothing is going to change while standardized tests still loom on the horizon.

Good thing I don’t need to deal with it anymore~