I believe that most students who struggle in introductory literature classes do so for three primary reasons: they never really read in their everyday life, they never think about what they read, and they expect the class to be just like high school English. (There are other reasons, such as an inability to manage time or to write well, but I believe that those problems are secondary – dealing with the primary problems can usually help with these secondary problems). In this first post, I want to say a few words about why I believe that these three things are both (a) problems and (b) primary ones. I also want to explain why it is very much worth one’s time to overcome these problems.
The first one is perhaps quite obvious. Most students read very little. Or rather, they don’t read the kinds of things that develop one’s reading capacities. Thus, they might read abundant text messages written in the special language of texting. These text messages are very brief. They might also frequent online social networks, such as My Space or Facebook or Twitter, which again involve much reading of short, discrete, and usually disconnected bits of texts. Sometimes students will also read magazines that cover their specific area or areas of interest, but these articles tend to be short and are often mere ‘thumbnail’ pieces. As a result, most students in their everyday life do not read very much and they do not read sustained narratives or reflections.
Some students do read a bit more than that – they read for pleasure. However, as with those who read text messages or magazines, there is rarely reflection on why one is so interested in what one is interested in; rather, the student simply likes to absorb information and trivia about those things s/he already happens to like (when reading texts and magazines) or s/he likes to feel pleasure and to escape from the world for a bit (especially with respect to genre novels consumed as entertainment). As a result, the average student does not critically reflect upon what they read. So, between not reading much and not thinking much about what they read, most students have no experience doing what they’ll be doing every day in a literature class.
This makes literature a tough class.
To compound the problem, there are the expectations that students have. Sometimes students have no expectations, and this can be a problem, as students do not sufficiently mentally prepare themselves for what they are getting into. Other students might simply expect to try to avoid not getting kicked out of the class with an FA so that they can cash in student loans or keep playing their sport until the season ends. However, I like to think that this is a small minority of students. What is more common is the tendency to believe that Intro to Lit will be like the only English classes most students have experienced: those in high school.
In high school, the emphasis is on the expression of personal opinion (How do I feel about the text – even if my feelings have nothing to do with what I read (or might not have read)?) and the regurgitation of information (What did experts say about this, or what can you find on the web?), in which case the students simply find and summarize or repeat (or, if you don’t know how to cite properly, steal), the information. As a result, students never learn to make considered judgments of what they have read or to support those judgments with solid evidence and reasoning. However, making such judgments is something you must do in this course. In fact, making reasoned judgments on the basis of a full understanding of what is before you is one of the highest capacities a person can exercise.
So: The course will require you to read texts on which you will often struggle to stay focused, and it will require you to stop and think about those texts, and it will required you to make judgments about them that you must defend with more thinking. If you have no experience with this, then you will find that you have your work cut out for you. You’ll also find that you’re about to pick up an excellent new set of skills.
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