At the end of last week’s class when Professor Sample referred to Textual Power as more of a theoretical work than a “practical” work, a particularly disturbing and potentially embarrassing image danced across the stage of my unconscious. I saw myself sprawled across the dining room table, snoring – the pages of Scholes’ text and my own notes crumpled and wet under a heavy, drooling head; an errant sticky note rising and falling in concert with my rhythmic breathing while my daughter demonstrated her burgeoning artistic talent with mommy’s unused pen. I suppose you could say I was expecting the worst. Mr. Scholes, however, proved me wrong. Textual Power is absorbing and engaging in its approach to teaching literature and applicable to both the collegiate and high school classrooms.

I first realized the practicality of Scholes’ theory during one of my tutoring sessions this week. I work with an ESOL student who is about to enroll in NOVA’s English 112 for the second time. She came to our Friday session having read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” convinced the story was about using the lottery as a way of deciding what games to play in an historic community. She balked when I asked her to reread it and complete a double entry journal for our meeting this coming Monday, convinced she had completely understood the story without any difficulty at all. We were at an impasse until I remembered Scholes’ discussion of the levels of reading. I explained that she was at the first level, working to understand the basics of the story such as plot and character. Her study of the text that day, as well as a return to it for the double entry journal, would help her to interpret the text (make judgments about plot, character and theme) and ultimately criticize the text (make judgments about the text’s connection to or statement about the outside world). She thought for a moment, then exclaimed that this process was exactly what her professor wanted her to do the first time she took 112. I smiled quietly and we moved on, but on the inside I was really pleased with myself.

That is until I remembered something else Scholes included in his discussion of teaching literature.

Scholes wisely asserts that there is a “bright little student” inside each English teacher, and that we are all desperately trying to show off our knowledge of our subject to our students. This proclivity for show and tell gets in our students’ way, he argues, such that they are hampered in the ability to develop the skills necessary for critical interpretation. Scholes places this claim within the university setting, but I think it is an issue that runs far deeper into the educational apparatus (if I might borrow Scholes’ phrasing).

Though Scholes does not directly state it, his subtle negativity toward high school English classes leads me to believe that he sees the larger picture as well. There are several instances where Scholes notes a lack of critical ability in college freshman, and it is up to the college literature professor, then, to help students develop this skill. To this end he argues for a complete overhaul of the standard university English curriculum, one which ultimately helps students no longer “fear the other” but embrace it, integrating difference into their own world view so that they can criticize a text, speaking not only for themselves but for a larger community as well.

I think the issue in high school English curriculums is that most teachers (or overly gifted, eager students in positions of authority) tend to look at their students as kangaroos and Numb-eels. Though aware on some level that students can build a schema for critical interpretation, they somehow find themselves devoid of their own frame of reference for this perception. Rather than assisting students in the development of their own sense of cultural literacy, they revere the text as almighty and its meaning as a matter to be handed down from on high, not discovered through textual study and an awareness of one’s place within the world. High school students are much more perceptive and world wise than given credit for, and I believe they can successfully be challenged in the manner in which Scholes espouses.

How to do this, however, is another matter – one which I will have to think about for my teaching presentation in April. Until then I will work on shedding the “bright little student” persona…

I’ll keep you posted on that.

– Ginny