Posted by Ariarule 2 days ago
Then, with all the best intent in the world, they try to explain to their students "Look, you don't get this, this fat book is transcendent if you can just sit with it and understand it! I, too, used to think that English class was just stupid words that they force you to read, but let me help you get this! You've got to..."
But all their students hear is Charlie Brown's adults going "Waa waa waa..." because they're genuinely not mature and experienced enough to "get" the book the way the English teacher understood it.
Ten years later a student will re-read one of their literature books, have this same epiphany, and talk excitedly about deep literature is, and someone will tell them they ought to be an English teacher. And the cycle continues.
Ok, so some English teachers are of course better than others, and some will convey their excitement a little better, and some students will be mature enough to understand it better than others.
But I will definitely maintain that all (close to all) English teachers have this same love of books, and want desperately to pass it on.
The problem is that too many pieces require experiences that the majority of the classroom just doesn't have.
It's not that students don't venture far enough into the cave to find the treasure, it's that the treasure literally isn't treasure to them yet.
The venturing that needs to happen for them to find the treasure isn't time spent in the material, it's time spent gaining life experiences.
Ex - there was nothing you could have done to make a book like "The Great Gatsby" good for me as a 15 year old. It's filled with themes that I had no experiences to connect with - no lost romances, no wealth (or even really a sense of wealth and money), no major life regrets, nothing at all to make this book hit. It's a dreary book about miserable, unlikable people when read from the perspective of a 15 year old student.
So why are we asking 15 year old students to read this book?
And that doesn't mean we can't throw students in over their heads every now and then (ex - exposure to the unfamiliar is fine). But if that's all you give them... they decide reading is pointless. You have to strike a middle ground with material that hits home.
And there's a range of teacher quality here as well - some are genuinely good at pushing students towards understanding the value in material, even if they lack experiences. But most aren't (at least in the US educational system I went through, which was a mix of decent public schools and expensive private schools)... they're passionate and well intentioned, but fail to empathize with the emotional maturity and world view of their young students.
- “Blah blah blah blah skeleton, blah blah blah blah mitochondria! Make sense?”
- “No!”I've thought something similar but never put it into words. It's nice when someone else puts your thoughts into words so clearly that you go, "That's exactly how I see this topic!"
> I was presented with art and literature as if it was self-explanatory, and that everything wonderful about it was plainly visible from the outside. But those works were much more like dark, winding caves with treasure stashed inside of them.
> But if someone had outfitted me appropriately, if they warned me that you have to bring one of those crank-up flashlights and you might have to shimmy through some narrow antechambers and spelunk through some flooded passageways, but that eventually you would reach a room full of untold riches—well, maybe I would have actually tried.
To be clear, I enjoy all three!
I'd argue that complexity is not even the right word to describe what the author describes. Thickness or depth is more accurate.
But life is often more complex than that and it requires great skill to accurately reflect that complexity in creative works. When you're struggling with an experience that is difficult to talk about and understand, a creative work that seems to "get it" can be really valuable in sorting out how to think about that experience. I rarely need help in describing how much I like coffee, but I welcome good writing on the subject of "how should one understand the mixed experience of being very close to someone who you often disagree with."
Is it the complexity itself people value, or the rewards of things that are complex? IME, the most valuable things are complex. Maybe that's because there is not enough capacity in simplicity to contain exceptional value (speaking very generally and loosely - we really need to define terms).
Also, I certainly think people value complex things, but I strongly disagree that they are over-valued. All the best things in my life seem complex.
I could imagine that complexity stimulates the brain in a different way and that adds to reward.
Reminds me of one part of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky".
TIL Gemini can respond to rot13
Just read "a deepness in the sky" last month, surprised to see a reference here.
Of course, this is also true in engineering disciplines as well. Perhaps the greatest software engineering work is the Linux kernel. Open the repo, and navigate to a random line in a random file. The odds that you will understand exactly--and I mean exactly--what occurs on that particular line on your first read without an explanatory comment is relatively low. If, however, you consider header files, libraries, how the file fits into the broader kernel, language features, and additional contextual information, your ability to understand that line of code increases significantly.