Asking for Something Ridiculous

Last night, our model lesson was ridiculous.  I’m not being judgmental here; we were asked to bring two disparate literary works—a fairly straightforward poem by Philip Levine and a freewheeling postmodern dialogue by Donald Barthelme—together to illuminate one another. We were also given a set of rules to govern our work. One of the rules was that our response had to be ridiculous, nonsensical, ludicrous—kind of crazy. 

At first it seemed like the exercise might flop. The class was quiet, perplexed. People stared at the rules as if they would shed any light on the task we were to perform. Though we were given the option to work with a partner or group, everyone quietly focused, alone, on the task at hand, wrestling with a request we did not fully understand from a teacher whom we wanted to succeed.  And when we looked up ten minutes later, we were eager to share our ridiculous analyses and excited about what we been able to do with this unfamiliar assignment. The atmosphere of the classroom was engaged, energized, fun.

When we talked about our responses to the assignment after it was over, we all reported feeling skeptical, resistant, and even overtly hostile toward the assignment. We’re all good students trained to approach literature seriously, and no one, it seems, wanted to mix literary analysis and ridiculousness.  And yet, good students that we are, we all settled into the task, and when we did, we found that we learned far more from the assignment than we ever expected we would—far more, perhaps, than if we had done something more traditional.  All of us reported that the exercise made us see more in the original poem than we had when we used our usual methods of reading, and I think it’s fair to say that we found the activity itself exciting once we just went with it and threw ourselves into the work.

During our debrief, someone suggested that this activity might work well with less advanced students, students, that is, whose expectations for a class on poetry were less set in concrete, and that might well be true. But what the experience got me thinking about was how ridiculous some of the analytical tasks we assign—or the exercises we come up with to help students heighten their understanding of different aspects of literary texts—must seem to students when they first encounter our requests.

I’m not thinking here of particularly outside-the-box assignments; I’m thinking of the basic tasks of our field: annotating a passage; seeing patterns of language in a text; seeing how the details we notice help us to build an extended analysis.  When we ask students to do these tasks, we can be reasonably sure that some of them will be familiar with what we are asking, and will complete the task assigned. But how many others might see the instructions to an annotation assignment as truly bizarre? And yet, if they trust the instructor, students are likely to try to follow the assignment’s request and grapple with the unfamiliar task. 

And when they do, perhaps we need to be able to meet these efforts with the same spirit we met one another’s crazy responses to the poetry assignment—with pleasure, encouragement, applause. We did a strange task; we were brave enough to share our wild responses, and, most importantly, I think, we agreed that the assignment had broken through our usual responses and made us think anew. With students whose skills at literary analysis are less polished, shouldn’t we meet their efforts to do the ridiculous things we ask them to do with the same spirit?

Only by risking ourselves creatively and intellectually will we grow. This is true for us; it’s true for our students as well. But it’s much more fun and productive to take those risks in an environment where even our first fumbling attempts are seen as steps toward intellectual growth rather than as a dispiriting measure of how far we have to go.