Can you believe the professor let him say that?

or

What if student comments are way off base?

An interesting question keeps arising in our conversations about running class discussion in an open and generative, as opposed to a task-oriented way: what do you do with a student comment that’s way off base—or even wrong?

(Disclaimer: This entry is not going to deal with responses that are bigoted or offensive in nature. That’s for another day.)

First, let me confess that, while I don’t believe that there are no wrong answers, I think that if the discussion question is truly open—as in, “I never really know what to do with this passage in The Scarlet Letter, and I’d love to talk about it together to see if we get farther together than I did on my own,”—then there are so many possibly right (or at least potentially interesting) answers that it would be hard for a student to be absolutely wrong.

Given the anxiety many students feel about speaking in class at all, it seems far more likely that the student hasn’t fully formulated his or her thought, or that the wrong-seeming response betrays a deeper misunderstanding of the text, than that the student is being wrong on purpose. Far better in the first case for the instructor to try to draw the student out more completely so that the response becomes comprehensible—and perhaps in the process more interesting, useful, or even illuminating.  Asking a student to rephrase or “say more about that,” turning the question to the class to see if others share the view, or perhaps asking the class to think about where in the text might there be evidence to support the surprising contention you’ve all just heard are all ways to allow an unexpected answer to become the most exciting part of a class.

As the old saw goes: the more you learn, the less you know—so it may in fact be easier for more experienced instructors to let go enough of their own ideas about a text to go to a new, if odd and surprising, place with it. But this requires us to believe a few important things: first, that the text can yield itself in vastly different ways to different readers, and that the excitement of reading with others is expanding what we already know, think, or feel about a text.  It requires us to be clear in our minds, as Curzan and Damour remind us, about the difference between a real discussion and a task-based conversation, in which there really are right or wrong answers, and where the point of the class conversation is to have the students actively coming to these answers themselves rather than quietly taking notes while the instructor lectures.

Becoming open to unexpected responses also requires us to believe that interpreting literary texts is a skill—or even an art—that gets better with practice. We wouldn’t expect a beginning biology student to be expert at lab skills before taking a class; we wouldn’t expect dancers to know all of the steps before taking the floor.  Sure, some people have naturally steadier hands with the pipette, and other fortunate people have an innate sense of rhythm. But they still need to practice, and so do our students.  And learners need to have a place where they can make mistakes and not be made to feel like the skill in question—in this case, finding pleasure in coming to a deeper understanding of a literary text and sharing that insight with other interested people—is off-limits to them. I think the literature classroom should be just such a place.