We Don't Always Need To Teach

 

Edith Hamilton

"In Greece there are most lovely wild flowers.  They would be beautiful anywhere, but Greece is not a rich and fertile country of wide meadows and fruitful fields where flowers seem at home.  It is a land of rocky ways and stony hills and rugged mountains, and in such places the exquisite vivid bloom of wild flowers comes as a startling surprise."  (Mythology, Edith Hamilton, p. 111)

This is the passage that a high school junior who is the student of a friend of mine chose for a typical read-and-respond assignment.  What that student wrote regarding this quotation forms a powerful reminder, or perhaps a startlingly new idea, that all teachers would do well to bear in mind.

 "I personally enjoyed this quote because it was so vivid in details that I could visualize what was being described.  This quote struck me because it was not about something that could be taught or learned and applied to one's life.  It is simply a quote describing details of Greece.  I think it is important to also recognize quotes or passages like this one because sometimes in life we need the simpler things rather than always looking at quotes that are about how we should live our lives, passages that teach.  Yes, teaching and guidance quotes and passages are good but so are the descriptive ones, the ones that transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative.  Quotes like this one ...make whatever the reader is reading far more interesting because quotes like this allow that reader to imagine what ancient Greece or any other place from the past would have been like.  This may be a simple quote, but I see something deeper in this quote that is very important....  It brings out the creative and imaginative side of literature."

We sometimes think of lyric poetry in classical literature as being that which does not advance the plot.  It is personal and emotional.  It sets up mood and atmosphere and evokes feelings.  When, for example, the Roman poet Catullus in Carmen 5 asks of his beloved, "Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred more/And then another thousand and a hundred like before/Then add another thousand and a hundred to the score," he could have more simply said, "Give me 3,300 kisses."  Yet, as Howard Nemerov so elegantly put it, there is a line between prose and poetry.  It is as indiscernible as the moment of transition from rain to snow, but it exists and it is the realm of lyric, and to be honest, would you not much rather have your lover propose passion in the lyrical way of Catullus than with a prosaic mathematical sum?

And this brings us back to what this high school student observed and that teachers should remember.  Education is not always about teaching and learning facts.  It is not always about producing something with those learned facts, whether on a test or through a project or presentation.  It is not, as it were, always about advancing the plot.  There is a necessarily lyrical aspect to education as well.

We seem to have lost sight of this, and there can be no more unfortunate or compelling proof than in the numbers of students who have told me over the years that they have lost their love of reading because of their English classes.  I enjoy spotting a Greco-Roman reference in literature as much as the next person and find a well crafted tricolon crescens an absolute delight, but no one looks at a Monet merely to count the brush strokes.  How often do we make a reading, especially in English or world language classes, merely a mining expedition for figures of speech, historical factoids, or salutary aphorisms?  Do we ever with our students simply read a poem, listen to a piece of music, or observe a work of nature or art and then do nothing more?

I can hear the objections rising even in my own mind as the presumed need for assessments and productivity claims the honor of precedence that we have yielded to it.  My colleague's student, however, was right.  In addition to all the pragmatic facets of education and the demonstrable proofs of their having been mastered, we need as well those facets that "transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative."  I hope to remember this as I plan future explorations for my own students into "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."