On teaching literature to 12-year-olds:

My seventh-grade class read Ben Jonson's poem "It is not growing like a tree." Here's the text of that poem:

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night —
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.

(I can't space it properly on this program, but it should be centered.)

First we parsed it for vocabulary & syntax, paraphrased it & looked at the structure (the significance of lengths of lines, for example). Then I wanted to suggest two possible readings: one that Ben Jonson had in mind his own children, all of whom died very young; the other that he was articulating a defense of lyric (against epic or history). So I told them about his children, and they took the next step. So far so good. The other reading was harder to get across, and I didn't quite know how to get them to understand this without just handing it to them. I suppose I could have framed it as fiction vs. non-fiction — they might have been able to draw an analogy. (I think I just talked about short works and long works.) I don't think that's terrible — I think they got it, but I wonder how I could have done it differently.

I chose "It is not growing like a tree" because it's short (easy to memorize) & dense, and some of them did memorize it. But, not surprisingly, they weren't as taken with it as they were with Blake's "The Poison Tree" (which is not to say I won't teach it again).

It's hard to get them started. When we read a poem I feel like the class is a kitten which I've just deposited in a vast maze, and I have to prod it to get it to explore.

But sometimes they chase after metaphors on their own. We read an excerpt from Moby Dick about the sea's "suffusing seethings." I told them that the literal meaning of "seething" is "boiling," & they caught the implication of latent violence in the word, & one of them even pointed out that the whale rising out of the sea is like the pot boiling over.

Once we were discussing chapters 27-30 of Anne of Green Gables; in 27 & 28 Anne pursues extravagant fantasies and comes to grief; in chapters 29 & 30 she throws herself into real life, and draws great satisfaction from it. So we summed up the four chapters as baldly as possible, and I asked if they could spot any contrast or development. They could; in fact it was the most mischievous boy in the class who got it.

I love it when things happen on the spot; when they see things I hadn't noticed, as with "suffusing seethings," or when I see things I hadn't noticed before. When we were discussing chapter 23 of Tom Sawyer it suddenly occurred to me that the revival and the storm are a comic reversal of Noah's Flood. I was too excited to keep this to myself, let alone to consider how I might nudge them to notice it, so I spilled the beans.

Sherlock Holmes & the short stories of Ray Bradbury went over very well. No surprise there!

The eternal dilemma in teaching is finding a balance between giving and drawing out (like sowing & reaping); one doesn't want to give too much, but if one doesn't give enough nothing will come out. The aim is to find a productive balance, which, of course, differs with every student. It's much easier if they ask questions; then one doesn't have to guess about what they know & what they don't know.
Of course, there's no dilemma if you just lecture, & certainly there's a place for lectures even in high school courses. (They're extremely unpopular at the moment.) (There's no dilemma also if you go to the opposite extreme, which judging from conversation with teachers, is a far more common solution — giving students geometric shapes and hoping they'll rediscover the Pythagorean theorem, for example. "Board of Ed regulations limit me to 10 minutes of instruction," said a colleague who teaches middle school. "For the rest of the hour they free-write on some topic — an ideal vacation for example— exchange it with one neighbor, then another..." She rolled her eyes. "But how can they write if they don't know what a sentence is?" This brings back bad memories...)
I wish there were books that suggested ways of presenting literature to children & teenagers; not just discussion questions, but what they should know before the discussion, different possible follow-up questions — as a ground bass for an improvisation; I don't think anyone would follow it as a script — so that one wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Things that move my father to tears (a partial list):

1) The Spanish Republican song with the refrain, "El pueblo, unido, jamas sera vencido!" He and I were singing this, and he had to stop. My mother: "Oh Carlo, it happened over 60 years ago!" (Strange words for a historian.) Father: "I know, [sniff], but the Spanish people suffered so much [cough]."

The great-aunt of an erstwhile flatmate of mine was on a Spanish Republican poster urging women to donate blood; up to then it had been thought that women couldn't or shouldn't give blood.

2) The women farm labourers' song with the following words:

Sebben che siamo donne
paura non abbiamo,
e abbiam delle belle buone lingue,
e in lega ci mettiamo.

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
E noialtri lavoratori
siam per la libertà

La libertà non viene
finchè non c'è l'unione,
crumiri col padrone
crumiri col padrone

O, li-o li-o laa, e la lega vincerà
crumiri col padrone
son tutti d'ammazzar.

Except that he always changes the last line to "son tutti da legar," because scabs and bosses maybe should be tied up, but not killed.

3) Once he was telling me the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, and every few sentences he would stop to putter around. I waited expectantly for him to finish the story, and it took me a while to understand what these frequent interruptions were about. Finally he forced himself to finish, coughing and sniffing his way through Simonides's epitaph.
(I have to say that's how I feel right now about the Iliad. It's taking me forever to finish, partly because I don't want them all to die.)

4) In the country graveyard where my great-grandparents are buried there's the tomb of an anarchist who died in Libya or Ethiopia in the 1930s. The last time we visited the cemetery the tombstone was too decayed to read, but my father had memorized the epitaph: "...mourned by friends and family, he died in un'impresa violenta [I can't think of an English word that would convey the sarcasm of impresa], dreaming of a fatherland not of soldiers but of citizens."

5) Once, late at night, we passed Imola, and my father insisted on stopping to read the the words of Andrea Costa, father of Italian socialism, on a plaque in the main square of the city. It was too dark to read the whole thing, but we managed to make out a few words and even those brought a tear or two to my father's eyes. I've actually found the plaque on the internet, and it's a rousing speech. (http://www.er.cgil.it/im/homeimola.nsf/f3800598d0274240c12568c6004d2ca2/a352eb30fe5f182bc12568c7005029f6?OpenDocument) Here's some of it translated:

31 December 1900 - 1 January 1901 It's the dawn of a new century - Toss flowers with full hands - Workers, thinkers, men: if the century that's dying saw the unity and independence of nations, the coming century will see their federation. If the impulses toward emancipation of the working classes were ruthlessly crushed in blood from 1830 to 1871, the next generation will see their triumph. If woman lies still in centuries-old obbrobrio ['opprobrium' doesn't sound quite right], if the child lacks bread and education, if the old person finds no roof or rest, provide, o new century, for the redemption of woman, the protection of the child, the care of the elderly. ... Onward, citizens! ... Let us throw to the century that did not witness our birth but will see our death our living hearts, and thinking, working, struggling, loving, strong in our sense of destiny, by science enlightened, give, oh! let us give to all children of men work, freedom, justice, peace.

Politicians don't give speeches like that nowadays. Is that a bad thing? I think it is. It's a vague speech (but by no means so vague as to be acceptable to all) and perhaps that kind of rhetoric can become manipulative, but these are mealy-mouthed excuses. Besides, it might be easier to spot bullshit in magniloquence than in its opposite. (I know that sounds paradoxical.) But more importantly, one has to take the risk. People need to be reminded now and then (especially now) what politics are really about, what's worth fighting for.

When my father was very young his grandmother, a pious lady much admired for her charity, admonished him not to play with the children of farm labourers. I think that goes some way towards explaining why he became a historian of agriculture, and founded a museum of peasant culture (http://www.provincia.bologna.it/cultura/vsmeraldi/)

He has some good war stories which I'll post here in the coming months; I don't want to forget them.

My students are so good! I read the story of Pyramus and Thisbe to my Saturday fifth grade at the end of class, as a treat, and before I had read three sentences Patrick said, "Oh, that's the story that's like Julio — I mean Romeo and Juliet."

Justin, a fourth-grader, is one of my weakest students; but he makes an effort, and is so eager to please that he finishes my sentences for me. Once I was working with him, and I said, "Justin, the way you're holding your pen is..." Justin: "Unacceptable!" a kind of joyful self-flagellation. "Well, it's just not helping you..."

I had tea with someone I knew from my undergraduate days. We made small talk for over an hour, and it was a bewildering experience. Small talk is not necessarily a drag, but her heart wasn't in it, nor was mine. Anyone observing her for a few minutes would probably conclude that she was lively and engaging; but the cumulative effect was deadening, deadly. I kept hoping we would light on some interesting topic, but we never did. Later I found out on the internet that she's studying something that interests me intensely, but somehow this never came up. And so I can't help wondering, "Is she humoring me? Does she not consider me worthy of interesting conversation? (But how could a teacher be so stingy?!) Or is she simply not as interesting as I've always imagined?" (David: "The latter. Don't torment yourself." But I'd hate to come to that conclusion before excluding every other possibility.) She has a kind manner, and God knows that as an undergraduate one wants nothing more than for people to be gentle with one (college being like an insane asylum), but — I don't know. I've had tea with her other times over the years, and this happens every time, though I've never been as disappointed as the other day. It was like being a child, and feeling that you're not taken seriously; whatever you say people just think you're cute. "What do we say to one another? Why am I alive?" I wondered as I took my leave. But luckily the rest of the day went much better.

A few weeks before I had invited a colleague to lunch, point-blank. Her company biography seemed interesting ("classicist, bookbinder, pastry chef" — it was all I could do not to fall at her feet & beg, "Teach me everything you know!"), and I figured I wasn't going to meet her any other way. As it turned out, we talked nineteen to the dozen for three hours, about everything. I suppose that wonderful experience emboldened me, so that I felt ready to take on tea with X — and came away feeling as defeated as ever.

I keep a list of reasons why I'm happy not to be in graduate school. Here are a few: when I was searching for a room in the fall I came across a young man who was a graduate student in English at a university in New York. For one of his required courses he was reading an anthropological study of the readers of romance novels. How many removes from the real thing is that? I can't even count them. (In other contexts a study of the readers of trash might not seem so dire, but here it seems like — oh, I don't know, an exercise in cynicism. How did it become a requirement?!)

I told a fellow of a research institute that I studied Andrew Marvell. "Oh! He's really good! I mean, what I study is essentially doggerel, so when I turn to Marvell I'm like, 'Gosh, this is real poetry!'" She was my age, and charming, and had we lived in the same city I would have tried to befriend her, but I don't understand how one can dedicate one's life to doggerel.

A professor emerita at a university in New York: "I try to read my star graduate student's book, but every time I start it I can't make head or tail of it, and then I get bored, and I always end up reading a novel instead. I so glad I'm retired, and I don't have to bother about what Dante might have drawn as a child, I can concentrate on my grandchildren's drawings!" (This was in a non-academic setting, so I guess she figured she could say whatever she wanted.)

Charles Simic on the crisis in translation: "Academics used to buy books in translation, to see what Russian or German authors were writing. They don't do that any more."

Dinner at Leah & John's: I was delighted to discover that they dislike Henry James as much as I do; it marks a new stage in our friendship. John even took Aspects of the Novel off the shelf and read E. M. Forster's cutting remarks on James. (Forster manages to be both magniloquent and incisive. It's very satisfying.) They disagree on George Eliot. "One day many years from now," Leah said, "when you're incapacitated, and I'm taking care of you, I'll read Middlemarch to you, and you're going to love it." I know exactly how she feels.