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.