by Suzanne Malakoff   In Life Learning mag.

Once upon a time, a teacher stood in front of my 10th grade English class with a copy of The Old Man and the Sea hugged to her chest and asked, “Who can tell me what Ernest Hemingway was trying to say?”

A couple of hands went up, somewhat shyly because we knew the drill. As students were called on to suggest what the author was trying to do with this story of a man battling a fish, posing their observations like a questions, as if they were seeking approval, the good sister shot them down, one by one, with, “No, that’s not it. Who else would like to try?”

This wasn’t the first time that we had sat through an exercise like this with this teacher – nor was it the first time we had experienced this approach to learning. But it was the first time that I spoke out against tired teaching methods.

Because I was bored and frustrated, and because I was 15 and discovering myself, I stuck my neck out and asked, “Sister, how do you know what he was trying to say? Did you ask him? Did you hold a séance and ask him?”

Before she was able to correct me, another bored and frustrated 15-year-old, one who had been pushing out from authority longer than me said, “The guy was hungry and needed a fish to eat and the fish had instincts to survive and not be eaten. Big battle – end of discussion.” I’m grateful to my classmate for drawing fire away from me; her parents were more liberal than mine and she tended to weather flack from teachers better than I.

However, I’m not so grateful to the high school teacher who helped build a wall between me and enjoying literature classes and made me immune to discussing books in depth for many years – I never have been grateful for that “gift,” unlike my mother seemed to think I would be after I grew up.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated approach to teaching literature; I encountered other teachers like this one who were armed to the teeth with literary experts and critics to back what they had concluded about great works. Their expectations for class requirements were satisfied with the unimaginative papers I wrote that paraphrased the “experts.”

At university, when I needed to take classes to satisfy basic requirements, my experience with studying literature at a more advanced level involved professors on the fringe of retirement who believed that only the British wrote well – maybe Americans if they wrote before the Second World War. And the bibliographies of experts that came with every syllabus were short, restrictive lists. These instructors were entrenched in stale ideas, and many of us found our way around reading anything required or even suggested.

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