Category: Teaching

Teaching

It Takes Twenty (or Thirty) to Tango–In Praise of Students

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I teach two classes in the morning and then have office hours, and do another class in the afternoon.
Last Friday I was dead tired, and as I slouched in my office before dragging myself to the last class of the week, I was thinking I wouldn’t make it. It’s a General Education class (so a mix of English majors and lots of other folks) on folklore and fairy tales, and for that particular meeting, we read two essays on how folktales work. There was no magic or jokes inherent in the text to help me. I figured I’d do my best to lead to them through the essays they read for class, and let them go a few minutes early. There are some perks to university teaching, and I am grateful.
We went over time.
Not because I’m a good teacher; I was not on my game Friday. Because I have amazing students.
I think students place too much emphasis on the instructor when it comes to thinking about how successful a class is. I often hear them in the hall (or in my office) gushing about their favorite classes, and how fantastic the professor was.
To every student who ever thought your class was awesome (or terrible) because of the professor—I charge you to think about the rest of the humans in that class. The best planned class falls flat if the students don’t come to the party. And the best students can lift a peaky prof right out of the doldrums.
We started with an essay by folklorist Alan Dundes that describes how folklore differs from authored literature. They loved his grouchy attitude, and when I gave them a bit of context and biography, they loved him even more. They defended his defensiveness, sympathizing with his marginalization by more traditional, ivory tower, literary scholars. They kind of loved his personality as they saw it filtered through his argument. And they came up with the longest, subtlest list of distinctions between folk and literary tales we’ve ever produced, in all the years I’ve taught this class.
I love my job.
I love that every class is different, composed of entirely different humans, with different experiences and backgrounds, in a different mix each time. I always have certain things I want to cover, certain things I want to say, but if I’m honest a huge chunk of each class session is pretty unscripted. I react to what they like and know (and don’t know and don’t like), and we talk about what needs understanding until the time is up.
Whenever students ask what they missed, I refer them to another student for notes. I can and do sometimes supply an outline for what I wanted to accomplish, but I only take in a page of notes on any given day, and it’s only a starting point. It only scratches the surface of what we end up doing and thinking and learning.
My favorite thing to write in letters of recommendation for former students is that they “contributed substantively to the success of the class.” They did. Without them, I’d just be a reader.
Reading · Teaching

Beginning Dante, or Reading our Way to Paradise

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I’m teaching Dante again.

I teach the Infernoin my Epics class, after we have read Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. It works beautifully, since we first encounter the Greek version of the aftermath of the Trojan War, then the Trojan/Roman; then we get to Dante, and he puts lots of those characters in his afterlife. Odysseus goes to Hades. So does Aeneas. It’s kind of a thing.
But nothing prepares them, really, for Dante.
The Type Scene of the Underworld Journey (Greek katabasis) is present in most epics, really.  The hero crosses over—literally dies—and brings back otherworldly knowledge to help his people. Gilgamesh, Hercules, Odin, Vainamoinen, Gandalf—so many heroes go and come back, and it’s a dramatic event in their storied lives.
But for Dante it’s the whole work.
For one canto at the beginning, poor Dante is lost, halfway through his life, wandering and trying to get somewhere, but he can’t do it alone. We can all relate to this. And it’s how he hooks us. Then his favorite poet appears, a literary and spiritual guide—Virgil, the Roman author of The Aeneid—and he offers to lead Dante along his edifying journey for as long as he can.
Dante the poet has a poet laureate lead him. Who would be our guide, we wonder? Someone whom we revere; someone who led us by example before they passed on. But before we can get too bogged down in thought, the journey begins.
Dante journeys to Limbo where he sees the spirits of Homer and other classical authors. This is where Virgil has been called from and where he will return when Dante’s tour is over. And we are introduced to Dante’s method and his mania at one stroke. He can put anyone who ever lived—real or literary—in the place he sees fit. It is a hugely ambitious task and a minor miracle that he completed it. So I guess it wasn’t mania—just drive.
The first sinners Dante encounters are the Lustful, and it’s one of my favorite passages in the whole Commedia. I spend a good deal of time on Canto V of the Inferno, unpacking it and reading it carefully with my students. One of Dante’s techniques is to have a soul tell her story (in this case, Francesca da Rimini, who had an affair with her brother-in-law), so he can understand the sin or virtue through a firsthand witness.
Francesca tells of how ill she was treated—trapped in a loveless marriage, she found what she thought was love just a little left of legal. And she first committed adultery at the instigation of a book. She calls the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere a “Galeotto” or go-between. It is after they read together the salacious details of the royal affair that brings down Camelot that Paolo first kisses Francesca.
Dante faints at this moment, and some read it as guilt. He, too, has loved where he should not have.
But I think it’s something else entirely. In an age where books are copied by hand, they can get miscopied very easily.  And in the case of Francesca and Paolo, they didn’t read thoroughly—they stopped before the lovers’ consequences were realized, so were tempted in to the same sin.
As Dante begins to tell of countless sinners and sins, he feels the weight of his responsibility and collapses under it. What if his text inadvertently–through sloppy copying or sloppy reading–leads others to Hell?
And so my students and I start another ambitious task—that of reading judiciously—with the hopes of making it to Paradise.
Reading · Teaching

Creation Myths as Backstory, or When Your Papa Really Was a Rolling Stone

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I’ve always been interested in Creation Stories. Where we think we came from says a lot about where we want to go—who we want to be.  As I think through how my mythology class will change when my campus converts from quarters to semesters, I’m considering what texts to add. Now I teach Greco-Roman and Norse—the obvious addition would be another culture. Egyptian, maybe. But I’m also considering an anthology of a type of myth, like a broad, comparative collection of Creation stories.

Ovid serves wonderfully to illustrate the prevalence of Creation stories by supplying no fewer than four different accounts in the first book of his work.  Either humans were made by the great architect-god who separated the heavens from the earth, or maybe Prometheus sculpted them out of clay. Or maybe, after the war between the giants and the Olympians, when the conquered giants’ blood spilled on to their mother, Gaia’s, ground, she used the blood and dust to form humans.
Or maybe we’re all descended from Deucalion and Pyrrha’s stone babies.
In this fourth account of the creation of humankind, Ovid recounts the great flood that Jove visits on the earth to exterminate the corrupt humans. Of all the world, Deucalion and Pyrrha alone are spared as virtuous and deserving of mercy. If it sounds like the story of Noah and his family, it should. Deucalion and Pyrrha are both grandchildren of Iapetus, the titan father of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and his name is a cognate for Japeth, one of Noah’s sons.
So Deucalion is the son of Prometheus, and Pyrrha is the daughter of Epimetheus. They are first cousins, so the incest taboo didn’t apply, and they complement each other beautifully. But Deucalion is descended from Prometheus, whose name means “forethought.” It is Prometheus who creates humanity in one version of the Creation, and it is he who either gives the gift of fire or who teaches his creation how to sacrifice. If you believe the fire story, the gods became jealous because humanity acquired a skill that raised them above their prescribed station.
In another story Prometheus counseled mankind to sacrifice the useless parts of the animal to the gods, putting them on top so Jove would see them when he descended in his eagle form to retrieve them, and thereby saving the meat for the good of humanity. This first sacrifice became the norm, and Jove was tricked out of the best parts of the animal forever. In both these myths, Prometheus infuriates Jove to the point where he chains Prometheus to a rock and commands that an eagle rip out his liver daily. He must have been pretty angry.
Epimetheus, however, means “afterthought.” Poor Epimetheus. Second born, and second-class. Even though Prometheus warns him not to accept gifts from Jove, he can’t resist Pandora when she appears. And we have that happy couple to thank for all the ills of society that emerge when Pandora opens the forbidden box.
But this was a story about Deucalion and Pyrrha. Deucalion is Prometheus’s, but Pyrrha is Epimetheus’s child. When the flood comes, they cling to one another and sail in a tiny skiff, just trying to survive. When Jove lets the waters recede, they disembark and find a shrine of Themis to pray. The goddess hears their prayers and pities their loneliness, and her oracle gives, for an oracle, pretty direct orders: as you leave this temple, drop behind you the bones of the great mother.
Poor Pyrrha is scandalized. How can she desecrate her mother’s corpse by throwing her bones on the ground?
But Deucalion, the first literary critic, suggests they think metaphorically. Maybe the great mother is the Earth, and her bones are stones.
Pyrrha is pacified, and so is Themis, and the stones they drop behind them soften and shape themselves in to human forms—Pyrrha’s stones become women, and Deucalion’s become men. And we have our toughness, our hard-headedness, maybe also our rough edges, from our stony origins.
In an age where people take online quizzes to tell them what Harry Potter character they are or what color their aura is in the present, maybe it’s time to revisit the stories of our pasts. Knowing something’s true name or its origin gives you power over it, or so the stories go, so the real power will be when we can discern our own beginnings and understand why we are the way we are, not just bicker over the superficial results of those origins.
Oh, it’s going to be another good quarter.
(Picture taken on a trip to Bryce Canyon in Utah, 2017.)
Reading · Teaching

Context is Key, or Where’d I Leave My Chaucer Goggles?

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So I changed my new mantra from Context is King to “Context is Key” because nothing that sweeping needs to be gendered, and because I really think it works like a key. I’m thinking about how we use the text to read the text, how some works teach us how to read them, how scenes and characters mean different things if they come after others and you’re cued to them, and how deep reading of an author or a work can give you a particular view of the world.
 
There’s a lot there, but it’s all connected.
 
As a grad student in Medieval Studies, I didn’t have to mess with theory very much. Most of it was written way after my stuff, and so only marginally applicable. Just like you can’t reach back and call Chaucer a feminist when he would have had no concept of what that meant, it’s not really fair to judge a medieval poem by a 20th century theory.
 
But you can judge it by its own standards. I like the idea of using the text to view the text. Beowulf, for instance, offers a basic case to begin. The poem opens with a description of an ancient king, Scyld Scefing (or Shield Sheafson, if we modernized it), and some events of his life. His name is a train wreck, obviously–one that would have gotten him beaten up on Anglo-Saxon playgrounds–unless we read him like a mythic hero-king: one who provides both protection (he’s literally a shield) and sustenance (providing, for example, a sheaf of wheat) for his people. We get a brief biography, then he never comes up again, but he does set a standard from which we can judge Beowulf as a hero-king.
 
Other poets aren’t as brazen about giving directions to read their work, but they kind of do anyway. After reading Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” where the devil refuses to claim a horse when its carter verbally damned it to hell–on the grounds he didn’t literally mean it–readers of the “Franklin’s Tale” are ready to criticize Arveragus for making his wife keep the little oath she made “in play” over her wedding oath, because even the devil recognizes intent—certainly her own husband should.
 
So some books teach us how to read them. By the end of a book, we’re keyed to subtleties the author couldn’t have made use of before, at least not to as great an effect.
 

But some authors also teach us how to read the world. After fifteen years of teaching Chaucer, I have learned to see humor in unconventional places, to look for patterns, and to judge intentions. Edmund Spenser has taught me to expect to find magic everywhere. Ovid has helped me view the world as interconnected and constantly changing, and to value change as refreshing, even rewarding. I think of this like putting on glasses in a process similar to when critics read from a particular theory’s “lens.” So if you need me, I’ll just be over here polishing my Chaucer glasses, trying to filter some sense out of the evening news.

Teaching

Mystery Texts, Gaps in my Vast Fund of General Information, and the Case for Surrealism

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This week’s “Mystery Text” in the Senior Symposium class was Julio Cortázar’s surreal short story, “Axolotl.” I love it. A man who discovers axolotls at the zoo in Paris swaps consciousness with one, and tells the process by which he finds himself trapped in the axolotl, as his former body walks away.
Students never guess the author—maybe once in twelve years, but not because they read it in our courses—just because they were cool and seeking out Latin American writers. And I give them credit if they guess Borges. He’s mid-20th century Argentinian too, and he gets taught in our world lit classes. For these purposes, he’s close enough.
I have not studied either of them, though, really. I read one Borges story and one Cortázar story in a 20th/21stcentury fiction class in grad school that I took in the summer. I was a medievalist—what did I need the contemporary stuff for?
But over the years I have bought a dozen books by these two, and another half dozen by Alberto Manguel, another Argentinian (who read in the afternoons to Borges as a kid, when Borges was going blind). I don’t know if you can call a niche of literature wildly outside one’s specialty a hobby, but I do keep buying books.
So after ten years of using Cortázar as a Mystery Text (this is an exercise for our seniors that feels like a literature practical in the style of I. A. Richards, but with the twist of using what they deduce to assess our program’s effectiveness at teaching literary traditions) and giving a cheesy internet biography to help them contextualize Cortázar at the end of class, I found myself this time really responding to Cortázar the activist, Cortázar the anti-Peron exile, even Cortázar the Parisian ex-patriate.
I started looking for a biography in English.
Because I have plenty of time right now.
(This is false. I am right in the middle of winter quarter. I’m on a search committee and have been going in two extra days a week for three weeks meeting all the candidates for my search and another position. It’s midterms—exams are piling up, and so are Chaucer translations; my partner was out of town for four days; we’re getting a new roof. I don’t have time for extra, unrelated reading.) But I’m really ticked that I can’t find an English biography of a 20th century Argentinian author.
Someday I may stop being curious. Someday I may not chase down characters and authors and practice new skills and stand in awe at things I don’t understand. But today is not that day. Today I’m imagining the kind of man who could write the bizarre “The Night Face-Up” and the lyrical collection Save Twilight, who could leave his country forever on principle and live in another language and culture and hemisphere. What pushes us to explore the surreal faster than a frustrating reality? And how long will it take me to get up to reading speed in Spanish?

(Image pilfered from Wikipedia.)

Reading · Teaching

Stories, Friends, and Order in the Universe, or Why Do We Read?

Alison BakerLeave a comment
Today was that day in class when, compelled by the chaos of Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, my seniors tried to define what kind of reader they are.
 
The novel is basically about reading. It begins with a Reader trying to read his new copy of If on a winter’s night and careens through the lives of an Other Reader, a Non-Reader, a publisher, a translator, an author, a student, and loads of other people. With all these different perspectives on text production and reception, it’s kind of natural to try and orient our own reading style. (It’s also easier to talk about ourselves sometimes than it is to sort out the labyrinth of the latter half of that novel in an hour, so it’s a common digression.)
 
But it’s important too, you know. Self-knowledge and all that. Good in itself. This is just the readerly fragment of ourselves.
 
There are a number of ways to read that my friends, colleagues, and students have described over the years. Today we mostly fell in to five camps:  those who read for character, plot, form, “aesthetics,” and “immersion.”  Some of these will need defining, as you can already see.
 
People who read for character view every new book as an opportunity to meet new people. They may love or hate them, but mostly they read because they are fascinated by people—by their motivations, their quirks, their backstories. These people tend to need to find someone they like or identify with (in fact that’s the main goal, probably, to find little bits of themselves in other characters) in order to finish the book. If all the characters are reprehensible, it’s hard for them to keep turning pages. These are the people who suffer when movie versions are different too—when the people they loved on the page are altered on screen, they take it very personally.
 
Those who read for plot want to see how everything turns out. These people read the fastest, skimming when they need to, and are often the ones who can’t recall details, and they certainly can’t quote lines, but they can summarize neatly; they know the story cold. These people tend to like action-packed adventure books or stories with twists or puzzles. Reading is an adventure—a puzzle to solve, a game to finish.
 
The “form” folks appreciate the structure of a book. They like repetition of scenes, especially when they differ slightly and mean something a little bit different each time. They read a book like a musical score, looking for motifs and waiting for the variations. This is fairly cerebral reading, and they appreciate clever authors with somewhat mathematical or mechanical minds. There are exceptions, of course—some books (and authors) build structure in more organically, like a vine rather than a skyscraper, but these readers still appreciate the order inherent in the story.
 
The “aesthetics” group is not just the Ivory Tower snobs (it may also be, but not exclusively.) These folks read for something striking—a particularly beautiful image that takes shape like a sculpture in their minds, or a line that feels more like poetry than prose. These are the ones who read with pencils in their hands, not wanting to lose a section that sings in the middle of a 500-page novel. For these folks every new book has loads of potential: who knows what gems they may find inside? They read to discover and to connect and to feel.
 
To Feel. The last group I add today is a response to my class today.  Four of eighteen students (English Literature and Language majors) said they read for “immersion.” When pressed, some of them said things that made me think they appreciate world-building and like to get lost in cultures and scenarios different from their own lives. They like science-fiction and fantasy but also historical—anything that makes them forget their own world for the duration of the book and completely lose themselves in the book. Otherwise it’s not really worth the time for them. They need to feel another’s experiences so tangibly, it’s like they are living the scenes as they unfold. This sounds to me like classic escapism, but some of them argued for aesthetic and intellectual pleasures as well.
 
Later in the quarter I’ll ask them if they have a favorite literary theory, and I’ll see if they match up.  Maybe the Plot People will turn out to be New Critics, and the Character Crowd will favor psychoanalysis. The Form Folks will certainly be Formalists (I hope), but what will the Beauty Bunch be? Romantics? And the Immersionists? Maybe they’ll all love Reader-Response. More likely, though, they’ll all surprise me again. Probably we’ll all need tee shirts like team jerseys, so we can easily find our tribe out in the world. We all read so as not to feel alone, after all.
Living · Teaching

Ancora Imparo: I am still learning

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I’m glad to say I’m still learning.
Over the first ten years of teaching, I really worked on developing my teaching persona.  Who I am in the classroom is a little different from who I am in my street clothes.
Also, I have developed (or appropriated) some tag lines or truisms that have come to characterize my approach to the world and to literature and language: It’s all connected; There’s treasure everywhere; Never trust a vowel.
When students realize that Big Bang Theory is making use of ancient type scenes, or when they realize they can figure out the meaning of an old, say Middle English, word because they know a modern Spanish cognate, I say “It’s all connected.”
When they think a text sounds ridiculous (the titles of The Mabinogion and the Nibelungenlied always get snickers), or that it’s too old and foreign to matter to them, but they find some gem that sparkles for them, and that leads them in to loving it, I remind them “There’s treasure everywhere.”
When they beat their heads against the wall (figuratively!) trying to figure out how to translate Chaucer or Beowulf, sometimes a well-timed “Never trust a vowel” leads to an epiphany.
This year I’ve discovered a new truth: Context is everything.
I’ve taught Ovid’s Metamorphoses for ten years, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for fifteen, and they still remain fresh and vivid to me. Classics can do that. But part of my enjoyment is shifting this year, as I look deeper in to the order of events and stories within the works.
I have always encouraged students to look for structure and order in the works we read, but somehow this year, the context of ideas like the tragic deaths of children in Ovid (Apollo loses his son Phaethon and Inachus the river god loses his daughter Io, and both fathers mourn deeply) seem to come to a head in later stories, or at least to lend gravitas to them. After seeing several parents pine for their lost children, the story of Demeter succeeding in regaining her daughter from the land of the dead, even for half the year, is a consolation to all the grieving parents thus far.
In the Canterbury Tales, too, I’ve often noted that the connections between the tales get more subtle but also more numerous as the Tales go on, but this year I was compelled to read “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” in the context of the earlier “Reeve’s Tale” (where there is a rape which is treated as a lark by its grim, bitter narrator, despite the obvious discomfort of the audience). The Wife’s tale, then responds to that whole scene—the Reeve’s introduction, his tale, and its reception—with a tale of rape that is not laughed off, but punished, the rapist threatened, put through an ordeal, and apparently rehabilitated. Yes, she’s a strong woman writing a tale of wish fulfillment for herself, but after she shows the Reeve what she thinks ought to happen to men who perpetrate or cosign such violence.
As a medievalist, part of my job is drawing attention to texts that came before the ones we read, helping my students to see the progression of ideas (or not) and the continuity of traditions. It makes us feel part of a historical continuum and lends a richness to contemporary and pop culture.
But this year, I’m devoting more attention to the connections within the text itself—adopting and exploring the idea that the text itself teaches us how to read it most fully. Context is everything.  We’ll see how much mileage I can get out of that.
*There’s Treasure Everywhere” comes from the delightful 1996 Calvin and Hobbes treasury by Bill Watterson. I use it for wildly different texts and scenarios, but it remains a pretty universal truth.
** Ancora imparo is Italian for “I am still learning,” and attributed to Michelangelo and therefore appearing on plaques and paperweights everywhere, as well as the top of this blog.
Living · Reading · Teaching

Wandering Back to Old English

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I am teaching Old English for the first time in several years, and I’m so excited! It’s like revisiting an old friend. For a variety of reasons from the lows of a medical leave to the highs of a sabbatical, the survey of British literature has not fallen in my lap for… too long.
I thought for a while I might be an Anglo-Saxonist, which goes some way to saying how much I enjoyed the language and the culture of that Germanic, heroic, fatalistic poetry. It was the first dead language I studied, and I was entranced by the strangeness and the similarity to Modern English and American culture. Hwaet! Mead. Warrior-companions. All of that was awesome. I wrote my MA thesis on Beowulf and the Old Saxon Heliand.
Then I went on and discovered Chaucer, and my world shifted again, but part of my heart burns a candle for Beowulf and all his charming imperfections.
When I teach Beowulf, I build up to it. We look at the conventions of Old English poetry in small texts like “Caedmon’s Hymn,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Battle of Maldon,”, and then Beowulf brings them all together. Today, though, I’m stuck on the Wanderer.
“The Wanderer” is a brief poem, mostly a soliloquy, but framed by a narrator (lines added by a well-meaning monk? We will never know) who explains the speaker’s state of mind. He’s sad. He’s lonely. He longs for grace. He has lost his lord and kinsmen and finds himself alone in the world.
And this time, after a four year hiatus from Old English during which both my parents died, I read those words in a way I never imagined before. The Wanderer sounds like a man slipping in to dementia.
It’s not, of course. That’s me imposing a fragment of my life, or my father’s life, really, on the speaker. But I did not see it coming, and it rings this time through with that truth that works of literature change with us; as we age and our circumstances change, our experience of the text changes, because we are half of the equation—the reader.
The Wanderer gripes a bit. It’s usually called an elegy, but I entertain other genres, and this feels more like a complaint or a consolation poem, since he’s resigned to his fate at the end. He is frustrated by his circumstances and trying to get through by turning inward.
He has lost his relatives and his lord. Maybe there was a battle, and he is the sole survivor. Whatever the case, he has lost everyone. This is how my dad felt, as he saw people he couldn’t remember, when he could still recognize that he should know them. He began a slow descent in to exile—separated from everyone he loved.
The Wanderer learned “that silence is noble and sorrow/ Nothing speech can cure” (ll 13-14). Dad seemed to learn this too, withdrawing more and more in to his head, but not being able to articulate why. He seemed to have moments of calm when he was quiet, but got confused and flustered when he tried to sort things out. Hideous, debilitating cause aside, he would have made a good, laconic Viking.
I have read this poem twenty times. I know it’s not about dementia, and it’s not about me. It’s about the abject fear people feel in a culture plagued by cold and famine—a primitive, instinctual fear of being alone, not just because of loneliness, but because communities survive where individuals die.
But whenever we willingly enter the world of a poem or other text, it is in some ways about us. And this time, I was delighted to see it was about my dad. It was nice to see him.
I’ve just decided it’s a consolation poem.
(This translation is taken from Burton Raffel’s Poems and Prose from the Old English.)
Teaching

The "I can Google that" Trap

Alison BakerLeave a comment
It is a mistake to think we don’t need to remember anything, that we can look everything up.
It’s true the Internet is changing the way we think and learn, but the shift to teaching skills, not content, I think, is misguided.  In English departments (particularly literature programs) we have been told that the way to make our programs relevant and marketable is to teach skills that students can apply in other contexts, rather than worrying that everyone has read the same set of “classics.”
(Before we start arguing, notice I put classics in scare quotes. And understand that I don’t have a hit list or a canon of literature in mind, really. This is an argument for content, but not necessarily for specific content.)
I do think literature teaches important, transferrable skills. Close reading, understanding the context in which a work was written, analytical writing—all of these are good things and all are very useful across the job market.
But it matters, too, perhaps more than we’ve thought recently, as information changes so rapidly that people don’t bother remembering things, that we fill our heads with cool stories and beautiful works. It turns out that having material in our heads is still important.

Memorizing passages is useful. Reading widely and having lots of stories to consider and connect to one another is vital not just to looking well-read (the appeal of which should not be underestimated among English majors). It matters because we use the material, the stories and experiences we have in our memories, to help us move forward.
There has been work on this in multiple areas recently. In an article on how kids’ reading comprehension increases in step when they have exposure to more subjects and experiences (demonstrating that kids’ comprehension skills improve when they have some knowledge of the subject matter they’re reading), Daniel T. Willingham shows that kids who have broader knowledge develop reading skills faster. The more you know, the better you learn.
Another facet of this is the impact of a rich, full head on creativity. When people aren’t
encouraged to memorize anything because literally every subject can be quickly researched on the Internet, we are making it harder to be creative. Art Markman argues in his book Smart Thinking, that the more knowledge you have, the more material in your mind, the more you can mix things up and create something new. Those with less stuff in their heads have less to play with.
When I teach literature I ask my students to think about what other texts (books, movies, video games, whatever) the text at hand reminds them of. We try to build connections between stories and scenes and characters, so that the next time we encounter a Reluctant Hero, we recognize her. It stands to reason that the more stories we have in our heads, the more access points we have to understanding a new text.
But this has wide application, according to these other studies. The upshot seems to be that the more we read, the better we read; the more we learn, the better we learn; and the more we know, the more we can create.
So go on. Build yourself a beautiful constellation of interconnected stories, images, and facts.
Be your own Google.
And here are links to articles I mentioned.  On reading comprehension: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-your-mind-to-read.html?smid=fb-share
On creativity and its connection to memory:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201510/creativity-is-memory
Reading · Teaching

Skirnir the Wordsmith

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There’s a myth in the Poetic Edda, the collection of the oldest Norse myths, where the fertility god Freyr falls in love with the giantess Gerd. He sees her when he sneaks in to Odin’s throne, Hlidskialf, from which Odin can see what’s going on in all the Nine Worlds.
It is not Freyr’s chair.  Sitting in it when Odin is absent is akin to the myths where Cupid sneaks in to Jove’s throne; it is a usurpation of authority.  Freyr is immediately punished by seeing the shiny-bright arms of Gerd, a giantess, and falling immediately in love. I’m not kidding.  He seems to fall in love with her arms.
But before we judge him too harshly for his improper use of authority, his lame fixation on shiny arms, or his layabout sullenness that causes his parents to send a buddy to intervene, we need to remember that this is mythic land, and having Freyr fall in love with someone whose name means (and who therefore really is) the Earth, can only go well for us on Midgard. If the god of fertility loves the earth, we all benefit.
So it’s an old myth. Really old. It’s written in a dramatic dialogue format, so maybe it was performed as part of the rites of spring. If that’s the case, Freyr misbehaving is cosmically good, like Hades stealing Persephone works out for humanity.
But this is not ancient Greece. Here there be giants.
Freyr is mooning. He’s sulky and crabby, and his parents don’t know what to do with him. They enlist Freyr’s friend to go talk some sense in to him. Skirnir, Freyr’s friend, offers to help him, and Freyr confides his love in the most dramatic of terms—no one has ever loved anyone as much as he loves Gerd. He’s so cute; he doesn’t know he sounds like every other smitten boy in the world.
Skirnir knows, though, and he seizes the opportunity. For the low-low price of Freyr’s magic sword that shines like fire and fights on its own, he’ll go “win” Gerd for him. Desperate Freyr agrees quickly.
Gerd, however, doesn’t.
She doesn’t need money or want fame, which are the first offers Skirnir tries. He has to change tactics. He pretends to curse her, by carving runes on a stick.  I love this part. (Not because I’m for coercing women in to marrying their enemies, but because of the explosive image of that rune stick.)
Skirnir claims to carve runes that will become her future, filled with images of shame and suffering.  She’ll be a guardian of Hel; only a three-headed giant will be her mate, yada yada yada–he claims to know how to effect this future by writing it. If he carves it, it will be.
This leads in to unpacking the image of the rune.  Old Norse runes were very angular.  They could be carved easily on a stick, and they could be discerned from sticks cast on the ground like pick-up sticks.  (Does anyone still play pick-up sticks?) The modern German word for “letter” of the alphabet bears witness to this: Buchstabe means literally (ha!) “beech staves.” Buch gives us beech and book, and the sticks that are cast or carved become letters.  Those letters can be combined to form words of power.
In the end, Gerd agrees to marry Freyr. Their union is a mythic promise, that the earth will be fertile always because it is loved by and bound to fertility itself. In this case (not unlike Persephone’s marriage) the end seems to justify the means. Gerd is coerced, but she is not unhappy in her marriage. And humanity gets two boons—a fertile, blessed earth and an understanding of the power of well-wrought words. After all, the title of the myth is not “Freyr and Gerd’s Fantastic Love Story.” It’s called “Skirnir’s Song.”