How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Feelings
How to teach novels

It can be hard for students to articulate their reaction to a novel. I wish I had a pound for every student who’s told me that a writer made a choice for the simple reason of making the reader read on. This implies that there are writers who want to do the opposite.

We do need to be open with feelings in the classroom, and especially those that students might not be comfortable expressing. Take confusion. We hear about it, but don’t regularly embrace it with students. Look at the text again: where are you confused? Students tend to oscillate between excitement and boredom. Texts are reduced to ’exciting’ or ’boring’ very quickly, so it is our job to explicitly talk about the wealth of emotions they can elicit. We must add to students’ repertoire and their, possibly quite limited, expressive vocabulary.

Teach emotions

Teach students emotions as you go along. Take ’apathy’ or ’indifference’; students can bring these emotions to their discussion of texts. The teacher might introduce these words by using them in their questioning. Does anybody feel indifference towards the character here? Does anybody get the feeling of apathy from the minor characters? If we want emotions to be part of students’ written analysis, we must make them part of the classroom dialogue. If we allow ’exciting’ and ’boring’ to dominate, we are narrowing the quality of the conversation. We miss out on their anxiety when a character is close to making a mistake. We ignore their jubilation when a character accepts a marriage proposal. We deny our fear when a character gets locked in a room with a murderer.

I find some of the following techniques useful when developing students’ knowledge of more complex emotional responses:

✵ Repeat the word so many times in so many different contexts that it becomes a catchphrase.

✵ Get students to write a story in which a character experiences that emotion.

✵ Compare emotions. What is the difference between boredom and apathy?

✵ Use music. What are you meant to feel when you listen to this part of a song?

It could be argued that social media has simplified our emotional reactions: we either ’like’ or ’dislike’ something, everything. My own teenage years were made difficult by my inability to express emotion in any articulate manner. I was a door slammer. That was how I communicated with my family. One slam for annoyance. Two for fury. Young people need the tools to express themselves emotionally so that they do not, like I did, have to resort to the brutality of the physical — and, for that, they need a teacher who will model the language to express such feelings.

Read with emotion

Rather than zooming in on a text and its meaning, just get students to write down what they feel or think as they read. More importantly, get them to highlight the parts where those feelings change. Nobody can maintain boredom for a whole text. But don’t challenge me on that one!

Write with emotion

Teaching a novel is also a good opportunity to practise creative writing. Reading a class reader is a long-term exposure to one particular style of writing and an opportunity to incorporate what the writer does into students’ own writing. Osmosis happens when students write near a text they have been reading. They pick up the gimmicks, the turns of phrase, the approaches, the vocabulary and the syntax of the writer. The best writers steal ideas and we need to teach students to steal things. Imagine how difficult it would be if everything you write had to be fresh, new and unlike anything anyone has written.

The problem students have when they write prose fiction is that they write for themselves; unlike novelists, who know how to write for their readership — well, maybe not all novelists. They create stories with one emotion. That’s why boys tend to have zombies and explosions and death in the first paragraph. Teach students to structure their writing around emotions instead. That’s why a novel or an extract from a novel is such a great starting point. Students can see how the emotions change paragraph by paragraph and then attempt to replicate it.

Paragraph 1 — anger

Paragraph 2 — bliss

Paragraph 3 — disappointment

Paragraph 4 — contentment

From a novel-reading perspective, seeing how and what makes the emotion change in a section is an incredibly useful way to understand what is going on in a story. This works with non-fiction too.

Be clear about the emotional impact of a choice

Let’s go back to a question from the start of this book and reword it:

What is the emotional reason for Charles Dickens using Oliver Twist instead of Olivia Twist?

A simple question like this might lead us to even more interesting and possibly difficult questions in a time of greater equality.

Would our emotions towards Oliver be different if he were female?

Does Dickens have a specific reason for making Oliver male rather than female? Does the use of a male protagonist in Victorian England give a different perspective than a female protagonist would?

Of course, Dickens is concerned with highlighting the plight of the poor in Victorian society and Oliver Twist is a device used to make us see how the abuse is systematic and prevalent. Girls living in poverty were equally mistreated, so there isn’t a clear reason for the choice. However, is there an emotional dimension? Are our natural ’maternal’ or ’paternal’ instincts and desires to protect a child stronger towards girls than boys? Victorian melodrama favoured the gender imbalance of a helpless female at the mercy of a strong male figure. However, a man selling a young girl could suggest ideas of prostitution and exploitation, so could Dickens be explicitly avoiding this unpleasant connotation by selecting a boy? Is he showing us that poverty rather than gender creates the victims?

Explore the emotional impact of a writer’s choices. Why give Lennie learning difficulties yet make him physically able? More interestingly, how would our emotions change towards Lennie if his difficulties were physical? Readers identify with certain characters: Steinbeck, I think, puts the reader in the place of George. The choice he makes at the end of the novella is an emotional one and we share in it. What would befall Lennie if George did not ’save’ him?

Compare Lennie with Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and you see the writers’ intent to draw different emotions from readers. Lennie is designed purely to elicit empathy and a certain sense of responsibility from the reader. Tiny Tim we feel empathy for, but we have some hope for him; he isn’t completely doomed. We are happy to explore moral dilemmas but can refrain from discussing emotional dilemma. What both Lennie and Tiny Tim do is allow us to explore issues of disability and our emotional attachment to those who live with it.³ The portent of Tiny Tim’s death is terrible and shocking whereas Lennie’s is a blessing and a salvation.

Of course, getting students to think as both a writer and a reader is key. We aren’t helping students if we focus exclusively on one domain or the other. Today is a writing lesson. Tomorrow is a reading lesson. Writers are readers and we intend to make students both. We just need to help them connect the two disciplines. That’s why I get students to construct their own characters when reading a novel so that they learn how a writer develops a character and practise that skill themselves, particularly with regard to the emotional impact of their choices. I give them a list and ask them to pick three options:

✵ Describe the sound of their footsteps.

✵ Describe their shoes.

✵ Describe the way the character walks/sits/writes/opens a door.

✵ Describe the smell of the character. Describe their perfume/aftershave/deodorant.

✵ Describe their voice. Focus on what makes their voice different to others’.

✵ Describe their reputation.

✵ Describe an action. It must be something kind, cruel or odd that they do.

✵ Describe their hands as they do something.

✵ Describe their silhouette.

✵ Describe how other characters feel about them.

✵ Describe how the character treats people.

✵ Describe the character’s relationship with their family.

✵ Describe the character through their relationship with others.

✵ Describe the temperature of the character and how that links to them as a person.

✵ Describe what makes the character sad or happy.

✵ Describe how other characters treat this person.

✵ Describe their hair. Be specific about colour, texture and the way it has been cut.

✵ Describe the clothes the character is wearing, but focus on the fabrics or where the items were bought.

✵ Describe the colour they are wearing and why they wear that particular colour.

✵ Describe the accessories they wear.

✵ Describe how their clothes link to their hair in some way.

✵ Describe how the character is an ugly version of someone famous.

✵ Describe their personality.

✵ Describe how the character looks at an object or a person.

✵ Describe their eyes. Include the colour, the size of the pupils and the way in which they move.

✵ Give the character’s name and then explain how it suits them.

✵ Describe what they are not like. He was not tall, not thin and not clever.

✵ Describe what this person used to be like. They used to be fun, keen and friendly.

✵ Describe the character’s reaction to something.

✵ Describe the one thing that makes this character contrast with all the others in the setting.

✵ Use a line of dialogue to show the character’s personality.

✵ Describe how the character contrasts with the setting they are in.

✵ Describe the character’s attempts to hide in the setting.

So, I could have a student who chooses the following three aspects:

✵ Describe their perfume/aftershave/deodorant.

✵ Describe their hands as they do something.

✵ Describe their silhouette.

Then I get them to attach an emotion to these, trying to avoid anger and happiness. Not all characters are heroes or villains; we can have moral ambiguity. I might get them to create a secretive, paranoid, optimistic or jealous character. How would you make a character secretive? You could use the perfume as a hint. Something you wouldn’t notice at first. The hands could be so white as to be almost translucent. Their silhouette could be indefinable; their shadow blends too easily with other shadows.

By getting students to explore their own choices, they are more aware of the choices a writer makes. Identifying options helps students to see them in a text. All too often, we are expecting students to make big leaps with analysis. This approach helps to scaffold both the reading and the writing. I simply ask students which of these techniques Dickens uses in his description of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The beauty of this is that students create their own when they realise that the list doesn’t fit the text. An explicit list helps to scaffold reading and writing. Plus, it mimics what an expert reader does. Students will build a stored memory of different approaches to describing a character so, when faced with a new one, they have a resource to use.

More lists

A PowerPoint of abstract nouns, especially emotions, is incredibly useful. The emotions can be different or variations of the same feeling (angry, frustrated, annoyed, seething, livid). Students can be great mimickers (you should see their impression of me), but they need a starting point. The teacher is one source, but they need others. Plus, teachers are not walking, talking thesauruses. Well, not all of us.

The process is quite simple. After we read a text and we are analysing it, I put up a list of abstract nouns and get students, in pairs, to discuss which words they’d associate with the section or with a particular character. I tend not to display the list when reading the text to avoid overloading students. I use it mainly for summarising and synthesising ideas.

✵ What are we supposed to feel towards this character?

✵ What is the writer trying to teach us?

✵ Summarise what the text says about X.

They search for abstract nouns in the text. Idea forming is a hard process to verbalise and we occasionally need to provide students with the tools to articulate abstract thoughts. When we read we don’t normally name our feelings, so we are asking students to do something that isn’t automatic. We have to teach them to articulate the experience, so they need guidance. Plus, the ideas encountered are often unfamiliar and so students don’t have preformed conceptions. I should imagine I would struggle to articulate what the experience of bungee jumping is like if I’d only read about it once. It takes time and consideration and this isn’t always an available luxury. If only we could say, we’ll read this chapter today but I will ask you for your feelings on it next week, so you have time to think and formulate ideas. But, instead we ask, ’What do you feel?’ ’Confused. OK, can anybody think of some better words we can use instead of confused?’ And so it goes on.

A list of words can help to scaffold the formation and articulation of an idea. Students might have something in their head, but they need the language to express it.