Thanks to my October change in employment status, I’ve had the opportunity in November to spend a lot more time working with my kids on some of their scholastic endeavors. Even more so than when I previously worked from home, given that MLGB is currently training for a new job, leaving me to handle the day-to-day school monitoring and grading.
The Centurion is currently in 7th grade, and one of his classes is American Literature. His textbook includes a combination of short stories, excerpts from larger works, and poetry. He has to answer questions about each work. For example, this was a piece that he recently worked through:
” Long as thine Art shall love true love,
Long as thy Science truth shall know,
Long as thine Eagle harms no Dove,
Long as thy Law by law shall grow,
Long as thy God is God above,
Thy brother every man below,
So long, dear Land of all my love,
Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow! “
From “The Centennial Meditation of Columbia” by Sidney Lanier – Source
He then had to answer the following questions:
How does this poem express patriotism? What does the poet want Americans to do?
Now The Centurion, like most twelve-year-old boys, is a pretty literal fellow. He read the poem, read the second question, and came up with the answer, that Americans should keep eagles from attacking doves.
This led to a much longer discussion of poetic metaphors, and understanding the context of a poem, not just the literal meaning, and circles over to a Game Theory video I watched a few weeks ago, but that really stuck in my head, specifically the parts about intuitive versus concrete conclusions.
Now I’m a pretty concrete thinker. That’s handy in my line of work, and I usually don’t give a lot of thought to the deeper meanings of a lot of things. Most of the time, a cigar is just a cigar. I was never a big fan of dissecting a piece of literature to pull out every hidden metaphor that the author may or may not have intended to be there.
But this makes me reconsider a bit, and also question some of the accepted wisdom about STEM focused coursework. I was blessed to also be homeschooled with a traditional curriculum, and then my love of reading took me down a college path of minoring in English and taking a lot of literature classes. Just because I don’t like to read (or watch, or listen, or play) looking for something beyond the surface level words or pictures doesn’t mean I can’t. In point of fact, I like to think that I do a pretty decent job of it. What are public schooled kids losing by having literature de-emphasized, and critical thinking removed from curriculum, in favor of fuzzy modern works and questions about how the poem made them feel?
It’s funny, because when The Centurion rolls his eyes and asks why he has to work through these questions, I’ve got a ready made answer: it will help with your critical thinking skills later.