I was always that annoying kid in middle school who noticed other people's grammar mistakes. By high school, I had turned from a nuisance into a resource, as I was the unofficial proofreader of papers for composition and English classes.
There are reasons I'm going to be an English teacher.
This year, I've been given the immense privilege and opportunity to learn about proofreading and editing papers from a teacher's perspective, a.k.a. grading. I've been working with a high school teacher as a sort of off-campus T.A., grading papers for some of her language and composition classes. In this particular class, students have to construct arguments--whether writing a literary analysis on The Great Gatsby or comparing rhetorical strategies from Mr. Collins' stodgy proposal in Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mr. Headstone's effusive proposal from Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.
High school students are not always very good at constructing arguments.
Over and over, I find myself thinking (and commenting) while reading their papers... So what? Why do we care about this point you're making or detail you're pulling (usually way out of context)? What are we supposed to do with this information?
Like my intensive grammar class freshman year affected the simplest of my writing (it took three tries to complete the family Christmas letter that year), so too this grading persona in my head influences my writing for English classes. Last semester in a class about British literature, I found myself applying my grading techniques to my own paper: Why do we care about Fanny Burney's representation of society and familial structures in Evelina? I mean, really? What's the point? How does it impact my life now, in the 21st century?
With my high school students, the point of asking them to analyze is to teach them to think critically about the world around them and the propaganda they encounter. They've written essays about feminism and slavery, nostalgia and reality. They're learning how to question what they see and how to dig for the answers.
And I'm not sure it's so different in college. I'm not saying that literary analysis is pointless. Quite the opposite, really. There is so much to learn from looking at literature, for very complicated reasons. Words create story. Our lives are story. I think in a lot of ways, we look to literature to learn about ourselves.
But we must include that important caveat: We look to literature to learn. We do more than just point out the presence of elements of foreign disdain in Evelina or the complicated social structure under which young ladies lived. We look to literature, we analyze it and think critically about it, to learn about the world, about society and human interaction. We look to literature to trace our roots from Adam and Eve through millennia of sinful humanity. Ultimately, we look to literature to glimpse our Creator.
And what do we do with our new-found knowledge? As Christians, we look up from our books to the world around us, and we search for ways to love the other sinful humans around us and to impact change, even just a tiny bit, that will bring us a step closer to the world as it was intended to be, a step closer to "Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven."
Why do we care? Because God created beauty, and story. And we look to literature to find Him.
-Finch
