(Classroom Support Material) Say/Do 2: Inviting Other Theoretical

Say

 Milner, Milner, and Mitchell - Bridging English 
Appleman - Critical Encounters in High School English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents

Teacher's too often limit students to reading through a single lens, which is a shame considering the numerous critical approaches available to students.  Applebee sites that the majority of teachers in a 1993 study either fell into New Criticism or Reader-Response.  This contrived dichotomy leaves students stuck in between an approach that values their personal response to a text and one that would rather students stick strictly to the text.  I vaguely remember having a teacher do a brief activity similar to "You be the Critic", but aside from that my own English teachers fell into one of these two literary schools and rarely, if ever, strayed from them. Appleman likewise critiques focusing too heavily on a single literary school. 

Appleman's anecdote on teaching A Doll's House reminded me of how vital scaffolding students is when covering difficult or uncomfortable subjects.  Feminism has a bad wrap from decades of media denigration, which combined with a lack of understanding of privilege can lead to awkward class discussions.  I do not necessarily think that teaching literary theory has a ton of intrinsic value, but I definitely see the practice's value for promoting critical thinking and broadening student perspectives.  Most importantly, reading through different critical lens enables students to "construct their own readings from a variety of theoretical perspectives.. (Appleman, 4). 

The "Little Miss Muffet" essay and accompanying activity seems like a really cool way to get students thinking about reading through different lens, and could also be a way to address audience (Appleman, 14).  Using nursery rhymes or picture books can seem childish to students at times, but looking back at these childhood staples reinforces the idea of reading from different perspectives.  In this case, many students will be reading or rereading stories they were told as children, and the insights they gleam from the nursery rhymes will have undoubtedly evolved.

The Appleman chapters on Marxism and Feminism were helpful for more specific critical theory strategies than those provided by Bridging English.  The English III classes I am assisting and teaching in for the internship are both in the middle of slavery units.  I feel like going through and rereading the slave narrative excerpts found in their textbook through a Marxist and/or Feminist lens would be a way to open class discussions up more.

Do

 

The nursery rhyme activity that Appleman mentions inspired me to look for it in the excerpt's appendix, but to my dismay the activity was absent.  In lieu of having Appleman's activity, I decided to try and design my own using Russell Baker's multi-perspective take on "Little Miss Muffet."

1.  Pass out copies of "Little Miss Muffet" by Russell Baker or have students bring up the text on their technology.
2. Perform the excerpt aloud for the class and ask that students pay close attention to tone of each speaker.
3. Pair up students and have them randomly pick a nursery rhyme and an occupation/role.  Include brief retellings of the nursery rhymes and descriptions of the occupations as familiarity may vary from student to student. 
4.  Ask that students rewrite their nursery rhyme from the perspective of their occupation and have pairs share their creations with the class.
5. Close by reading The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, by a Wolf and having students discuss the impact of who tells a story on its meaning.

Occupations/Roles

• Sleep deprived police officer
• Ambitious stock broker
• Clumsy burglar 
• Angry grandmother
• Apathetic nurse
• Nervous lawyer
• Screaming mime (not really)

Nursery Rhymes

"Little Jack Horner"

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said 'What a good boy am I!'

"Little Boy Blue"

 Little Boy Blue,
Come blow your horn,
The sheep's in the meadow,
The cow's in the corn;
Where is that boy
Who looks after the sheep?
Under the haystack
Fast asleep.
Will you wake him?
Oh no, not I,
For if I do
He will surely cry.

"Little Bo Peep"

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,

And doesn't know where to find them;

Leave them alone, And they'll come home,

Wagging their tails behind them.

Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep,

And dreamt she heard them bleating;

But when she awoke, she found it a joke,

For they were still a-fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,

Determined for to find them;

She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,

For they'd left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-peep did stray

Into a meadow hard by,

There she espied their tails side by side,

All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,

And over the hillocks went rambling,

And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,

To tack each again to its lambkin.

"Mary had a little lamb"

 Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.

He followed her to school one day,
Which was against the rule,
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb at school.

And so the teacher turned it out,
But still it lingered near,
And waited patiently about,
Till Mary did appear.

"Why does the lamb love Mary so?"
The eager children cry.
"Why, Mary loves the lamb, you know."
The teacher did reply.

"Old King Cole"

Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he;
He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
And he called for his fiddlers three.
Every fiddler he had a fiddle,
And a very fine fiddle had he;
Oh there's none so rare, as can compare
With King Cole and his fiddlers three.

"Muffin Man"

Oh, do you know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Do you know the muffin man,
Who lives in Drury Lane?

Yes [or "Oh, yes"], I know the muffin man,
The muffin man, the muffin man,
Yes, I know the muffin man,
Who lives in Drury Lane.

"Third Blind Mice"

Three blind mice. Three blind mice.

See how they run. See how they run.

They all ran after the farmer's wife,

Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a sight in your life,

As three blind mice?

Little Miss Muffet, by Russell Baker

Taken from Poor Russell’s Almanac (1981). St Martin's Press. 

Little Miss Muffet, as everyone knows, sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey when along came a spider who sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away. While everyone knows this, the significance of the event had never been analyzed until a conference of thinkers recently brought their special insights to bear upon it. Following are excerpts from the transcript of their discussion:

Sociologist: We are clearly dealing here with a prototypical illustration of a highly tensile social structure’s tendency to dis- or perhaps even de-structure itself under the pressures created when optimum minimums do not obtain among the disadvantaged. Miss Muffet is nutritionally underprivileged, as evidenced by the subliminal diet of curds and whey upon which she is forced to subsist, while the spider’s cultural disadvantage is evidenced by such phenomena as legs exceeding standard norms, odd mating habits, and so forth.

In this instance, spider expectations lead the culturally disadvantaged to assert demands to share the tuffet with the nutritionally underprivileged. Due to a communications failure, Miss Muffet assumes without evidence that the spider will not be satisfied to share her tuffet, but will also insist on eating her curds and perhaps even her whey. Thus, the failure to pre-establish selectively optimum norm structures diverts potentially optimal minimums from the expectation levels assumed to...

Militarist: Second-strike capability, sir! That’s what was lacking. If Miss Muffet had developed a second-strike capability instead of squandering her resources on curds and whey, no spider on earth would have dared launch a first strike capable of carrying him right to the heart of her tuffet. I am confident the Miss Muffet had adequate notice from experts that she could not afford both curds and whey and, at the same time, support an early-spider-warning system. Yet curds alone were not good enough for Miss Muffet. She had to have whey, too. Tuffet security must be the first responsibility of every diner...

Book Reviewer: Written on several levels, this searing and sensitive exploration of the arachnid heart illuminates the agony and splendor of Jewish family life with a candor that is at once breathtaking in its simplicity and soul-shattering in its implied ambiguity. Some will doubtless be shocked to see such subjects as tuffets and whey discussed without flinching, but hereafter writers too timid to call a curd a curd will no longer...

Editorial Writer: Why has the government not seen fit to tell the public all it knows about the so-called curds-and-whey affair? It is not enough to suggest that this was merely a random incident involving a lonely spider and a young diner. In today’s world, poised as it is on the knife edge of...

Psychiatrist: Little Miss Muffet is, course, neither little nor a miss. These are obviously the self she has created in her own fantasies to escape the reality that she is a gross divorcee whose superego makes it impossible for her to sustain a normal relationship with any man, symbolized by the spider, who, of course, has no existence outside her fantasies. Little Miss Muffet may, in fact, be a man with deeply repressed Oedipal impulses, who sees in the spider the father he would like to kill, and very well may some day unless he admits that what he believes to be a tuffet is, in fact, probably the dining room chandelier, and that what he thinks he is eating is, in fact, probably...

Student Demonstrator: Little Miss Muffet, tuffets, curds, whey, and spiders are what’s wrong with education today. They’re all irrelevant. Tuffets are irrelevant. Curds are irrelevant. Whey is irrelevant. Meaningful experience! How can you have relevance without meaningful experience? And how can there ever be meaningful experience without understanding? With understanding and meaningfulness and relevance, there can be love and good and deep seriousness and education today will be freed of slavery and Little Miss Muffet, and life will become meaningful and...

Child: This is about a little girl who gets scared by a spider.

(The child was sent home when the conference broke for lunch. It was agreed that he was too immature to subtract anything from the sum of human understanding.)