But is anyone reading the text in this class?

Here are two seemingly disparate things that I feel like combining: Stanley Fish and the students in the back of my classroom who clearly aren't doing the reading. Let's see if we can make this float.

Stanley Fish, perhaps best known for his essay "Is There a Text in This Class?" (which is actually a pretty good read, and gives a nice sense of how incredibly difficult it would be to work in the same department as Stanley Fish), gave a talk here today entitled "Why the Composition Course Should Not Be a Transformative Experience." (You have to love Fish titles) Fish explained that at the beginning of his Freshman Composition course, he tells the students that he's not interested in any of their opinions about anything. Period. His is a course strictly on grammar, subject-verb-object, and syntax: It's not about the content.

In theory, I agree with him. Here I am, teaching La Celestina, a 16th-century Spanish novel, to a room full of undergrads, and the point is, according to Fish, that my job is to expand their textual horizons and teach them how to interpret these texts using academic tools. Whether this is useful or not in the so-called real world we'll have to leave to the side for the moment, given that this is my livelihood we're talking about. But what's interesting about this to me is that Fish wants students to stick to the form and function of it all, so that, given the sentence "Helping elderly people cross the street prevents accidents," for instance, they must restrain from discussing the possibility that these elderly people have to cross the street because they're forced to buy their prescription drugs from a shady Canadian black-market Lipitor dealer (or something of that nature). No: Stick to the form.

But then we return to La Celestina, and my current struggle with whether my students are actually reading it or not, and whether they're all sitting there mentally writing horrible things on my evaluation because they're bored of medieval Spanish literature... And what do I do? Well, I put on my monkey costume and talk about whether there was abortion in 16th-century Spain and dig out a Penelope Cruz movie version of the novel and my students put on a puppet show about the Inquisition. We can't possibly stick to the form. We don't get too far off the beaten track, but I can see it happening, just to wake 'em up. I think Fish's ideas could work in the ideal classroom, with engaged students who are simply fascinated with subject-verb-object, but what happens when the material is hard and half the class clearly needs a caffeine IV drip? Bring in the monkey.

Anyway, tomorrow Fish is talking about thesis statements, so I'm totally there. Maybe there'll be some more insight into the undergraduate mind...