- Messages
- 59,086
I never loved it, but I gave most of the texts a chance, at least... and the biggest difference I would say is that most students in my day (which wasn't that long ago!) understood that in order to pass, they would actually have to suck it up and read the book even if they hated it.
These days, the percentage of students who actually do the required reading is scarily low. Obviously, part of it is that Internet sources have become more and more rampant and more and more easily accessible in the past decade, and there are more recent and more accessible movie versions of many novels and plays that are studied, but part of it seems to me to be part of the culture of entitlement that many of today's students seem to be stuck in. I've actually had students get angry at me when they did badly on an essay, test or quiz after fully admitting that they didn't do the reading and only read the SparkNotes. They really seem to believe that the reading is optional and unfortunately, by the time they get to the higher secondary grades, most students have had at least a few bad teachers who have lent evidence to this belief by only assigning and marking work that would allow a surface-level Internet-source summary version understanding of the text to be more than sufficient.
Well, I've been teaching 25 years and have always had students who blamed me when they didn't do the work and got a bad grade. And in my day, students read Cliffs Notes and all my professors would gnash their teeth over it and try to find ways around that. Dr. M, for example, read all the Cliffs Notes for the works assigned in his classes looking for errors and watched all film versions of the same so he could catch students on quizzes. Dr. M is soooooooooo harrrrrrrrd, some of my classmates would whine. He wants you to read every little thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. He would often come into class and say, "Shall we have a group whine before we begin, so you can all get it out of your systems now?"
That was, I dunno, 30-odd years ago?
I always understood that when I didn't read something that was assigned, I was taking a risk and sometimes I paid for it, which I accepted as my due, but most of my students do that, too. But there's always a couple who consider it unreasonable to be asked to do work they don't want to do.
Which brings us to......
The iambic pentameter may be modern, but it is certainly not accessible to many of us. I sure as heck have no interest in reading it.

As others have pointed out, meter is meter. When I teach introductory poetry, I teach students iambic pentameter by having them listen to The Proclaimers "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)," as you can sing any poem written in strict iambic pentameter to the chorus ("Whose woods these are, I think I know/ His house is in the village, though/ He will not see me stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow/ Da lat da.") We're not talking about anything sophisticated or difficult here.
Shakespeare wrote in unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is the meter most closely resembling the rhythm of normal human speech in English. The meter is easy. What most people complain about with Shakespeare is that the text is dense and the language is challenging. But since that doesn't appear to be your complaint, I will move on.
Um, I do understand that it is an academic discipline
Do you?
Could you provide a bit more detail about what you are interested in when you teach literature? What do you want your students to get out of your classes and out of the works you assign? What specific academic skills do you want them to cultivate?
There are many things, among them an understanding of culture, but since your objections seem to focus on analysis, I will also focus on that.
In my experience, they are analyzing meanings/motifs/contexts, which is fine,
Yes, we expect students to read works for meaning. Sometimes the texts are challenging. They are going to have to read a lot of things that are challenging as they go through college and they are going to have to figure out what those things mean. Some of them are going to go on to careers that require them to read difficult text and understand it.
except it can require rather a stretch of the imagination when a student doesn't care for a work, relate to it, or find anything of value in it.
Yes, we expect them to think and some of them find that very difficult.
But some of them also find math, biology, sociology, history, and just about anything else in the academic catalog to be difficult, irrelevant and lacking in value. And guess what? They have to do it all anyway. And while there are people who believe that they shouldn't have to do anything unless it is "relevant"--very popular idea, that--others see value in having students study those subjects whether they are relevant or not because they think those subjects by themselves have value--they help students understand the world, they teach students to think in disciplined, analytical ways, they open up new avenues of thought and understanding, etc.
As for what students care for, relate to, or value--that's very subjective. And since I can't read minds, I assign literature that reflects the pedagogical requirements of my courses. Since you appear to be complaining about introductory courses, my introductory lit classes focus on an overview of Western literature, which does indeed include Shakespeare; my purpose in the course as I see it is to introduce students to works that reflect the history and philosophy of Western culture and the human beings in it. Some introductory lit classes focus on elements of literature--plot, symbolism, theme, etc.--which teaches students (or attempts to teach them) how to break down a piece of text and analyze it logically, focusing on a particular element at a time. None of this requires a student to relate to a text; it requires a student to do academic work.
There are people who do not benefit from this at all. There are also students who do. Is there an academic discipline of which this is not true?
If they have to rely on other people's analyses to find meanings in seemingly meaningless works - meanings that seem always required to be 'hidden' or 'deep' - they are just copying rather than using their own mind.
They never have to plagiarize, although some of them think they do. Some of them do need some help finding meaning (which is never required to be all that deep or hidden in an introductory class, where we are generally grateful if students can figure out the most basic things). But the job of a tutor is to help the students find their own meanings, not to help them cheat.
Last edited: