On the Road Again
I’m writing to you from the road tonight. This weekend I’m visiting a city with historical and literary significance, and I’ll post a bit about the trip after I return.
Historical Context Is Important
In the meantime, I wanted to post a bit about my own high school language arts experience. I was blessed to have a couple of excellent English teachers in high school. But I had a few teachers who did not discuss the historical context of the literature they taught. I didn’t understand until I was older what a huge failure that was. Anyone who teaches literature–public school teachers, homeschooling parents, Outschool teachers–should teach historical context.
Indulge me while I give you examples from my own high school years.
- My freshman language arts teacher assumed that her students were well-versed in the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and did not review those before she taught A Tale of Two Cities.
- Similarly, my senior AP English teacher did not ask for a show of hands of students with even cursory knowledge about the exploitation and genocide of the Congolese people by King Leopold II before we read Heart of Darkness.
In both situations, we were advanced-level students, but our school employed coaches as history teachers, the Internet wasn’t yet widely available, and our school library was inferior. The end result: Very few of my classmates understood the full context of those two literary works.
In contrast, my two favorite English teachers did an excellent job prefacing novels and novellas:
- My sophomore English teacher set up The Pearl with not only historical context but also John Steinbeck’s personal history.
- My junior English teacher extensively covered the Puritans and their literature–and even Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family ties to the Salem Witch Trials–before we studied The Scarlet Letter.
Literature is a reaction to the world. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they respond to history, politics, and current events. The Grapes of Wrath cannot be fully understood without understanding Black Tuesday, the Depression, and the Dust Bowl. Fully comprehending The Sun Also Rises requires some knowledge about World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and The Lost Generation. Knowledge of the Civil War and the South post-war inform reading of just about anything by William Faulkner.
As teachers, we hammer into students that setting is the time and place a literary work occurs. But we sometimes forget that setting has another prong, social milieu, which includes complex information like economic conditions, social classes, and cultural norms. Our students need a prior understanding of history and social milieu to better understand what they are reading.
This Week’s Printable
Next week, I’ll publish a printable template that will allow students to map literature and its historical setting on a single page. Enter your e-mail in the box below to join my newsletter, and I’ll send this template straight to your inbox next week.
Have a great weekend!
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