Thanks to Joel and Monica for a great conversation and to Joel for his thoughtful post. I'll try to answer Joel’s last question (On what basis do we decide not to change a damned thing about assignment X or text Y?).

What I value in literature (reading and writing both) is amoral. I don't put much stock in reliable humanist narratives about teaching that tell us we transmit our stories because they represent the best of what's been thought and said or because they help us develop critical thinking or because they make us more reflective about our lived experience. I don't disparage those values, I just don’t believe in them in any kind of necessary or urgent way. I want to believe that beyond their affected postures of disinterest, our students are pretty damn hungry to be taken seriously and to get on with the business of waking up and sensitizing their perceptive apparatuses, whatever those may be, however their temperaments may orient them, be it toward language, visual art, movement, or something else.

I may be quite wrong about that, but I’m no more wrong than anyone who believes our students have any interest in or even extraordinary capacity for the best of what’s been thought and said or for critical thinking or for reflective contemplation.

Bear with me, because I am indeed working my way toward this question of how we decide to not change a damn thing about a given assignment.

So what does seem to me truly urgent and necessary about what we do is that careful reading and writing can: (1) show students that their very subjectivities, their very sense of self/persona are radically malleable, slippery, and various (2) that beyond analysis, reading closely can be an experience of shifting into another self, complete with a new language, new concerns, new perception.

Okay, good, so aren’t we back at the root of a humanist liberal arts education – that to read and write is to imagine one ’s self differently and that doing so is the basis of empathy and that empathy is the basis of a compassionate ethic, and so on? Yeah.

But here’s where I have to start talking about Huck Finn.

My challenge in teaching this canonical American text is not its liberal use of racial epithets. But if I am to teach this text then I feel compelled to guide students, in so far as it’s possible, in inhabiting the text’s consciousness. If, instead, we want to simply critique the novel as an object, say, by ending at a reading of the text that leaves us with some equivocating take on Huck’s movement toward a rejection of slavery (never fully achieved) and chalk up our discomfort at Twain’s minstrel-inspired portrayal of Jim to historical accuracy (relative to a white audience’s racism), then I don’t want any part of that kind of teaching. I don’t want to engage in work that leaves me or my students in some removed critical distance from which our subjectivities are never implicated. I’ve no interest in that kind of teaching because I think it’s cursory, and to model/advocate a cursory engagement with texts is to insult that nature in our students and in ourselves ready to wake up. Wake up to what? Wake up to our meanness, our own racism/sexism/homophobia/etc., our own petty and dark and hurt and venal selves that will readily take advantage of any kind of privilege afforded us in order to get over, in order to survive one moment to the next. And, of course, in the case of this particular novel, wake up to that attention to beauty and appreciation of camaraderie and brotherhood Huck experiences in that singular and painfully circumscribed space of the raft.

I feel compelled to stop here a moment and make clear I am not arguing with Joel or with any one of my colleagues in this department from whom I learn almost every day and for whom I have the greatest respect and for whose company in this shared project of teaching I am grateful. I am arguing with myself and with my own tendency to fall short of my pedagogical values. For this, ultimately, is what Joel is asking us to articulate. If I am going to know when an assignment or teaching strategy is done, is no longer available to tweaking, then I had better be clear as to what my values and goals are, what my classroom would look like “in a perfect world.”

And so, as I think about my future engagement with Huck Finn I think of writing assignments that will direct students to imagine themselves slave owners, for one, and to imagine the uncomfortable dynamics of the story set in various circumstances (what if Tom Sawyer came along and spent sixty or so pages playing games and delaying the eventual release of, say, a concentration camp prisoner, or an Abu Ghraib “detainee”; how would those circumstances change how we feel about the story?). I think of culling together contemporary images, video clips, passages of texts that render similar social dynamics, ones where we seem to feel it’s okay to advocate for the dignity of a group out of one side of our mouths while simultaneously getting a cheap laugh by putting out buffoonish representations of that group out of the other side of our mouths (Andy Mercurio brilliantly pointed out that such seems to be the case today with homosexuals and, I would add, women… and isn’t it interesting that some representation of femininity is at the heart of both?).

Where I’m going with this is that I want to upend the hierarchy of reading and writing that places the pleasure of getting lost in a text or of imagining oneself in a story at the bottom and critical thought and critical writing at the top because, as I’ve been trying to say, perhaps laboriously, is that a deeper, more meaningful kind of critical thinking can happen when we begin first with or prioritize the imagination and the implication of self and of consciousness with at least some of our assignments. And so maybe I was wrong at the beginning of this post, maybe I don’t advocate amoral teaching at all. What I advocate, for myself at least, is that I weave creative writing and reflective journaling more consistently and more rigorously into my treatment of texts. Just as I ask my freshmen to create epic similes and to use chiasmus and to play with the effects of these figures before I ask them to analyze how and to what effect Homer uses them, I want to ask all my students to write from the perspectives of our characters, no matter how distasteful (Iago or Tom anyone?) these may be. I guess, to finally answer Joel's question, I’ll know when I will not change anything about an assignment or pedagogical approach when that work helps my students become more adept at shape shifting, if you will. Among the oddball menagerie of characters we present to our freshmen when covering Greek myth is Proteus, the guy who promises to provide some vital piece of information, usually how one gets home, if only the petitioner will hold on long enough to Proteus’ form even as that form shifts and changes from one impossible shape to another. That’s what I’m talking about… in a perfect world.

One last thing: we need to rethink our texts in the upper school. I humbly submit that when we provide a near monolithic block of white male authors telling the stories of white male protagonists, we leave all of our girls and all of our students of color to contort and shift shape and translate consciousness from their lived experience over to whatever the texts offer them. That’s fine. In fact, I would argue, such stretching beyond the familiar is a solid half of what education is all about. But it’s only half. The other part, the missing part for too many of our students, is that of stretching only a little way and finding in the text something that validates, something that helps them shift a little closer to whatever home is for each of them and then closer to whatever home might eventually become.