defending the honor...or something like that.

A classmate of mine recently wrote about the frustrations she was having with our literary criticism class. Her post made me think about my own constant frustrations with this class. How am I ever going to apply this material to my career? My Instructional Design and Assessment class is directly applicable to my future career as an English teacher, but this class is a little trickier to categorize. I will probably never teach middle schoolers about Formalist, Romantic, or so-and-so's theories--that's just not part of the criteria deemed necessary to teach by the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

BUT...this class isn't supposed to be directed towards my future students. It's directed towards me. It is extremely important that I know the value of literature, reading, and authorship. Otherwise, why would I even bother to teach it? If it's not important, and if I don't know why it's important, why should I teach it to my students? Why do they need to know the deep and rich history of literature, of the billions and billions of readers who have read the same material as they will in my classes, of the authors whose minds have crafted such works of brilliancy?

I need to take this class, and I need to pull as much out of it as I can. I need to be able to defend the honor of literature...otherwise we'll all become computing robots and science nerds (sorry to all those out there who have passions for those topics...just try to roll with my ridiculous exaggeration). I agree with Eliot when he says that in order to truly get a grasp of one piece of literature, one must study the great tradition of literature. That's also why we have to grapple with these questions of "What is Literature?" and "What is Reading?" and "What is Authorship?" The frustrations and the fight eventually form into a deeper understanding of what we're reading and why we're reading it.

To my fellow classmates: I know sometimes these readings are painful and to make any sense of them is often a difficult task. But do not lose hope...we're deepening our wells of knowledge so we can defend the honor of our beloved major!