Heliogue expressed that teaching T.S. Eliot would incite head explosions if taught in his own high school. But the school I’m observing is, as I replied, an anomaly of sorts.
The school is quite multicultural by Indiana standards and in a very affluent part of town. Students are primarily children of professors and executives. The school is small enough that everyone knows each other, it houses Jr and Sr highs in the same building (a pedagogical choice that deserves some consideration) and, like I mentioned, is very high tech. It is also financially endangered, having closed down a newly renovated school several years ago, fired more than a handful of rookie teachers and forced older teachers into early retirement, and in the meantime, found the money to pay a fired curriculum director and outfit the remaining schools in the latest technology. It boasts the highest scores for a public school in the state and has a reputation comparable to private prep schools.
Affluence is definitely a factor, but the school has managed to create a school culture that values intelligence. The “cleverness is not cool” aspect found in many schools across the country doesn’t exist in even the remotest sense. It’s an interesting case study, but hardly indicative of the rest of the country’s schools in any shape or form.
My goal is to see how familiarity with integrated digital spaces affects one’s learning capabilities, if at all. I’m looking at both the least and most tech-literate students in these classes, but even that is a misnomer. The “least tech-literate” students in these two classes still have computers and use them regularly. We’ll see what happens.
But Prufrock. I didn’t learn to appreciate Eliot until last year when I heard The Wasteland read in the properly corresponding British vernaculars. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has joined my list of favorite poems for various critical and aesthetic reasons that I think I will be able to share with the class. The key is how to analyze the poem without breaking it down and ruining the imagery for the students.
One primary issue is how to make sense of the beautiful but otherwise disconnected scenes and metaphors throughout the poem. As three major “scenes” make up the poem with corresponding metaphors, I have roughly broken down the poem into these parts.
But I finally figured out how to not only convey the points of the literary disconnect, but to maintain the ominous feelings of emptiness that Eliot is known for. Kids are exposed to this sort of disconnect everyday, albeit in “low” art forms. Though it certainly isn’t a “love song,” I downloaded the video to Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” and plan to show it before our discussion of the poem because it is a familiar medium (music video), a medium often criticized for its steady stream of disconnected imagery (but nonetheless conveys imagery powerful enough to keep the endless attention of young people around the world), and displays the shallowness, desolation and desperation of our cultural period as Eliot displayed the internal desperation of his contemporaries. And hell, if the students think Nirvana is cool, this should go over well.
It isn’t a perfect correlation, but I hope to be able to draw the connection between Eliot’s version of stream-of-consciousness with a medium students are already familiar with so that they can get past the poetic pretenses and get to the meat of this wonderful poem. Afterward, the more usual historical and literary analyses ensue.
The point of exposing students to difficult material is not to make heads explode, but for them to be familiar with this kind of material when approached with similar literary modes in the future. The perceived limits of intertextuality between “high” and “low” art forms are easily dashed with an open mind, and I think it makes the classroom a far more enjoyable place as it works to demystify critical literary theory.
If anyone knows of a more closely aligning (and more contemporary) music video I can download, please let me know.