I’m an English professor today because I had Mr. That’s how I was taught, in high school especially. I’m fortunate to do what I love for a living, and I know it. Harvard poetry professor Helen Vendler uses two lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude as the title for an essay about teaching: “What we have loved, / Others will love …” That second line concludes, “and we will teach them how.” That’s how I teach, or hope to teach: with my heart on my sleeve, perhaps, but with my brain always fully engaged. I’m all for passion in the literature classroom. It takes Emily Dickinson’s playful remark to her mentor Thomas Higginson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” and turns it into a critical principle. Rather, it’s the literary equivalent of fandom. In fact, it’s not even good, careful reading. For what Keating (Robin Williams) models for his students isn’t literary criticism, or analysis, or even study. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House: because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive. Keating’s classroom-or outside of it, because so many of his poetry-derived “life lessons” are taught outside the classroom, after all-had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Andrew’s School, in Middletown, Delaware).
#THE ROAD NOT TAKEN QUESTIONS FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL MOVIE#
We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it but having seen Dead Poets Society, Scott believed he finally had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and more important, why.
My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife, Robyn, and me a 10-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. I was in the last year of my English literature Ph.D.
I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters at least I hope they are. I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society.
0 kommentar(er)
