Wherefore art thou taste?

To the Equinox: 

Readers of the April 29th issue of the Equinox may have noticed the strange confessions of a contributing writer (“Regarding Shakespeare,” page A4) who seems quite proud to admit to transgressions that could well work against his long-term professional goals.  After congratulating himself for his lack of respect for his professors, classmates, and the authors under study in his courses, he goes on to make a potentially more interesting point about the pall that is inevitably cast on “assigned” reading as opposed to reading that is done for pleasure. 

Had he read his Shakespeare more carefully when he had the time to do so he might have found a figure for this in Henry the Fourth, Part One, when the Prince explains the apparent thoughtlessness of his youthful behavior:  “If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work;/ But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come, / And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.” 

I agree that turning to non-assigned reading during a busy time in the semester is delightful, and also that the most profound learning goes beyond what is on any syllabus.  For this reason I have been active in encouraging “assigned pleasure reading” in the form of our extra-curricular Keene is Reading texts each year.  But I also assign, and thus condemn to status as “homework,” hundreds of pages of reading in my English classes every semester, as well as lengthy papers analyzing what is found there. 

The professors, teachers, and principals he seeks to inform with the shocking news that some students don’t read every word are well aware of this unfortunate fact and work against it as creatively as we can, but if we become cynical about these efforts then much indeed will have been lost.  Because I respect my students and treat them as curious adults who are responsible for taking an active role in their own education I do not dust for their fingerprints on every page of “Great Expectations,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “A Room of One’s Own,” or any other text we are fortunate enough to have the time and freedom to study in class. 

Along with my colleagues, I assign quizzes, papers, and other student work that requires all students to have prepared thoughtfully for class.  It pains me to inform a talented student like the writer in question that most jobs, even or especially as educators in a secondary school, do not afford the time or context for extended, purposeful discussions of Hamlet or “Heart of Darkness”, and one should always try to be available to the classes one is actually in, because we take all classes more than once. 

I am still enrolled, in a sense, in classes I took over twenty years ago as an undergraduate.  Though my papers then were far from great, and though I am sure I showed up to class tired and sometimes hoping not to be called on, the quality of what we were reading won out:  the seed found purchase. 

This is why the letter writer’s final point—about drinking milk before steak, an image I find rather disgusting—is so profoundly mistaken.  I will never be old enough to know what Homer knows, to know what Zora Neale Hurston knows, but the concentrated effort of study makes me want to try—maybe not the first time I read their works for a class, but in the school of lifelong learning in which we are always beginning students, in need of orientation. 

I have met the writer of this letter to help him with academic advising, though I haven’t worked with him in class, and certainly found him an ambitious and capable student.  Many aspects of his letter pain me, especially the dismissive references to the intelligence of his fellow students, and I choose to believe that the writer is capable of more magnanimous work than this column indicates.  I hope that he learns to think better than to be proud of the wrong things.

William Stroup
Associate Professor of and Chair of English