Halfway through the seven-day Advanced Placement grading marathon with 1,175 English teachers, I had 15 minutes of fame.
Our chief reader, Jim Barcus, arranged to have four of us speak for an hour on Oscar Wilde and Robert Penn Warren, the authors on the AP test. “How Would You Teach That?” was such a success last year that it was moved to the Hilton Ballroom this year, with an open wine bar, cheese and fruit.
Three hundred teachers sat in rows of chairs and at linen-covered round tables, sipping wine and listening.
Opening the evening was Jim’s former student David Miller, who teaches at Mississippi College. He was funny and inspiring — a hard act to follow. He began by telling us that he chose teaching instead of the ministry because it gave him more time to hold forth before a captive audience.
He was so riveting that as he ran on the beach the next morning, a young female teacher screamed “You were fabulous last night!” — causing a few heads to turn and making David’s day.
I have none of David’s oratorical skills, but I do know how to run a student-centered classroom — one where literature has an application to student lives.
I photocopied dozens of Wilde’s famous one-liners as part of a lesson on the difference between humor and injurious verbal attacks. Wilde’s witticisms range from the relatively tame (“Only the shallow know themselves”) to the very pointed (“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between”).
Like Wilde, students revel in one-liners that wound others; “snap!” has become the new “touché.”
I suggested asking students to analyze Wilde “zingers” to see where to draw the line between wit and wounding. Self-deprecating wit (“I can resist everything except temptation”) is funny. A joke at someone else’s expense is not so amusing. Knowing when a zinger becomes unfunny could be useful in life.
We might want to say to a cheerful morning person “Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,” but we will bite our tongues (or our bagels) if we wish to remain friends.
And teachers might be tempted to say to a supervisor requiring standardized syllabi, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” but alienating your boss can have negative consequences. Students always benefit from cautionary lessons on consequences.
Neither your friend nor your boss will be impressed when you quote Wilde. But he has yet another one-liner to describe this process: “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.” Asking students to draw the line was my lesson plan.
It was a heady moment when one teacher walked up to me and asked for another 50 copies of the handout, “for those who weren’t there.”
The next day my 15 minutes of fame were over and I was back to scoring essays. But Wilde is still with me.
My favorite one-liner applies to the revision process I undertake with each column: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
Now that’s funny.
Erica Jacobs teaches at Oakton High School and George Mason University. She can be reached at [email protected].
