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- [00:02]
Podcast Announcer
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- [00:46]
Scott Bertram
Welcome to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms. Now your host, Scott Bertram.
- [01:05]
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show and at our website, k12 hillsdale.edu.
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Interviewer
We'Re joined by Dr. Benedict Whelan, Associate professor of English here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Whalen, thanks for joining us.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Thanks for having me, Scott.
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Interviewer
Talking today about how to teach a short story, we'll begin by asking about why we even care about this in the first place. Why should we teach short stories? And why not longer, more complicated novels that might be more more enriching for students?
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yeah, this is a great place to begin because of course, when we think of literature instruction, I think most people tend to think of the big greats. So you could think of Homer and Virgil and Dante, and you might think of Hamlet and Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn. All of those are longer works. The short story, though, has an important place in a classical education in a number of ways. One thing we should keep in mind is that more complicated or longer or more complex does not automatically mean better. Sometimes the beautiful things are very simple and sometimes powerful or moving things are very simple. And we have the phrase short and sweet, and we can think of sometimes the phrase or the word punchy. Those are elements of the short story that I don't think we want to lose in a classical education literature. The simple and the beautiful or the very punchy, the incisive, short, sweet, powerful moment captured in the in the short story. So I think the short story has its place. Short stories tend to be accelerated, compressed, very tight, and those make them powerful in their own way as compared to, say, novels or epic poems. Those also in my classroom, those attributes of being accelerated and compressed and tight actually served me very well in trying to cultivate good reading habits in students. We're trying to get. Get our students to closely attend to details, to do close and careful reading of these texts. And when you're dealing with a short, little punchy text, it's actually easier. It makes it easier as a teacher to develop those habits. And so they're quite valuable just for your pedagogical ends in that way, as well as being moving and powerful. And then I would add also that the short story is easily studied in class. I think human beings, if we think of other genres of arts, we easily recognize that common for the arts, that we enjoy them with others. So it's fun to go to a symphony. It's even more wonderful if you go with a friend or somebody you love and then can talk about it, enjoy that experience together. The same goes, I think, with going to museums. Sometimes we might go and study alone. But it's fun to walk through a museum with somebody and to converse about the art you're seeing. With literature, it's hard to do that with a novel. It's hard to just spend the time experiencing the novel together. In class, we tend more to talk about rather than to encounter the novel. But with a short story, it's quite possible in the literature classroom to have that moment of encounter together, sort of like watching a TV show with people. With your class, you can actually simply read the short story out loud and then converse it. And that's an encounter. If it's a good short story, that's a shared encounter, a moment of wonder, of delight, of joy that can be had in the classroom. And I think that's not something to be underestimated.
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Interviewer
In journalism, we say it's actually much, much, much harder to write short than long. It's harder to be more concise, to know what to leave in, what to take out. And I don't want to necessarily compare, but in terms of analysis, you know, every line counts a little bit more. There can be denser because the actual length is shorter.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yes, I think that's exact. That's a great comparison. Every line in a short story is doing more work, it's bearing more weight, and hence it encourages very close analysis.
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Interviewer
So what are some of the common mistakes that teachers might make when approaching short stories with students?
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yeah, this is a danger for me as a college professor as well, is that I'll think of the things that I might want to accomplish in a literature classroom, and I'll end up making that my end rather than the means to an end. So essentially what I mean is that the mistake is that we use short stories as a means to getting to the end of some technical understanding we're trying to get our students to have. So if we're trying to teach, say, forms of narrative, we might think of that as the primary end and the story itself as the means to that. Or if we're thinking of development in literary history, say, movement from Romanticism to realism, we might think of teaching stories as a means of conveying this understanding of historical development of literature to our students. And I think that's putting things backwards. I think ultimately we study plot or types of characterization or, say, struggles of man versus man or man versus nature, not as its own end, but instead to facilitate our appreciation and understanding of this work of art. And so the caution I would give, I think the most common mistake is treating the work of art as a means to an end outside of itself. Instead, all of those other devices that we study in the literature classroom are means. They are the means to the end of a better understanding and appreciation and joy in the literary art worth.
- [06:38]
Interviewer
We're studying what might be the proper approach or the proper attitude that teachers can have towards short stories.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yeah, so that's. That's where the. The sort of, in one sense, obvious concomitant is privilege the story. If you realize that you're constantly stressing, okay, where's the climax? What's the denouement? What you're doing is privileging technical language about the story rather than the story itself. So let the story be the centerpiece and the thing that you're always coming back to. That is most easily done by simply reading a short story aloud in the classroom. So don't be embarrassed or shy or scared of taking valuable class time to simply read the story, because that's ultimately what we're trying to encourage our students to love. I remember with one one anecdote when I was in high school. I remember the most impressive moment in my memory in the literature education, and I'm a literature professor, was actually not when we were getting these great lectures or when, you know, some great novel, but simply when a teacher came in and sat down and spent the whole period for a week or so reading the stories of Flannery o' Connor and just sort of sitting back in the classroom and relaxing and allowing my imagination to go to work and simply being absorbed in the short story and being suddenly wondering about it. And, of course, Flannery o' Connor is very surprising and has these moments of Violence or shock, like being surprised by that. I really grew as a reader of literature simply through that form of encounter. And so I think sort of keeping the store, the story, the short story as the centerpiece and not the means to an end is our goal here.
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Interviewer
I'm curious a little about approach, because as a literature teacher, you could say, together we're going to learn about chapter four of Tom Sawyer. Right. So this limited portion of a larger work at the same time, yes, you could do a short story and tackle it in the same way. Is there a different approach to saying, I'm going to take. Take this part of the whole and address it as a class versus this short story and address it as a class?
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
So writers vary on this. So you can get, say, narratives that are much more episodic. So a chapter might be mostly a discrete sort of mini story itself, and that you can think of all sorts of episodic narratives that do that very well. And then thematically, of course, we can break down novels into chapters or sections where we look at a particular theme or idea that the author has. The thing about the short story is that it has an integrity to it, so that it is whole and complete in itself. And that makes it different even than a, say, chapter four of Tom Sawyer or something like that, in that it needs to stand entirely on its own, whereas chapter four doesn't need to. And that does change our approach to it and our sense of whether we're addressing something whole or in part. And philosophically and pedagogically, those sorts of distinctions are very important, although they can finally break down and you can think of other works that are, say, collections of short stories, where then you might have the debate, well, what's the relationship between these different short stories? And so there is a blending, and there are ways in which novels and stories can be studied in tandem, but there's a sort of unity and wholeness to the discrete short story that gives it its sort of punchy flavor.
- [09:59]
Interviewer
Talking with Dr. Ben Whalen, Associate professor of English at Hillsdale College, about how to teach a short story. So if we get more specific, do you have any particular techniques, exercises that you like to do with students when you're teaching a short story.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yeah. So here, and I have to give all credit and also encourage the listeners to go read this book, buy it. The contemporary novelist and short story author George Saunders, New York Times bestseller. He wrote this wonderful book a couple of years ago called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and it's a book that includes I think seven short stories by Russian masters, Gogol, Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy. And he includes the story and then he has a little essay where he talks about it. And if that sounds boring, I challenge you to go read it because he's a lively writer and he's a wonderful teacher and has a deep insight into the short story form. And so we can use this as teachers. It will inspire teachers in the K12 world to teach better and to read these stories better. One of the things that George Saunders says in the book is he compares the opening of a short story or the first page of a short story to the author tossing up a bunch of juggling pins into the air. And he says the rest of the short story after that first page is the catching of those pins. So in other words, the opening page sets up all of the. Or not, maybe not all, but it sets up the expectations, the movements, the motifs of the short story that then the short story will resolve and bring together and catch in some way. And so one of the methods that he has in this book that I find very valuable myself in my classroom is sort of what he describes as only giving or reading to your students the first page of the story. So just photocopy that first page, read it out loud with them together, and then just ask these three questions. First of all, try to summarize in a sentence or two, what do we know so far? Just what do we know? And there already the students will have to make judgments and distinguish between what seems worthwhile to go into just a one to two sentence summary and what seems irrelevant. And then secondly, just ask this, it's a very simple question. What are you curious about? What are you curious about in the story? If this story is working, it's provoked some questions or curiosities for you. What, what are those? And then third, where do you think the story is headed? And that's a speculative sort of counterfactual thing, but students love that question as well. And can you justify your expectations with details in this text, those three things? If you can spend a whole class period on the first page of a short story and just discussing those three things. And I think it's, it's very effective. Students enjoy it and then they can see if their expectations and curiosities are resolved and. And how the rest of the story responds to what's given at the beginning.
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Interviewer
There. Now I see you've brought additional material. So I imagining you might have an example from the first page of a short story to share with Us.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
It's a short first page of a short story. This is one that I think would be familiar to a lot of. A lot of listeners. It's a very famous story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman titled the Yellow Wallpaper. And I'm just going to read just the way the story begins. Because if you think of doing this with students, with those three questions in mind, can you summarize what do we know so far in one to two sentences? Then what are you. What are you curious about in this selection? And then. And then where do you think the story is headed? I think this. This beginning will give a sort of a good example of how that would work. The Yellow Wallpaper. It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer, a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity. But that would be asking too much of fate. Still, I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. Else why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted? John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage, John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. John is a physician, and perhaps I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind. Perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see, he does not believe I am sick. But what can one do? That's the end of the first page. And even just there, if you give that to students. Wait, is she sick? And why doesn't her husband believe her? Questions like that emerge, and then the sort of questions of the relationship between faith or romanticism or superstition and physicians and science. And then her thought that the house might be haunted, or there's something odd about it. There are all sorts of different expectations aroused by this first page that then, in a good short story ought to be answered or caught later in the ensuing pages. And that certainly does happen in this one. So this is not the only way to teach a short story, of course. But I really like this method, this approach of Sandra's. It works for older and younger students and it leads to lively in class discussion about the story. So there's even bated excitement for then how does the story wrap up? Because now we've got a couple different ideas of where it might be going.
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Interviewer
Aside from Saunders and Flannery o', Connor, who you referenced earlier, do you have a favorite short story author or any that you particularly recommend?
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Yeah, well, this is you sort of provoked this with your earlier question about how short stories might relate to, say, a chapter in a novel. But of course, one of my favorites is Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, and that's where you have a lot of short stories. But of course they're related in this larger frame narrative in very interesting ways. I do think I commend to the listeners Chekhov, of course, if we want to look at some of our American authors, both Fitzgerald and Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, in my view, are as fine story writers as novelists, and they're masters in the genre. Mark Twain, of course, one of my favorites. And go to is wonderful too, if you want a recommendation of off the Beaten Path or She's not a minor figure, but maybe a little bit less commonly read. Willa Cather is, I think, sadly underrated and underread. And she's just a marvelous, marvelous American early 20th century novelist and short story writer. So those are a couple that I would commend to you.
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Interviewer
Short Stories for Everyone and how to Teach a short story with Dr. Benedict Whelan, Associate professor of English here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Whelan, thanks for joining us here on the Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast.
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Dr. Benedict Whelan
Thanks so much.
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Scott Bertram
I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook Search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.