The Humane Letters seminar is a rich environment in which to cultivate wonder, and it is an exceptional way to lead secondary students to know and experience what our culture’s greatest literary works afford them. Since not all approaches to seminars and seminar leadership are equal, it is good to identify the best approach.
Let us begin with the five objectives of seminars. They should train students to: read well with independence and sensitivity to the specific genre; speak precisely in a spirited, adult conversation, free of pop-culture references; defend their positions from the text while exercising intellectual honesty; think through a problem with clarity; and think about the world more generally. Reading. Speaking. Defending. Thinking. I can imagine no greater need for our students than the ability to address thorny issues in reasoned but spirited discussion, based on evidence and the confidence that they can get to the truth of the matter.
Contrary to other methods where the teacher plays little to no role at all other than as a kind of traffic cop, Humane Letters seminars must be led, and the seminar leader must prepare and lead with purpose. First, and perhaps most importantly, the leader must read and study the text carefully. While secondary sources are helpful, teachers still must argue their positions from the text.
When leading a seminar on expository literature, the first objective is to get the argument; the second objective is to respectfully evaluate that argument. In preparation, leaders should write their questions down and organize them, putting questions of content first and evaluative ones last.
Preparation for a seminar on imaginative literature involves an imaginative recreation of the story, noting important drivers of the action and key imagery and symbolism employed in the text. Leaders should write questions that direct the students to puzzle over the characters’ actions and motivations. Unlike expository literature, the students should not be led to evaluate imaginative literature, so any discussion questions the leader proposes should avoid that workshop approach.
Secondly, seminar leaders need to train their students to mark their texts. When students do not annotate their texts, they cannot remember the argument or the pivotal moments which best capture a storyline. Thus, they cannot participate in the seminar. When reading expository literature, the students should be trained to write down the thesis of the reading assignment, the page numbers that demonstrate that thesis, and, finally, what questions the material raises in their thinking.
This method is not the proper instruction for marking imaginative literature because there is no thesis or argument in imaginative literature. Imaginative literature is experiential. Still, the students will need to mark their texts for repeated uses of words, sentence structures, phrases, and symbols. They will note moments of action that perplex them. For instance: Why does Ivan Karamazov become so enraged when he sees Smerdyakov wearing eyeglasses?
Third, the best seminars begin in wonder and the desire to know. Seminar leaders model wonder for their students by asking good questions throughout the seminar, and those questions should begin inside the text: for instance, Why does Hamlet delay so long in killing Claudius? If the students can answer that question, they have an essential hold on Hamlet’s character.
While a treatment of expository literature requires the students to unpack the argument first, the more valuable questions are those that go to the larger issues at stake and the merits of those arguments. The students need training in how to respectfully evaluate arguments and how to compare and contrast them with what they know to be true, especially historically. Hegel, for example, announces that all history is an uninterrupted progression toward human freedom. The students should ask themselves: Are there more or less slaves today than there were in 1831, the year Hegel died? When reading Thucydides, for another example, one might ask: Are the Athenians correct in arguing that power and self-interest should be the sole driving forces of international relations? Here is another: Is it true—as Plato has Socrates suggest—that we cannot be taught virtue? If so, what have parents and pastors been doing all these years? Notice that the questions are not directed at the students’ personal feelings. They are not, for instance, being asked how they feel about private property or theft or any of the other issues that arise internal to a discussion of political theory.
The more valuable questions regarding imaginative literature are those that tend to a character’s motivation and development. Regarding Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: Why is Clytemestra so insistent that Agamemnon step on that tapestry? Why is she making such a big deal out of this? Why does he hesitate and then allow himself to be bullied? He is a seasoned soldier, freshly returned from ten years of brutal combat; how does his wife persuade him to do something he knows he should not do? The chorus seems to not know what the reader knows. Why is that? How do they interpret the events preceding this story? Let’s gather their aphorisms and examine them. Do they hold up in the context of this story? Does the chorus’ position change? Why did Agamemnon kill his daughter, Iphigeneia? Did he do it willingly? Is there any reason to believe he could have resisted the sacrifice? Note that none of those questions are extra-textual; they all lead the students deeper into the text in search of interpretive treasure.
Sometimes students will ask what appear to be simple questions on the face of it. If leaders listen closely, however, they can turn what appears to be a simple question into something richer. For example, a student might inquire: How old is Hamlet? In my experience, the students will immediately speculate that he is their age: that is, eighteen. When I ask them why they think he is eighteen, they say, Because he acts just like I would if my mom married another man, especially my uncle, that fast! But that was not the question. The question was: How old is Hamlet? What textual evidence do you have to indicate his age? Eventually, some alert student will direct the class’ attention to the gravedigger’s remarks in Act 5, Scene 1, where the gravedigger calculates his arrival at King Hamlet’s court, which corresponds to the birth of the younger Hamlet. Thirty years, he concludes. He confirms this calculation when he exposes Yorick’s skull and declares, “Here’s a skull now hath lien you i’ th’ earth three-and-twenty years.” This figure comports with Hamlet’s sweet remembrance that Yorick bore him “on his back a thousand times.”
Establishing that Hamlet is thirty and situating that revelation in the context of the discovery of the body of a long deceased and much loved older friend is deeply unsettling to the students. After all, they had taken Hamlet for a much younger man. How does this fact inform or change our understanding of who he is and why he acts the way he does? A skillful seminar leader will catch at these opportunities and drive them toward matters of greater consequence.
Fourth, note that all of these questions are harnessed to the text. In a Humane Letters seminar, wonder should be elicited by confronting the text and the knowledge and experience achieved by staying true to the text. Every contribution is susceptible to rebuke, verification, and modification by the text. The text, in other words, is the engine driving the seminar. In that light, not all readings of a text are defensible. It is a leader’s responsibility to make the boundaries clear and to teach the students to find those boundaries themselves. In company with the text, the teacher is the intellectual center of the classroom—intellectually alive, energetic, and opportunistic. In short, leaders have to be thinking on their feet about the material.
Finally, teachers must not outsource their responsibilities as seminar leaders by dividing their classes into mini-seminars, led by the students. Teachers are the singular leaders of the seminar and the only ones in the room who can lead the students to what they ought to know and experience. They create wonder by asking probing questions. They challenge the students to offer textual evidence and teach them what constitutes valid evidence and logical argument. They help their students identify their assumptions and their contradictions. They train them to treat symbols with dexterity, without becoming too brittle. Finally, they habitually model for their students how to disagree and not take offense and how to treat a text with respect and sensitivity to its imaginative world or its argument.
Notice all the active verbs in that list. That is the kind of active leadership that elicits wonder.
