“I’m no good at that hidden meaning stuff” – a phrase repeated by countless students over the years. They seem to think about reading as detective work, requiring a decoder ring.
So it’s the mid 1970’s. As a part-time lecturer I enter the classroom of a satellite campus of Delaware County Community College. They’ve given me a syllabus which lists specific texts, including one I love:
My Papa’s Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
………
“What do you notice when you read this poem?” I begin. We read it again.
“It rhymes.”
“Dancing drunk can be fun.”
“Sounds like the dad might work construction.”
“What gave you that idea?” I push a bit.
And then a kid from the back of the room pipes up. He has never said one word before this. “That drunk is abusing his kid.”
We all turn. Yes!!
How did you know that?” asks a girl intent on finding hidden meanings.
“Cuz that's what drunks do with their kids.” he replies.
Bringing the world to the word and the word to the world– that is in large part the fun of teaching.
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Years later I heard the same complaint about “hidden meanings” from my children’s literature students.
“Let’s think about Tuck Everlasting” (by Natalie Babbit) I would begin. “Why that title?’
No surprise– Tuck is the name of the main character. But let’s think about the word “tuck,” the meaning of tuck?
They participate. “A tuck, like a fold, in cloth?” “Something tucked away?” “A tuck like a roll in gymnastics?”
What would a tuck in time look and feel like? If not dazzled by the possibilities, we are all, at least, impressed.
Of course, I loved teaching, but more than that, I loved exploring text. I had a hard time imagining that they might not.
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One semester, when my daughter was in 4th grade, I sat propped up in bed grading papers. She stopped by to check me out as I audibly sighed. “My students just don’t ‘get’ metaphor.” I complained. “And I hate giving bad grades.”
“What's a metaphor?” she asked?
I did my best to explain briefly and she toddled off to play with Barbie’s.
About 15 minutes later she returned. “Is that like in the Wizard of Oz? They sing “when, troubles melt like lemon drops” and then the witch melts when Dorothy throws water at her?”
To some of us, nothing is exactly hidden. I tell my students to“think of it a bit like weeding a garden. You now see the trillium that was just sitting there, in plain sight, once you got past the stilt grass. Or maybe it’s like NOT being distracted by a woman’s clothes and make-up. Look at her bones, look at her stance.
How happy my daughter makes me, then and still.. Not only does she connect the world and the word, but she also makes meaning within and around and through text. She melts me.
When my students “got it,” they melted me, too.
My favorite! I enjoyed this so much. Thanks Wendy