Outreach Blog 3

Outreach Blog 3

My third engagement was the same as the first and second, a four hour session on the twenty-third of October from eight in the morning to noon.  The location was again Mrs. Fyke’s classroom at Dexter High School.  The participants were the students in her three freshman English classes and a class of sophomore English students. This outreach has forced me to develop my forethought and planning skills.  My first engagement with the students felt forced and lopsided.  I felt like I was leading them by the nose through the story rather than helping them to discover it for themselves.  I needed to know the story well enough to be able to investigate it on the fly to keep up with the story well enough to be able to investigate it on the fly to keep up with the pace of the class.  I needed to be familiar enough with it to ask prevalent questions.  We read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado in class.  The story is about a man buries another man alive, seemingly, as revenge for a perceived wrong he’d suffered at his victim’s hands.

            I asked them fairly open ended questions.  “Why did Montresor kill Fortunado?”  They would give an answer and I would ask them to return to the text to support their claim.

            Often the more tangential claims were left open or were later retracted by the students.  There were some notable exceptions though where students made claims about the narrative or characters that weren’t affirmed later in the text but there was no further evidence to refute it.  Their fresh insight gave them an untainted or unbiased reading.  They weren’t looking for any Freudian symbols, weren’t trying to draw Marxist hierarchies or trying to make a convoluted argument denying some form of authorship.  Some of the students highlighted points of tension in the story I had laid to rest.  Other challenged it in way I hadn’t imagined!