Two observations about teaching

• It's exceptionally difficult to unlearn my training, or to recognize impulses that I've never had.  "Relating," for example.  A few years ago, I had several students who declared, somewhat indignantly, that they couldn't "relate" to The Tempest.  ("Well, I should hope not," I wanted to respond--but didn't.)  I understand the desire to find something familiar in a text, the yearning to find one's own priorities and needs nested there.  But there's something so depressing about "I can't relate to it": it presumes that the reader's mental activity can end once she stumbles across unfamiliar (or unpleasant) ideas.  (May Sinclair's The Life and Death of Harriett Frean [1922] satirizes exactly this approach to literature.)  It's not always easy to explain to students that they must make the text interesting by attending to its qualities, especially if they've been taught to believe that the text should make itself interesting to them.  The difference between "relating to" and "having a relationship with," perhaps.
• This semester, I've found myself telling my students in comp that they must learn to read their own work.  The most successful students learn how to analyze their stylistic choices as choices, while the least successful remain, in effect, "passive" writers.  The most passive of passive writers is the cut-and-paste plagiarist: she drops text into paragraphs without "seeing" the discrepancies in style and grammar.  I wonder if there's any overlap between students who want to "relate to" a text and students who cannot distance themselves from their own prose. 

Comments

[ogged]

One teacher used to tell us that becoming comfortable with unfamiliar ideas was like learning to use a muscle that one isn't used to using: it's awkward and painful at first, but eventually feels natural, and, eventually, it can be enjoyable just to use it.

That doesn't help quite so much with interestingness, but isn't too far off.

[Frankie]

It’s not so much that these students can’t relate to what you call “unfamiliar (or unpleasant) ideas,” as that these students can’t relate to the SITUATIONS. In other words, some stories may be irrelevant to their lives. It is hard to grasp, and hard to be motivated to work to grasp, issues that do not occur in one's life. That’s not to say it is never worthwhile to learn about situations different from your own, but it is easier to understand and easier to see the value in stories about situations similar to one’s own. Stories of this sort enrich our understanding of our own life, and provide valuable and, yes, useful, insights.

What is your view on this interpretation of “can’t relate to”?

Frankie

[random_name]

There can only be one response to a student complaining about being unable to "relate" to a text:

"You're relating to it now. It's in the syllabus. You're related to it in that you have to read it. If you don't read it, you can learn to relate yourself to a big fat D-. Don't talk to me about relating. Read it. Understand it. Leave your damned ego ('it has to relate to me for me to bend my brain toward understanding it') out of it."

[Bob]

I disagree with you on this. We all have a need to "relate" to whatever we're attempting to study. You and I can be engaged by literature in all kinds of ways intellectually, but some students are unready to do this on almost any level without help. Like all of us they need to find an emotional connection with the play's conflicts and then to build on that. Certainly, Shakespeare himself understood this point extremely well.
Also, a sweet and happy new year.

[Vance Maverick]

Your students are certainly being lazy, even arrogant, in declining to think about ways the material might be valuable to them. But I think Frankie's practical suggestion is a big mistake. You can't just say that the material is valuable because you're teaching it. Somehow you need to find a gentle way to push them towards opening their minds to it -- showing them that indeed they can relate to anything, no matter how exotic. "Nothing human is alien to me" is a mental virtue for which literature provides good practice.