Home: Leila Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic Realism
Associate
Through The Aesthetic Realism Teaching
Method, Interest Wins, Cynicism Loses—
In Students & Teachers
Leila
Rosen
1996
Published in The
English Record of the
|
I |
am
proud to have seen: the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method can change the
pervasive dullness, cynicism, and lack of interest in both students and
teachers—and make classrooms dynamic with real learning and pleasure! This has happened in my classroom, and with
each year I am grateful to say I care more for my students and the subject I
teach, high school English-and I know this is what every teacher can feel.
Eli Siegel, the greatest
person of thought ever to live, defined interest as "the state of a self
in which it wishes to be of
something." Interest is at the very
basis of what Aesthetic Realism shows is the purpose of all education: to like the world through knowing it. And the reason we can like this world, Mr. Siegel showed, is that it is made well,
and its structure is related to our own: "The world, art, and self explain
each other," he stated, "each is the aesthetic oneness of
opposites."
Aesthetic Realism also explains the fight raging in
every teacher and student between interest and cynicism; between enthusiasm
about learning and the feeling "Who needs this?" As a teacher at
I am one of the most
fortunate teachers ever, because as I have studied Aesthetic Realism I have
heard what every teacher needs to hear—clear, honest criticism of my contempt, my desire to meet young
people with smug superiority. And I am proud that I can criticize myself,
sometimes in the midst of a lesson, and have a good effect on my students.
1. Adjectives Encourage Interest, Oppose
Cynicism!
I tell now what my 9th grade English
classes learned last term as we studied a subject that has made for many groans
of "Who cares? What do I have to know that for?"—grammar. I told my students what I learned from
Aesthetic Realism: the very existence of language arose from the drive in
people to like the world by giving things names—words that can stay within us
even when the object is gone. Words
arose from the feeling: "I want these things outside me—say a flower, a
moon—also to be in me in a permanent
way, and I want to be able to tell other people about them." Adjectives, I told the class, stand for one
of the great ways people wish "to be of
something." "An
adjective," states our Macmillan
textbook Grammar and Writing "is
a word that tells more about a noun or pronoun." My students would come to love adjectives as
they saw that a world that has adjectives in it is a world that is
interesting! Adjectives are utterly
opposed to the cynical feeling that the world is dull and doesn't come to
much. When a noun like street can be seen as having many
different qualities—it is busy, it
is wet, it is crowded, it is colorful;
and with each adjective this thing, this noun, this street is seen with greater
exactitude and wonder—it is interesting!
The young people in my
classes—mostly of African-American and Hispanic backgrounds, with families from
the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Ecuador—travel to Norman
Thomas High School from the Lower East Side, Washington Heights, East Harlem,
the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Many of them
have endured a great deal, including tragedy, in their 14 or 15 years. They feel unsafe walking around their
neighborhoods, where friends or family members have been hurt, even killed, in
drug-related shootings. And they have
met horrible racial and economic cruelty which encourages great cynicism, and
despair.
At the beginning of the
term the situation was one familiar to many teachers and which they have used
for anger and cynicism. These students had a mingling of excitement at being in
a new school and dullness; interest and a cynical "Yeah? Show me" attitude that was steep. The atmosphere in this 8th period
class was chaotic. Many students came
late every day—then sat passively until I reminded them to take out their
notebooks. Clarisa and Mayra, who were
best friends, came in talking loudly, and continued even though their seats
were on opposite sides of the room. Ten
minutes after the period began, Kaseem would bang loudly on the door, which was
unlocked, come in, and immediately start talking about some other subject than
the one we were studying. I had to
repeat myself several times before they would listen—and often, when I asked
for their assignments, they looked puzzled: "We had homework?" Most of these students had difficulty reading
and writing and were below grade level, and I saw they were tormented feeling
they couldn't stay still or listen
very long. Yet even as it was hard
sometimes to go on with a lesson as I planned it, I knew these students wanted
desperately to respect themselves for how they used their minds.
We began to study
adjectives the week of the huge blizzard that blanketed the city with over a
foot of snow. I asked the class what
they thought of the snow—did they like it?
Most said, "Yes!"
"How would you describe it?," I asked. "It was really cold," said Manuel
Santos. Mayra said she liked the big
flakes as they fell. Several young men
said they liked playing football in the snow: when you fell, it was soft. Lots of hands went up to say more about the
snow. As I wrote their observations on
the board, I wanted them to see they were using adjectives. "It was soft and fluffy," said
Sandra. Other students spoke with
pleasure of the tall snowdrifts; how the snow seemed dry, but was wet as it
melted; how it was "shiny in the moonlight." When Roberto said he liked how pure and white
it was, Carmen scoffed, "Yea, but only in the beginning. Then it got all gray and dirty." Other students objected to her cynicism—meanwhile,
I pointed out gray and dirty are adjectives—as are the other
words they mentioned—all aspects or forms
of the snow: cold, tall, wet, dry,
shiny, white.
We read the definition I
quoted from our textbook: "An adjective is a word that tells more about a
noun or pronoun." And I asked: "As soon as you start to tell more about
something, does that show you're interested in it?" It does.
Then I read these sentences from Eli Siegel's great work Definitions and Comment: Being a Description
of the World:
An
adjective is a word showing the world as form. …A noun can have an indefinite number of adjectives,
each one of which shows what the noun can be, or what the object for which the
noun stands can be.
We saw that a noun like
"snow," while interesting in itself, can seem general. And, I asked, "As we began to describe
it, say more about its color, texture, temperature, size, using specific
adjectives, were we heightening its meaning by seeing the snow more as it was, or adding things to the
snow that it didn't have?" They
were interested in this question and said, "More as it was." "If there is an indefinite number of
adjectives telling what a thing can be, while it is still just one thing,"
I asked, "does this show we can see greater and greater meaning in it all
the time?" This is so important and opposes the life-sapping dulling of
things that I have seen stops students from learning. The students began to see that the structure
of language itself is against a person's desire to flatten things, take them
for granted, put them aside. And
Aesthetic Realism is terrifically scientific and kind in showing that even the
most painful things—including many my students have met—can be described
exactly, and that adjectives, come to by people we never met over hundreds of
years, enable us to do so.
2. What Adjectives Can Teach Us about People
Among these students, as in
most
I hate people who can't act their age.
They don't even try. What they call
serious and mature sounds like something from a worn-out tv rerun.
One result of this contempt
is in how I wrote of myself:
Lately, everything seems blurred. I walk out on a clean, bright day expecting
to see the sun, fresh snow, a clear sky. Instead I only see slush, and clouds
woven throughout the sky. People are
merely animated objects moving around me. Then I see my reflection and it's a
blurred, fuzzy picture.
I am more grateful than I
have words to say that, only a few years later, I had the tremendous good
fortune to begin studying Aesthetic Realism and to learn the reason I saw the
world and people as a meaningless blur and despised myself. In the second Aesthetic Realism class I had
the honor to attend taught by Eli Siegel, Mr. Siegel asked me: "Have you
found people dull?" I said yes, and
he asked: "Do you think they are? Do you think the way you've seen things and
people has been interesting enough for you?" No, it wasn't! Mr. Siegel asked me if I had wanted people,
including men and my mother, to mean as little as possible. I had, and he asked: "What, then, is the
best thing here? Aesthetic Realism has a
phrase: 'the miracle of exactitude.' The
idea is to see a person exactly as he is."
I love Mr. Siegel for teaching me that the world I had scorned has a
structure that makes sense, is exciting, beautiful—and that people whom I had
dulled in my mind are, in fact, interesting,
because every single person is a unique relation of reality's opposites.
I told my students that like a noun, every person in that
classroom and anywhere is both one and many, has thousands of aspects, and can
be described with vividness and exactitude by adjectives true about him—each
showing what that person is and can be.
I told them that the more I wanted to see this, the more I saw how truly
interesting people are, and the more I respected myself. The fact that this continues to happen with
every year of my life as I study in great and exciting classes taught by Ellen
Reiss, is cause for unending gratitude.
3. My Students Begin to Write with New Interest!
At the beginning of the
year, I saw that many of the sentences they wrote were short and seemed
constrained and flat. They also had few
or no adjectives. In order to have these
ninth graders feel the world, and therefore write, with more deep interest and
freedom, I asked them to describe the qualities in a particular object. For this purpose I brought in various
familiar fruits—oranges, two kinds of pears, and several different kinds of
apples.
I divided the class into groups and gave each group a piece
of fruit and a plastic knife, and asked them to 1) spend about 5 minutes
observing the outside of the fruit—its weight, texture, color, smell, shape—and
then, 2) write down their observations, using adjectives as accurately as they
could; then, they would do the same for the inside. Some students were annoyed: "Do we have
to? I know what an orange tastes
like."
I said we would look at one fruit together first. I took out a light green, unusually shaped
fruit none of my students had ever seen before and which I had never
tasted. In seconds, half the class was
gathered around my desk, looking at it with great interest. "What's that?" they asked. I held it on its side, revealing its
star-like shape and asked if they could guess what it was called. They did: a star fruit. Everyone wanted to look at it, feel it, smell
it. We started to describe it, and they
asked, "What does it taste like?"
I cut into its smooth, shiny, dry skin.
"Wow! Look at all that green
juice coming out!" said Carmen. I
cut and peeled some small pieces and many students wanted to taste it. "It's kind of sweet," said
Denise. I said I thought it was a little
bit tart, too. "It's crunchy,"
said Roberto, "but it's also soft."
These are opposites and they are also adjectives—sweet and tart; soft
and crunchy." "Do these words
describe both things in the world and
yourself?" They said yes. Carmen said she was hard and soft—her skin
was very soft, and her fingernails were hard.
"And are you stubborn," I asked, "and also
gentle?" She smiled. "Yes." Seeing this opposes the cynical feeling,
which Carmen had intensely, that nothing and no one can understand or explain
us—a feeling Aesthetic Realism can end in every person. "If the same adjectives that describe things
outside ourselves can also be used to describe us, does that show we are deeply
related to what is outside us, and should be interested in knowing
it?" They said YES.
For homework, I asked them to write a composition describing
what they observed about the fruit they had been given, using adjectives to
show what it is; and then, to say how they had the same qualities in
themselves. When they handed in their
compositions the next day, they looked so proud. These were the longest, most careful and most
detailed pieces of writing most of them had done all term. This is from Manuel's composition:
The orange is sweet and sour. Its skin looks smooth, but it has rough bumps
around it. The orange is one unit on the
outside but is broken up into different parts on the inside. It is dry on the
outside but the inside is very moist.
The orange is very much like me.
I'm a sweet person, but at times I can be very sour, meaning mean or
bad. Most of my skin is smooth but parts
are very rough. I'm one unit on the
outside, but on the inside, my body is separated by bones and by organs. I'm dry on the outside, but on the inside I'm
surrounded by liquids.
My students came to love
adjectives, to use them with pleasure in their writing and also to recognize
and care for them in sentences they read.
I love the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method for strengthening and
bringing to life—in students and teachers alike—real interest, honest
excitement about the world and what is in it!
That is what will happen everywhere when this beautiful, kind method is
standard in classrooms across the nation—and the future of education depends on
it.
©2004 Leila Rosen