In the Holt: Elements of Literature, Third Course textbook, standardized for 9th grade curriculum across the School District of Philadelphia, the story “Thank You, M’am” by Langston Hughes is framed to teach students about “Dialect,” as a literary device. Holt defines this device as, “the way of speaking characteristic of a particular region or group of people” (525). This is true enough, but this definition alone doesn’t provide students access to the academically rich landscape of dialect diversity and representation, much less put in perspective Hughes’s radically political act of employing dialect as a literary language. I wanted to help students to access, in some capacity, this ongoing debate of linguistic validation, to which dialectical diversity is key.
Dramatic Irony is a fun concept to teach, if only because it is a collision of an overdetermined term and a widely misunderstood term. To really get at it, you need to not only understand what irony actually means, but untangle the various definitions of “dramatic.” But all this is merely to hang a term on a feeling we’re all intimately familiar with. When I read the definition (“when the reader or audience knows something the character doesn’t”) I got the shrugs and subsequent obedient note taking of students for whom I might as well be speaking nonsense. These words are alien to their experience of narrative. Children crave immersion in narrative--to give them a definition of Dramatic Irony is to stake off a section of an unexamined ocean of spectatorship and expect them to tell it from the other waters.
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Louis FantiniLongtime Student,
First Time Teacher. Archives
March 2016
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