But with controversy in mind, I looked back over my lesson plan, reflecting on how I lead the post-reading discussion with period 3. We had just finished “The Cask of Amontillado,” with a focus on unreliable narrator, and the final guiding question of our debrief discussion was “What is Montresor’s mental state at the end of the story?” The result was a few grumbled “he’s crazy”s. Overall, the class enjoyed the story—it’s hard not to—but the discussion didn’t tap into their enjoyment. One of the objectives of secondary English is to initiate students into literary analysis as a vibrant process of developing an interpretation and defending it from criticism. Good discussion approaches this—the facilitator helps identify and refine student thought, verbal expression carries student thinking further than their internal, often unconscious, meaning-making, and room is created for dissent and alternate interpretations. Bad discussion feels like a formality—something your English teacher makes you do to check if you understood, and rather than ideas being posited and responded to, students simply dutifully answer the teacher’s questions, which are blandly affirmed, rather than refined and posed back to the class for response.
Period 3 felt much like the latter kind of discussion. Numerous factors contributed to this, but my question, “What is Montresor’s mental state at the end of the story?” stuck out to me. It’s a bad question—it’s obviously driving at one interpretation. Astute students could probably tell the answer to this question is “he’s crazy” without having read the story. With “structured academic controversy” in mind, I restructured my debrief, replacing my bland question with the simpler, better, “Is Montresor crazy?”
The result was immediate. A chorus of “yes” was answered by an enthusiastic sect of dissenters, and we were off:
S1: “I think he’s very dedicated to his revenge plan!”
Me: “First, let’s from somebody who thinks that he is crazy… and if you have an example from the text that would be even better.”
S2: “I think he’s crazy because for one he has revenge on somebody and we don’t even really know what the revenge is for. And then number two, he buried him alive.”
Me: “So, that’s a good point. How he actually extracts his revenge is pretty grim, and terrible, and awful. But then also, there’s the question of what did he even do? We don’t even know what Fortunato did to him to cause this reaction. How about someone who thinks he’s not crazy?”
S1: “So, what she said, where he, like, killed him, like, in a pretty grim way. Well people who are, like, you know, like soldiers, they kill people in pretty grim ways, I mean, does that make all of them insane?”
S2: “For a purpose!”
S1: “Well, he killed him for a purpose too!”
S2: “What purpose?”
S1: “To get his revenge!”
Laugher
Me: “Then the question becomes: if you’re so obsessed with revenge that you’re willing to kill someone, does that makes you crazy?”
S3: “I don’t think he’s crazy because… Well, I think he’s a smart thinking, proud man. So, he’s smart, like, he didn’t just slash his throat in front of everybody at the palazzo. He took him down and actually thought it through what he’s going to do to him. Like, he’s thinking it through, most people that murder people just stab them and run away.”
Me: “So you think that the fact that he was so methodical mean’s that he’s not crazy. Does anyone have a response to that?”
S4: “I think he’s crazy because he took all that time and effort thinking about how he’s going to kill him.”
Me: “I kind of thought the same thing! The methodical nature of it made him seem more crazy rather than less crazy.”
S1: “But if you’re completely insane, you wouldn’t be able to think past just killing them… So he was smart! He also protected himself. Who’s going to go down to the bottom of the cask where there’s a bunch of salt that can kill you? No one! So you can just leave him down there, nobody will know about it, and, I mean, you keep yourself protected! You’re still respectable in the community!”
Works Referenced
Johnson, David W., & Johnson, Roger T. (1988). Critical Thinking Through Structured Controversy. Educational Leadership. 45:8. 58-64.