I have been posting a series of classroom observations in a style I haven’t seen – a stream of consciousness reflection of what I think as I watch class unfold. Let me know if you’ve run across this type of observation before.

Waiting for students to arrive at class. The teacher plays an orchestral version of a popular Mexican pop song through speakers on his desk. Soft, welcoming. 

I know the lesson today is going to be about looking at literature through different perspectives, different lenses, as the teacher has told me. I think of rose colored glasses, that is, seeing everything in a positive light, perhaps a bit naively. That’s not exactly what this lesson is about, I know, but our thoughts sort of bring us where they want to bring us. Like a Max Frisch quote from Homo Faber that I memorized once when I was learning German, something like: “Ich sage nicht was ich will, sondern was die Sprache will.” (I don’t say what I want to, but rather what the language wants to.) So yeah, I’m thinking of rose colored glasses, and then about Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, which leads my thoughts to beige colored glasses, and maroon, and magenta, and taupe. I’m now hearing the musical in my head. Donny Osmond, specifically, who played Joseph.

After the last students take a seat the teacher fades the music and sounds a gong, a bowl actually, an object and an act that makes me think of Tibet or Nepal. The reverberations are calming, centering. I leave Donny and the dreamcoat, I’m here for literature analysis.

The students are going to choose a famous fairy tale, or a popular movie, to deconstruct. They are going to apply a lens, a particular perspective, a way to analyze the stories. 

This is a grade 12 English class. The example text is The Three Little Pigs, their straw, wood, and brick houses. This teacher is good. Not everyone could get away using stories for children for these young adults. For that matter, not everyone can get away starting class with a moment of bowl-ringing mindfulness. 

“What’s the moral of the story?” he asks the class.

“Instead of playing, you should build a better house,” says a student from Azerbaijan. “Work over pleasure,” adds another student from across the room. The teacher has them thinking, all he has to do is nod. Students call out more possible morals. 

And then we’re watching an advertisement for the British newspaper, The Guardian. A spoof on the story of the three little pigs. Police in combat gear raid their houses. We see the three little pigs in court. The wolves seem to have the upper hand at city hall. They have control of the story, it doesn’t look good for the pigs. They are accused of insurance fraud. The destruction of their houses at the hands of the wolf is, in fact, the fault of the pigs. Of course it is, when the wolf has the loudest voice.

We are thinking of the story differently.

“Let’s switch gears,” says the teacher. “Now we are going to consider the story of the pigs with a semiotic lens.” He projects a slide that asks How are the wolf and each pig polysemic? Semiotics is the study of signs. I remember Charles Sanders Peirce, the American philosopher. Polysemic is then multiple signs, more or less. The wolf represents more than one thing, as do the pigs. A simple story, but as the students suggest multiple interpretations it gets complex, fast. Parallels with Marxism, the working class. Reference to manufacturing consent. Do fairy tales use fear to force kids into line, to get them to think a certain way? Innocent-seeming stories that serve to brainwash?

“And now what about a feminist lens?” the teacher asks. What might change? What do we notice?” I can’t hear the students well, they are discussing in pairs and small groups. So I tune them out and think about The Three Little Pigs through a feminist lens.

What is it to be a feminist? To notice oppression, to notice inequality, to raise up women, to make the experience of being a woman normal? Or extraordinary? I realize I don’t know what a feminist is. Is it a stretch to analyze the story in this way? Of course, perhaps that is the point – to push how we think about stories over some sort of boundary we had assumed was common sense. To consider a story from a feminist point of view, to think about what a story might have to say about race, relationships, religion, power structures, social mores is to challenge ourselves, to widen our view. Literature helps us understand our world. Literature class helps us expand what we get out of literature. 

The teacher switches slides. Now Miss Piggy is looking at us from the screen, the Jim Henson muppet. The first line on the slide says: The absence of female characters in The Three Little Pigs reflects a traditional patriarchal narrative where women are often …

I can hear this conversation echoing in the high ceilinged rooms of ivy covered stone buildings, English majors and students of liberal arts getting passionate, strident. And I can hear at the same time the conversation being dismissed as nonsense. I picture a derisive group of old men sitting around their regular table at the donut shop, holding their coffee cups with both hands, MAGA hats, John Deere hats, suspenders. “Liberal nonsense!” they all agree, nodding, scratching. I’m an awful repository of prejudice.

Students select a story now, for further analysis. Goldilocks, Cinderella, Popeye the Sailorman, The Tortoise and the Hare. Well known stories, at least in America. Mulan and Shrek.

“Consider each story through these literary lenses. What do they tell you about you, us about us?”

While they do that I have the opportunity to interview two students. The teacher sends me out of the room with them both. A Russian student, a boy, says he thinks the lenses are almost too much. I think about my reaction to the feminist lens. “Like the feminist lens,” he says, as if reading my mind. “It’s not always applicable. But the lenses help me know how to respond to literature for the final exam. It’s important I score high, the universities I applied to are looking for a high score.”

The other student, a girl from Poland, never mentions the final exam. “It’s amazing,” she says. “The class is amazing. Looking at literature from multiple perspectives helps me really understand the authors better, and the authors’ intent.”

And does seeing things from another’s perspective help you think better in general?

“Oh,” she says, with refreshing honesty, particularly in someone so obviously intelligent. “I hadn’t thought of that. But yes. Definitely.”