Throughout the months of January and February, my Senior English Seminar class conducts seven seminars on Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a cycle of stories about a platoon in Vietnam before, during, and after the war. The book is a 20th century literary masterpiece and requires the students to wrestle with ambiguity. Over the course of the seven seminars, the students begin to piece together the myriad patterns O’Brien lays out in his book and to answer their own questions about why he writes the book the way he does, which, inevitably, leads to even more, and better, questions.
Seminars have become central to our teaching in all disciplines at Lawrence Academy and are, perhaps, one of the most challenging forms of assessment we undertake. We emphasize that seminars are exercises in group work; discussions, not debates. If we wanted to hear each student defend his idea, we would ask for essays or speeches. Instead, seminars are intended to promote the discovery, not presentation, of ideas, with the benefit of several minds cooperating with one another in search of new and greater understanding. We warn them that, in the spirit of good scholarship, this process will not lead them to “the answer,” only to more, and better, questions.
By their senior year, in fact, we no longer provide a seminar question to guide the discussion. Instead, the students arrive in class prepared to ask questions of their own, allowing them the opportunity to listen and think in the moment, prepared with a working knowledge of the text and enough nourishment and rest to practice being truthful, thoughtful, and thorough – the principles of good scholarship, or “The 3 Ts.”
A common misconception is that seminars only assess speaking. In fact, in the spirit of cooperative group work, they require students to multi-task, using three essential intellectual skills: speaking and listening and thinking. Above all, however, seminars are exercises in listening for both the students and the teacher. Seminars involve detecting verbal cues as well as physical cues, tone of voice as well as body language, and developing a keen ear for authenticity. While the teacher listens in order to assess each student’s execution of the three intellectual skills and to ensure that the students’ ideas are genuine and of intellectual integrity, the students listen in order to connect their ideas to the ideas of their peers, to build on valid and substantive ones, and to challenge ones that have no basis in the text, are superficial, or seem to belong to someone else.
Often, students are tempted to peek at Spark Notes or some other resource, of which there are many available on the Internet, to help them do the work we tell them they can do on their own and, in fact, do much better. We remind them of “The 3 Ts” and to practice our own good listening, prepared to blow the Spark Notes whistle when we hear the buzz of pre-packaged thinking.
This past winter, in their third seminar, the students came into my classroom a little too prepared with answers they had apparently already discovered and were eager to present and defend, answers that were a little too fully formed with little textual evidence and which not only did not ring with the customary clumsiness of genuine high school senior thinking, but also did not subscribe to the notion that a seminar is intended to be a group exercise in discovery.
Within the first 15 minutes of the 50-minute seminar, they were getting ready to settle on an “answer,” when Luis, a boy from the Canary Islands, spoke up. “That all makes sense, I guess, but I am still confused by this chapter,” he began. In my notes on the seminar performance grid, I commented on his allegiance to “The 3 Ts,” and while he received one check in the margin for speaking, he received three checks in the grid: attempted to define terms, drew out/included others, and returned focus.
At the beginning of each seminar, the students write on the back of their seminar performance grid about their goals for speaking, listening, and thinking, as well as how much sleep they got the night before, what they ate for breakfast, and how they prepared. At the end, they write about how they think they did.
In my grading of their seminars, I respond to their comments on the back of the grid and write my assessment on the front of the grid, copying out the comments I make on that student’s performance during the seminar, and giving him or her a grade based on a ratio of the number of times the student spoke to the number of check marks he or she got in the grid and the quality of the thinking used when he or she spoke. Quality of thinking is gauged based on three levels of interpretive analysis: reader, character, and writer. A student who can think at all three levels and recognizes the difference between the three is capable of earning an A.
Before I return the grids, I give some general comments on what worked in that seminar and on what needs work for the next seminar. The day I handed back their grids on that third seminar, I told them I was about ready to blow the Spark Notes whistle when Luis rescued all of them by saying he was confused. He was practicing “The 3 Ts,” and he was listening and thinking before he began speaking. What is more, he got the rest of the class to start listening and thinking, too, dismissing their pre-packaged “answers” in favor of genuine group discovery, a task they all eventually engaged in with stumbling uncertainty and at which they achieved a modicum of real success, breaking apart the layers of narration and unearthing the possibility that nothing in the story is true, which, of course, inspired more questions.
Every year in the seventh seminar of the series on The Things They Carried, my students begin to put the pieces of this text together. No matter how much they have struggled and how far they are from a full understanding, I have learned to have faith in this seven seminar process because O’Brien’s book always leads them to the next questions they need to ask and because the book is so good at making them care about asking those questions, especially if I manage to shut up and listen to them do the necessary work on their own, using the three-level thinking tools they have been practicing throughout their Lawrence Academy careers. The last chapter generally proves to be cathartic, introducing a new element to the text and tugging at the heart strings in ways none of the other gut-wrenching chapters have yet done.
In this past winter’s final seminar, the students were trying to answer a question they try to answer every year, “Why does O’Brien name his narrator after himself and call the book a work of fiction?” After 30 minutes, some of them were starting to get goofy with their answers, taking a mental breather, and evading the necessity to deeply engage, while others were buying time to think. All of a sudden, Ryan, a day student from Townsend, MA, who was sitting next to me and who had yet to say anything in that day’s seminar, lifted his head and sat back in his chair, his eyes wide. No one saw him do this but me.
This was not the first time I had seen a student have a physical reaction to an “aha moment.” I waited while the girl who was speaking finished her sentence; then did something I rarely do in a student-centered seminar; I interrupted.
“What happened?” I asked Ryan, already knowing the answer.
He looked at me, a little dazed and, as his classmates watched, he tried to articulate the very complex and ambiguous idea he was only beginning to formulate. His classmates were stunned. The room was silent, and even a little reverent; then the rest of them started to build on Ryan’s idea until they got stuck again, complaining that their heads were actually starting to hurt, that they felt they were both more confused than ever and closer to understanding.
Ryan had three such physical manifestations of eureka moments in that seminar. None of them was staged or exaggerated for dramatic effect. All were genuine, and, by the third one, his classmates were noticing his body’s physical response to the workings of his mind and fell silent to listen to his next attempt at crystallizing the ideas they all were striving to grasp.
Proud of each foray into cooperative group thinking, they kept asking me, “Are we right?”
Each time, I shrugged my shoulders and smiled back at their hopeful, equally smiling faces. “I don’t know. Are you?” I asked, then shut up and listened.
They responded with a groan, which evolved into an extended silence while they once again wrestled with O’Brien’s intentional ambiguity until someone else ventured another idea that they would discuss with the authentic intellectual vigor I have learned to anticipate in these seven student-centered seminars on O’Brien’s book; anticipate and celebrate.
At the end of the 50 minutes, their heads were killing them, and, though they had no answers, only more – and better – questions, I told them they had done it. They had engaged in good scholarship, wrestled with ambiguity, thought creatively and critically at great depth, and done so by listening to each other. However, I didn’t need to tell them that. They already knew. They could actually feel the glorious pain of it; a pain that, I told them, now that they knew what it felt like and understood what it was, they could seek again and again and again. Then I left the classroom, walked into the English office, and started to dance.
LESSON PLANS AND RUBRICS:
THE 3 T’s – GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF GOOD SCHOLARSHIP:
TRUTHFUL, THOUGHTFUL, THOROUGH
I. THE THING THEY CARRIED SEMINARS:
Each seminar presents a new degree of challenge in levels of thinking and complexity of connectedness. Allow a night of preparation for each story assigned for the seminar and ask students to use the three levels of interpretive analysis prompt sheet to generate their questions and ensure their knowledge of the text.
- “On the Rainy River” – discuss with particular emphasis on level 2
- “How to Tell a True War Story” – discuss with particular emphasis on levels 1 & 3
- “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” – discuss at all 3 levels
- “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush” – connect 2 stories on same incident at all 3 levels
- The five field stories: “Speaking of Courage,” “Notes,” “In the Field,” Good Form,” and “Field Trip” – connect 5 stories revolving around the same incident at all 3 levels
- “Ghost Soldiers” and “Night Life” – connect 2 stories to each other and rest of text at all 3 levels
- “The Lives of the Dead” – connect final story to rest of text at all 3 levels with particular emphasis on the differences between levels 2 & 3
II. THREE LEVELS OF INTERPRETIVE ANALYSIS PROMPT SHEET:
As you think about the text at all three levels, remember that the levels work in an endless feedback loop. If you get stuck at level 3, go back to level 1 and remind yourself of the feelings the writer evoked in you. Then examine the text for the tools of the craft the writer used to get you to feel that way. If you are thinking at level 2, remember that the choices the writer makes for what happens in the book, the order of events, and the actions and reactions of the characters are also level 3 choices.
Level 1: READER LEVEL: your own personal reactions to the text – what the text reminds you of from your own experience, an idea the text inspires in you, what you liked and didn’t like in the text, how the text connects to other books, movies, songs, or local or world events. Your personal connections, thoughts, ideas and memories may be sparked by an event, a character, a detail, a turn of phrase. Be sure to note the specifics in the text that sparked your level 1 thinking.
Level 2: CHARACTER LEVEL: the plot and events in the text; the main characters and what you know about them, what you think makes them act the way they do. Use the seven ways a writer creates character: 1. What he says 2. What he does. 3. What he thinks. 4. What others think of him, how they react to him. 5. Background information, personal history and direct description. 6. Physical appearance. 7. The differences between ways 1-6. Be sure to note specifics in the text that support your level 2 thinking.
Level 3: WRITER LEVEL: what the writer is trying to say; his or her choices in putting the text together: structure, parallels, point of view, the seven ways to build character, word choice, patterns (both repetition and variation) in imagery and language and ideas/themes – places in the text where the writer is suggesting ideas without stating them. (Remember never to assume the narrator and the writer are the same person!) Be sure to note specifics in the text that support your level 3 thinking.
THE 3 T’s – GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF GOOD SCHOLARSHIP:
TRUTHFUL, THOUGHTFUL, THOROUGH
III. SEMINAR PERFORMANCE GRID
IV. SEMINAR GRADING RUBRIC: SPEAKING, LISTENING, THINKING
A range work:________________________________________________________________
Mastery of all three skills: speaking, listening, and thinking
Thinking at all three levels and knowing the difference between them
Connecting ideas and synthesizing them
Demonstrated knowledge of text and ideas in text
2:1 ratio or higher
B range work:_______________________________________________________________
Mastery of 2-3 skills: speaking, listening, thinking
Thinking at level 1 and 2 and knowing the difference, making level 3 observations
Demonstrated knowledge of text
Connecting ideas
Better than a 1:1 ratio
C range work:________________________________________________________________
mastery of 1-2 skills: speaking, listening, thinking
Thinking at level 1
Level 2 basic understanding plot and knowledge of text
1:1 ratio
D/F range work:______________________________________________________________
No knowledge of text
No mastery of skill
Ddistracting others, detracting from discussion
THE 3 T’s – GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF GOOD SCHOLARSHIP:
TRUTHFUL, THOUGHTFUL, THOROUGH
V. LEVEL ONE REFLECTION ON SEMINARS:
Using the notes and comments on the front and back of your graded seminar performance grids, you are to write a level one response to all seven of the seminars in which you have participated over the past term. Keep in mind the 3 T’s as you reflect on your own scholarship. Your response should include the following:
- Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses preparing for seminars.
- Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses as a speaker,
- A listener
- And a thinker at levels 1, 2, and 3.
- Reflect on improvements you have made over the course of the seven seminars.