Analysis Blues · Wed Jan 16, 00:14 by Eleri Straker
Well, after a long absence (brought about by the frustration of having to close my comments section owing to some moron sending a spam bomb that contaminated my site with obscenities) I’m back.
I have a student in my year 13 class who is both delightful and clever. Over the last twelve months or so he has developed not only a wonderful appreciation of literature, but also an absolutely lovely writing style. However, despite having a wonderful, insightful grasp of literature, he has a blind spot when it comes to language analysis. He understands it, when answering questions in class, he can do it orally, but when it comes to writing it down…that’s another matter. In fact, this student has to resit part of his literature exam as he forgot to include any language analysis in his last attempt. I read his essay when his paper was recalled and it was a good essay, but completely lacking in the analysis area.
Over the intervening months the situation improved, then all of a sudden it started again. All these wonderful, insightful essays, beautifully crafted, but with no analysis of language or structure. Only ideas.
Tomorrow is the re-sit.
An essay arrived yesterday. Beautiful work. Elegant and articulate. Ideas clearly understood. Beautifully conceptualised.
No analysis…I could have wept.
We went over the essay with a fine tooth comb. He could see what was lacking. So I asked him why he didn’t write down the analysis and he simply shrugged and said that he didn’t know.
I pointed out that it didn’t make sense as he can do the analysis on Shakespeare, so why couldn’t he transfer the skills across to the Wilde play. (His problem is analysing Wilde’s language).
We spent an hour analysing sections of the play and he went away saying he would work on it.
I have to admit that I felt quite depressed about the whole thing. He’s one of my best and nicest pupils and I could see him not achieving his expected A grade because of this blind spot.
So I found a few lines from the play (a snippet of conversation between two of the female characters discussing the notion of women as property) and wrote out an analysis of Wilde’s use of the word ‘property’. ( It’s all to do with the frequency of the word – four times in as many lines, the alliteration of the words that accompany it, its position in the sentence etc.) and sent it to him.
This morning, he turned up in the English office. He had with him a sheet of paper on which he had written down some ten or twelve extracts from the play, each one accompanied by a paragraph about them.
The first one was, in his own words, “a bit pants Miss.” But as I read down the page I could see that he was beginning to understand the analysis element required, and each successive extract was more closely analysed than its predecessor.
His final choice was simply one line followed by the question, “Inversion?”
“Explain,” I said. So he did. Was the sentence he’d chosen an example of Wilde turning conventional ideas on their heads to make a point?
“Go on,” I said, helpful as ever. He went on to explain that he believed that Wilde had deliberately inverted a statement to create unexpected humour which actually drew attention to what was a serious point… and then came the crunch… and the inversion was created by leaving out a specific word (in this case ‘not’) and that one omission completely altered and undermined the contemporary attitudes of Edwardian England…
At that point, I handed back the sheet of paper and smiled. He’d got it.
The point of this story is not that this student finally grasped a specific technique at the very last minute. No, the point is that rather than shrug his shoulders and decide that he wasn’t going to get it in time and that he’d have to settle for a B, he went away and spent an entire evening struggling to get on top of the thing that was preventing him from acing the topic. He wasn’t going to ‘just make do’. And when he’d spent his last evening doing what he called a ‘blitzkrieg’ on analysis, he then came searching for me, found out when I was free and made damn sure that he wasn’t leaving until he’d spent another hour with Oscar and me. Now that’s dedication.
And that’s another reason why we do it.
