Chapter Four: Kelly Sandbrink

Much to my surprise, I enjoyed reading this portion of the text, and often found myself nodding along to Gallagher's statements. In my own experiences, most teachers were "overteaching" the texts we were required to read in school. The summer before my senior year of high school, one of the books I was required to read was Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." I fell in love with the book; Hemingway's storytelling and his attention to details captured my attention like few novels up to that point had.

On the first day of school, my English teacher began discussing Hemingway, and introduced "The Old Man and the Sea" as our next assigned reading. As we explored the novel, my teacher killed any enjoyment I originally had in reading. X represented Y, which really represented Z, and it all added up to A. It all was jibberish to me, and I just wanted to read and enjoy the story. Because I tend to research things I don't fully understand, I started doing my own research on Hemingway. I found an interview a newspaper editor had had with Hemingway, in which he stated that he was only trying to tell a story he saw in his mind, and all the analyzing he heard people doing with "The Old Man and the Sea" was shit. That quote is verbatim now, of course, but it proved to me that we often misconstrue things, and lose the intended meaning, because we're so worried about looking for a deeper meaning. When I presented this to my English teacher, he told me that quote was "shit being spewed from a drunkard's mouth," and that it all meant something. At that point, a discussion ensued, and it wasn't pretty.

Regardless, I didn't pick up a book to read for enjoyment for years after that. What was the point? Over-analyzing has done nothing for me but beat a dead horse, whether I'm in a class, or re-teaching one of my students' English assignment. I think that we, as teachers, need to focus on the thinking skills, and the others will follow. We'll create a society of young people who can critically think for themselves, who can make connections to texts, and see the relationships.