\n<\/p>\n
I have a rule for myself in freshman English that I don\u2019t assign readings that require much explanation. If I continually have to provide background of a work\u2019s history and context, it means the students are awaiting a deus ex machina, AI or me to summarize and simplify. I seek out readings that feature conversational voices that create an immediate, imaginable world that my students can understand on their own\u2014that is, read<\/em>.<\/p>\n Every year, though, I make one exception to this rule and assign either Sophocles\u2019s Oedipus the King<\/em> or Antigone<\/em>. They don\u2019t get any easier, no matter how many times I teach them, but they\u2019re worth the effort because they\u2019re sublime, and the range of topics they provide us for discussion and writing seems inexhaustible and ever relevant. In fall 2024, with the presidential election looming, I assigned Antigone<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cBefore we start\u00a0\u2026 you know family trees? I need to show you Antigone\u2019s.\u201d I began drawing on the whiteboard the Oedipus family tree from the bottom. \u201cAntigone and her siblings\u2014Ismene, Polynices, Eteocles. Their parents: Jocasta and Oedipus. Up here, Jocasta\u2019s parents: Menoeceus and Ms. Unknown. Oedipus\u2019s parents, Laertes and Jocasta, are over here. And because they\u2019re characters from Greek myth and legend, we can keep going back\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cProfessor!\u201d calls out Varna. \u201cYou made a mistake. Jocasta can\u2019t be Oedipus\u2019s mother, too\u2014right?\u00a0\u2026 Right?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cActually\u00a0\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe can\u2019t have children with his mother.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShouldn\u2019t<\/em> have. \u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMm?\u201d<\/p>\n Even before the pandemic, I had given up assigning Oedipus <\/em>and Antigone<\/em> as homework reading. In my classes, we read Sophocles together. On paper, out loud. \u201cPut away your devices, please. We\u2019re going really old-school\u2014ancient Greek school.\u201d<\/p>\n Although some of my community college students have shaky English or discomfort with speaking aloud, at some point in our halting and struggling reading we catch the play\u2019s spirit and profundity and are knocked back on our heels. Marie, despite her thick accent, whether reading Antigone or Creon, is inspired and masterful. Is it the theatricality or simply having to communicate the words on the page that guide her into clearer enunciation?<\/p>\n Bewildered Samuel, meanwhile, eventually finds his footing and delightedly embodies the comic outlook of the Sentry. Everybody reads, taking turns with the roles. We are mostly patient with one another, and we dig in as anxious Tina loses heart and her voice notches down into her shoes and her classmates cheer her on and plead with her to speak up. The students\u2019 encouragement of and aid to one another helps me limit my interventions, though I still continually interject with vocabulary definitions or references or to explicate idiomatic expressions or pose obvious questions to check in on comprehension. I pause us after a character\u2019s thrilling or brilliant statement and ask them to quote this or that for us to ponder in writing.<\/p>\n Reading aloud in a community college classroom is less a pleasure cruise than a field trip through a museum.<\/p>\n During my recent sabbatical, while working on a biography of Max Schott, an author, one of my old teachers and my friend, I was, as must happen to some professors on leave, missing the classroom. So as a supplement to or diversion from my daily notes and questions to Max, I wrote scenes for a few weeks in the form of a play of what I remembered and imagined of what it was like to teach Oedipus the King<\/em>, from the first day through the next several class sessions. Max regularly expressed enjoyment over the daily installments. That was my reward, praise from my mentor. Still, at the end, I told him on the phone that it was nice to be done.<\/p>\n He said, \u201cYou\u2019re not done.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, I am. I even imagined them through the essay and the drafts!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut what about Oedipus at Colonus<\/em> and Antigone<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOh, I\u2019d never try to teach those with Oedipus<\/em> in the same semester. It\u2019s freshman English.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, they\u2019re supposed to read essays and articles, too, and in real life the students themselves wouldn\u2019t let me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re making it up anyway!\u201d he laughed.<\/p>\n I resisted for a week. I had just about finished the biography and the subject of the biography, my own mentor, was encouraging me to go on, write more about my imaginary classroom. No one else was asking for more from me.<\/p>\n I reread what I had, about 150 single-spaced pages, half of which, I should say, were composed by Sophocles. I can compare my contribution to the play within a play to a quirky improvisational movie in which the soundtrack is a series of movements from Mozart\u2019s string quartets. Whatever else is going on, the music\u2014in my case, Sophocles\u2019s Oedipus the King<\/em>\u2014carries a lot of intelligence and feeling.<\/p>\n But Max was right\u2014the imaginary semester wasn\u2019t over. So for Act 2, the students having finished writing their essays, the teacher character, Bob, brings in a box of stapled copies of Oedipus at Colonus<\/em>. The imagined students surprise me and are much more game than I thought possible. We proceed, not unhappily, and with interesting discussions (I thought) through Oedipus\u2019s fateful disappearance from this land of suffering. Typing up the \u201ctranscript\u201d of my students reading Oedipus at Colonus<\/em>, I occasionally felt as if I, the writer, not the teacher character, was going through the motions for Max\u2019s sake. Each day, pen on paper, I would reread and revise the previous day\u2019s pages and then go on, writing by hand, through another several pages, and then type and email them off to Max. He and I were still talking once or twice a week by phone about his writing and life and about books, and he didn\u2019t complain that the quality of my made-up classes had dropped off; hence, I knew I had to continue through Antigone<\/em>. By the end of a semester\u2019s classes, I had imagined me and my students through the three plays.<\/p>\n Then I started going through old emails that I had sent Max about my real-life classes. These had been written, usually, on my phone on the subway home after my day\u2019s teaching. \u201cDon\u2019t explain,\u201d Max had often told us, his writing students, back in the day. \u201cSee if you can reveal the characters mostly through what they say.\u201d And there, in those emails, I found my unimaginary students and me, my unimaginary self, acting sort of like the ones I\u2019d made up.<\/p>\n For example (I\u2019ve changed their names and identifying information, but not, unfortunately, mine):<\/p>\n Bob: Do we need to go over the characters in Antigone<\/em> <\/em>again?<\/p>\n Tawny: Do we? I don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Bob: Who\u2019s Creon?<\/p>\n Class:\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n Tawny: (sighs)<\/em> The king!<\/p>\n Bob: Thank you\u00a0\u2026 Anything else about him?<\/p>\n Ashley: Antigone\u2019s uncle?<\/p>\n Bob: Yes!\u00a0\u2026 Remember, we talked about identities. Paul?<\/p>\n Paul: No.<\/p>\n Bob: We didn\u2019t?<\/p>\n Jason: We did!<\/p>\n Paul: Then I don\u2019t remember. What\u2019s identities anyway?<\/p>\n Bob: We all have different identities depending on where we are\u00a0\u2026 Here, I\u2019m a\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n Class:\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n Bob: Right! A teacher. At home I\u2019m Suzanne\u2019s husband. Just like you\u2019re in a role at home and another role at work and another here.<\/p>\n Tawny: And so?<\/p>\n Bob: In your paper, as a character yourself, you\u2019re going to have to talk to one of the characters as they are at the end of the play\u00a0\u2026 So where are they, what are they, when the play ends?<\/p>\n Marcus: Creon\u2019s alive.<\/p>\n Bob: Right! And you can\u2019t say that for\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n Ryann: Antigone.<\/p>\n Bob: Right! Or\u00a0\u2026 Haemon or\u00a0\u2026 Eurydice. But the play is over, and you have to talk to one of them\u2014whether they\u2019re dead, down in Hades, or alive in Thebes\u2014about this same topic as my morning class did\u2014the purpose of life.<\/p>\n Marcus: But they\u2019re dead.<\/p>\n Bob: We\u2019re just imagining it. They all do have some hard-won experience, right? Imagine yourself talking to one of them. All right?\u00a0\u2026 How about Antigone? What do you remember about her? <\/p>\n Tawny: She\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n Bob: Yeah\u00a0\u2026 What else?\u00a0\u2026 Did we really forget the play over the weekend?<\/p>\n Kaylia: (nods)<\/em><\/p>\n Bob: Can anybody summarize it?<\/p>\n Zeina: We have to summarize it?<\/p>\n Bob: No\u00a0\u2026 But can somebody just say what happens\u2014in a nutshell, a tiny<\/em> summary\u2014so that we have that magic word \u201ccontext\u201d before we write? (Bob points at the word \u201ccontext\u201d at the board, from the lesson at the beginning of class time, when the six on-time students and he read Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s essay \u201cConversation.\u201d)<\/em> Context, anybody?<\/p>\n Tawny: Her brothers died.<\/p>\n Bob: Yeah. And\u00a0\u2026?<\/p>\n Tawny: She buried one of them.<\/p>\n Ryann: But against the law.<\/p>\n Bob: Right! Remember, guys? Let\u2019s go back to Creon\u2019s big speech near the beginning. That\u2019ll remind us who he is and what he thinks of himself and the world. Ryann?<\/p>\n Ryann: (reads Creon\u2019s speech about \u201cour Ship of State, which recent storms have threatened to destroy\u00a0\u2026\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n Bob: What is Creon asking the citizens, the old men of Thebes, to do?<\/p>\n Niege: Guard the body.<\/p>\n Bob: He\u2019s got professional soldiers for that. He asks them for one thing. What is it?<\/p>\n Ryann: To stick with him.<\/p>\n Olya: Loyalty.<\/p>\n Bob: What\u2019s that word, Olya?<\/p>\n Olya: Loyalty.<\/em><\/p>\n Juan: No matter what, you back them.<\/p>\n Bob: Got it! Creon doesn\u2019t need them for service. He needs them to support him no matter what he does.<\/p>\n Tawny: They\u2019re in his corner.<\/p>\n Bob: Yes. He wants that assurance from them\u2014and they give it. Do you think he knows he\u2019s going to violate divine law?\u00a0\u2026 Yeah, Paul?<\/p>\n Paul: If we\u2019re gonna write\u2014<\/p>\n Bob: We\u2019re going to write.<\/p>\n Paul: I forgot my pen. <\/p>\n Bob Blaisdell teaches English at Kingsborough Community College.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have a rule for myself in freshman English that I don\u2019t assign readings that require much explanation. If I continually have to provide background of a work\u2019s history and context, it means the students are awaiting a deus ex machina, AI or me to summarize and simplify. I seek out readings that feature conversational<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2609,535,534,440,1067,21969],"class_list":{"0":"post-41029","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-class","9":"tag-college","10":"tag-community","11":"tag-opinion","12":"tag-reading","13":"tag-sophocles"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}