Ideally, students learn to enjoy the satisfactions of composing and comprehending.
Satisfaction takes time; digestion proceeds across minutes, hours or days. For students to experience satisfaction in composing or comprehending, they need time to feel it. Recognition of accomplishment plays an equally important role in this process. Teachers promote this satisfaction by giving students time to compose, alongside the burgeoning ability to recognize accomplishment. These are quiet joys, internal joys amid today's spectacularly visual and electronic culture. [Ed. note, I wrote the first pieces of this series eight years ago, but have chosen to keep their original wording.] In terms of composition, students can feel satisfaction, for example, at overcoming an obstacle. How will they begin a letter, essay or poem? How will they find a word or sentence that says what they want, that, according to Tolstoi, infects the audience with the writer's feeling? In terms of comprehension, students can feel satisfaction, for example, when detecting a pattern. While reading The Age of Innocence recently, I was made impatient by the narrator. I began to think Wharton was cheating me with her omniscient narrator. From the beginning, again influenced by Tolstoi's What is Art?, I asked which character Wharton cares about. She sides with no one, except perhaps Countess Oleska. Her criticism runs so close to anger that she exploits the narrator. She uses it as her own personal tool. As a result, moments of Archer's thoughts in the narration ring less true. I enjoy comprehending the story to this degree, and wish similar enjoyment for students.
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