Bridging Seasons: Teaching Manuel Arguilla’s Midsummer and Anton Chekhov’s Misery

by Devi Benedicte’ I. Paez

Ateneo de Manila University (Manila, Philippines)

Keywords:      culture, literature, student-centered learning, teaching reading

 

Abstract

How can a student of literature in English at a Philippine university be assisted in gaining an understanding of seemingly remote concepts such as the winter described in Chekhov’s Misery? This paper reviews a methodology for doing exactly that.  It illustrates how, for example, by first introducing a Filipino short story in English such as Manuel Arguilla’s Midsummer, the teacher can provide for a more emboldened and engaged discussion on seasons as metaphors for feelings. The paper also aims to show that accommodating Philippine literature in English in a literature course that has previously focused on western texts may lead students toward the shared and purposeful responsibility of constructing familiar meanings amidst the diversities found in “foreign” literatures.

 

Figure 1. Filipino students discussing a story in class.

 

How does a Filipino college student construct meaning within a text that describes a seemingly remote season such as deep Russian winter in Chekhov’s Misery?

 

Soviet writer, Maksim Gorky, observes that in Chekhov stories, one can “hear the quiet deep sigh of a pure human heart, the hopeless sigh of sympathy for men who do not know how to respect human dignity” (Gorky as cited in Rosenburg, 1992, p. 247). Yet a discussion on this text with my freshman students in ourIntroduction to Fiction course showed that they could hardly empathize with this sense of hopelessness, much less offer sympathy for the loneliness of this seemingly insignificant sledge driver. Why? Was the lack of empathy for Potapov reflective of their limited experiences of anguish and rejection? Does the setting of deep winter truly draw out feelings of anguish and rejection from my students? How do Filipino students imagine and understand the season of deep winter in the first place? How can the literature classroom bring them to a more heightened awareness for how they negotiate the many meanings of a text? Furthermore, how is language proficiency significant in the shaping of meanings in a literature class with an ESL context?

 

Objectives of the Classroom Activities

The following article is a description of a sequence of classroom activities that focus on the shaping of meaning in the settings in Manuel Arguilla’s Midsummer and Anton Chekhov’s Misery as central to character analysis. There are three main objectives to the design and implementation of the classroom activities.

 

First, the class activities may show that beginning with a reading and teaching of Filipino literature in English “can broaden students’ perceptions of the use of English in wider cultural contexts” (Vethamani, 1996, p. 204). Their familiarity with the culture and experiences encountered in Midsummer may lead to a more engaged discussion on seasons as metaphors for feelings. Thus, the transition to reading and discussing a Western text such as Misery may find students with more confidence in and awareness for strategic and critical reading.

 

Second, a student-centered learning environment, one “in which students have some degree of control over what goes on in the course and how it occurs” (Aebersold and Field, 2007, p. 37), provides more opportunities for students to demonstrate their levels of language proficiency through a more reflective shaping and sharing of relevant responses. The process may show them that their personal experiences and observations do shape their responses to a literary piece and can add to its many meanings.

 

Third, the previous objective is fulfilled by applying metacognitive strategies or learning strategies that get students “thinking about thinking” (Anderson, 2002, p. 1). Through journal writing, students understand how they react and respond to a story’s images, metaphors and symbols through its language and how their reactions and responses are shaped. Aeborsold and Field (2007, p. 168) assert that “student journals are a superb way to keep learners involved in the processes of monitoring comprehension, making comprehension visible, fitting in new knowledge, applying knowledge, and gaining knowledge proficiency.” Journal writing may also enable students to see how the language of a literary text facilitates vocabulary expansion, and consequently, a richer and more critical level of reading comprehension. Furthermore, they are motivated to develop awareness for the creative, dynamic, and polysemous nature of language in a literary context. In her classic study on dialogue journals, Peyton (1993) also points out that journal writing gives the students an opportunity to use English in a “non-threatening atmosphere” (p.2).   She further explains that this kind of writing context is achieved as students are engaged in independent writing at their own pace with the teacher as a proficient speaker of English, interacting primarily with the content of the student’s written thoughts.

 

Getting to Know the Two Stories: A Brief Summary

Misery by Anton Chekhov

As the day ends in the middle of deep Russian winter, Iona Potapov, a sledge driver, is overcome with grief over his young son’s death. As he brings his passengers to their destinations, he attempts to share the reason for his anguish and pain. No one seems to make any effort to listen or to offer any gesture of sympathy. In the end, he can only share the story of his grief with his mare.

 

Midsummer by Manuel Arguilla

Amidst the sweltering heat of the noon day sun in the middle of summer, a man with his bull and cart, chances upon a young woman on her way to a well. He watches her until she disappears. He sees her again and is affected by her presence. He invites her to share his lunch, and thus, begins a conversation. With her mother’s consent, the young woman offers the man her home for shade and a place to rest. He follows her, thinking to himself that he can follow her “to the ends of the world” (p. 169).

 

A Teaching Plan for Arguilla’s Midsummer and Chekhov’s Misery

The activities may be relevant to first year university students in an introductory course. Discussing the two stories in relation to setting, character, and theme may take 4-6 lessons of 50-minute periods.

 

Reading Arguilla’s Midsummer: Lessons 1-2

Pre-Reading: Engaging the Familiar  

1. This activity begins towards the end of a previous lesson after the class finishes a previous activity. To introduce Midsummer for discussion, students are only given its title. The teacher asks students what images, feelings, or memories are associated with the season of midsummer.

 

2. In class, students write, draw, or create a collage in their journals that describes their initial reactions to the title. They can share their initial ideas in small groups.

 

While Reading: Seeing the Story

1. At home, students develop a sense of awareness for how they are reacting and responding to the story by answering the following guide questions:
   1. Do they like what they are reading? Why or why not?
   2. Were their initial expectations based on the title satisfied as they were reading the story? Why or why not?
   3. What are the similarities and differences in the way they remember the season of midsummer to how it is described in the story?

 

2. To further support their initial reactions and more thoughtful responses later on during the class discussion, students also choose a vividly striking passage.
   • What feelings are aroused in you through this passage? What physical sensations come to mind with the descriptions of heat in midsummer?
   • How do the recollections of these feelings and physical sensations based on your chosen passage help in your understanding of the male character? How about the female character?

 

For example, my students cite a passage from paragraph 1:

 

 The road seemed to writhe under the lash of the noon-day heat; it swum from side to  side, humped and bent itself like a feeling serpent, and disappeared behind the spur of  a low hill on which grew a scrawny thicket of bamboo. (p.165)

 

Some students comment on the phrase, “… the lash of the noon-day heat….” They  react to knowing the intensity of the “noon-day heat.” The   discussions enable the  students to unlock the meanings of “writhe” and “lash” within the context of the  descriptive paragraph. The discussions point out that both words intensify the physical  sensations associated with summer heat. This is later on connected to the male  character’s feeling of listlessness and contrasting surprise at discovering the young  woman in paragraph 5.

 

3. Blocking some scenes as one would block a stage performance may also be effective in helping students visualize the positions of the male and female characters. Students may work in small groups to demonstrate where the male character is in a specific scene as if on a stage in relation to the female character. This bears significance to how students make inferences about the characters’ motivations, attitudes, and behavior. More importantly, through character analysis, some themes on gender equality or sexual tensions may be raised.

 

Post-Reading: Seeing the Bigger Picture  

Finally, as homework, students illustrate Midsummer’s title page to synthesize their understanding and appreciation of the story. They may share it with the class with some brief explanation of its relevance to the story’s themes.  An alternative activity is for students to describe and narrate in their journals similar experiences of encountering something unexpected in a dry and dreary situation.

 

Connecting Setting and Character in Chekhov’s Misery

Pre-Reading: Listening and Writing: Lessons 3-4

1. In class, students listen to an excerpt of A dramatic reading may be viewed onhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muriZpyIJSQ. They may read and follow with their own copies.

 

2. Then they write their initial reactions in their journals.
   • Did you like the story? Why or why not?
   • What images formed in your mind during the dramatic reading? What specific words or phrases from the excerpt caught your attention?
   • What were you reminded of based on these specific words?
   • How did you feel at the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story?

 

3. Students may share their initial reactions with their seatmates. After this, they resume writing their responses to a passage from the story.
   • What do you think of this passage?
   • Why do you think you responded in this manner? What factors influenced you?

 

While Reading: Understanding the Unfamiliar

At this point, teacher and students discover the meanings of winter in the context of the story while examining their own contexts as well.

 

1. Some guide questions for the discussion:
   • How do we know of Potapov’s misery or grief?
   • Can you relate to how Potapov feels?
   • Can you imagine Potapov’s kind of winter vividly?
   • Where do our notions of winter come from?
2. Ask students about their ideas of winter. Where have they seen it? Have them list popular films, TV shows, childhood stories and songs that may have introduced them to the notion of winter.
3. Direct students to use the Internet to gather winter images from media. One website that lists popular films that show winter scenes is http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/winter/MemberTagFilms.aspx

 

Student may also check out websites that show popular Christmas images, songs, or any media feature that has made winter images seemingly more accessible and familiar.

 

4. Students then write their own impressions of winter based on these references. Consequently, an engaging discussion on media’s influences may follow.  One  image from media that we discussed in class is a web ad for membership shopping that I uploaded on this site:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2673/3709357583_3938bfe8df_o.png

 

Students may then realize that Western films, TV programs, or even advertisements have influenced their notions of winter. Interestingly, in the Filipino context, images of winter are more popular during the festive Christmas season. How does this happy, hopeful, and even privileged notion of winter contrast with Potapov’s winter? How does this story expand the students’ views on seasons as metaphor for feelings?

 

Post-Reading: Bridging Seasons: Lesson 5

1. To synthesize the lessons from the two readings, have students recall the feelings they associated with in Arguilla’s Midsummer and what made the associated feelings fairly easy to recall and describe.

 

2. Ask students to recall why winter seems more difficult to imagine.

 

3. Next, have them contextualize the setting of Misery.
   • If Potapov were a driver of a passenger vehicle in the local context, what season would suggest misery?
   • Why would this be a more apt season to intensify misery in the local context?
   • How do our personal experiences lend to a deeper understanding of a story’s elements?

 

Conclusions: Engaging the Readers’ Contexts

Some insights on the practice of these classroom activities also have much to do with the purposeful and reflective attitude of the teacher. Indeed, teacher cognition is significant in what, why, and how students read and discover in the literature classroom. “The tasks, learning environment, and classroom discourse are all influenced by the teacher’s beliefs” (Woods, 1998, p. 58). My initial reason for choosing Misery and Midsummer is how the sense of stillness resonated in me amidst intense seasons such as midsummer and winter. In this age of instant gratification, would my reading preferences readily appeal to my young students? Indeed, text selection is crucial in motivating students to read and sustaining in them a desire to read more. McRae (2008) asserts that “…what is done with the text to make it draw, and hold, the reader’s attention is every bit as vital as the content of the text itself” (p.75).  McRae also points out that, “What the students bring to the text will contribute a great deal to this process: world knowledge, cultural background, personal experience, all play a part” (p. 66). In fact, students may recognize that their worlds are as important as the worlds they discover in the literature classroom.

 

Consequently, students may be led to the notion of applying metacognitive strategies. When both teacher and students are aware of what they want to learn and how they are trying to accomplish certain tasks that will enable learning, the effort to analyze a literary text may be less ridden with anxiety. These enable students to recognize and appreciate the “orchestration of various strategies” (Anderson, 2002, p. 2).  Eventually, metacognitive learning strategies might also encourage students to be more critical language learners.

 

Moreover, the suggested classroom activities may also apply to reading classes that introduce L2 students to literatures in English for the first time. They may begin to recognize and understand their feelings of initial resistance against or anticipated disinterest for a seemingly remote piece of literature from a different culture. Where they go from there is always an exciting and worthwhile process of negotiation that may not necessarily lead to a complete understanding of another culture. Kate Chopin’s description of a married woman’s happiness in The Storm has opened critical discussions on notions of fidelity and happiness from the Western point of view and a young Filipino’s point of view. Indeed, in teaching literature in English, “we can teach the boundary, we cannot teach the bridge. We can talk about and try to understand the differences…” but we cannot contrive to make a connection for a notion that is, as yet, outside of the student’s cultural experience (Kramsch, 1993, p. 228). Indeed, working with literatures from various cultures not only exposes students to great literature but also allows intercultural awareness and appreciation.

 

Through their own language capabilities, personal experiences, and references from media technology, students can respond more to the language of a variety of literary texts in English, and consequently, to its many metaphors and themes. Canagarajah (1999) asserts:

 

 In a pedagogy that encourages students to cross cultural and discursive borders, we  must integrate popular culture and serious literature, play with rigor, art with  scholarship, imagination with intellect. (p. 190)

 

Above all, in such a literature classroom, students can begin to participate in genuine conversations that open possibilities of meanings that they can and continue to shape.

 

References

Abad, G.H. (Ed.). (1998). The likhaan anthology of Philippine Literature in English from  1900 to the present (2^nd ed.).Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

Aebersold, J., and Field, M. (2007) From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for  second language classrooms (12^th ed.).  New York: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, N. J. (2002). The role of metacognition in second language teaching and  learning. Center for Applied Linguistics. Retrieved June 11, 2009,  from  http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0110anderson.html

Canagarajah, S. (1999). Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching. Oxford: Oxford  University Press.

Kramsch, C. (1993). Context and culture in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Martin, I. P. (2007). The literature Filipino students do not read. English in Southeast  Asia,  Commemorative Volume.

McRae, J. (2008). “l” Creative reading and literature with a small “l”. Manila: ANVIL Publishing.

Peyton, J. (1993). Dialogue journals: Interactive writing to develop language and  literacy. Retrieved October 20, 2009 from http://202.198.141.77/upload/soft/0 article/017/17023.doc

Rosenberg, D. (1992). World literature: An anthology of great short stories, drama, and  poetry. Illinois: NTC Publishing Group.

Vethamani, M. (1996). Common ground: Incorporating new literatures in English in language     and literature teaching.In R. Carter and J. McRae (Eds.), Language, literature and the  learner (pp. 204-216). New York: Longman.

Woods, D. (1996). Teacher cognition in language teaching: Beliefs, decision-making, and  classroom practice. Australia: Cambridge University Press.

 

About the Author

Devi Benedicte’ I. Paez teaches English at the Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University, where she is also an MA candidate in English Language and Literature Teaching. She is a facilitator with the Ateneo Center for English Language Teaching (ACELT). Her interests and research on sociolinguistics, literature and language teaching, and World Englishes have been presented at the English in Southeast Asia (ESEA) Conferences in Bangkok and Singapore and at lectures for the Linguistic Society of the Philippines and the Association for English Research and Teaching (ASSERT).

 

Devi Benedicte I. Paez #28 Aguinaldo St. Katarungan Village, Antipolo City 1870 Philippines devipaez@pldtdsl.net English Department, Loyola Schools, Ateneo de Manila University Assistant Instructor