Socratic Seminars and James Baldwin

I teach two classes of IB Seniors. They are back to back and I have lunch right afterwards, so I have time to reflect immediately about how the classes went. Often, this reflection is thinking about the differences between the two classes, which are as strikingly different as any two classes of the same prep and size could be. The first class contains most of the stereotypically "top" students in the Class of 2010 in terms of grades, while the second class is filled with smart kids who are not necessarily the ones with the highest GPA. As students, perhaps they're a little rougher around the edges, at least as a whole, but of course both groups are great kids.

Still, often their class goes much smoother than the other class. First, they generally seem to listen to each other more, and seem to operate in a way that is less competitive. Secondly, the lesson is being delivered for the second time from me, and I'm sure I've, at least subconsciously, worked out some of the kinks. These classes are full of all new literature and all new lessons and assessments for me, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't some kinks sometimes. So, I like both classes, but generally that second class feels more relaxed and successful.

Today was one of those days, however, when the first class felt much more successful than the second class. We were discussing the James Baldwin essay "Notes for a Hypothetical Novel." It's a tough essay, with Baldwin using the titular hypothetical novel to muse about the status of America, which he writes is "a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country. The overall essay is basically an examination of this incoherence, which springs out of American mythology and the "melting pot" mentality that even I can't quite get if Baldwin is critiquing or praising. I didn't have to assign the essay, but I thought it had some really interesting ideas about America and about the function of the American writer, and thought at least a few students would find it interesting.

The first discussion today was not perfect, but it felt like an honest grappling with the text. Students had intriguing ideas and used their classmates to further their understanding. "This sentence is really weird," one student asked. "Can anyone else make sense of it?" Another even connected this sort of question to techniques Baldwin uses, asking "Do you guys think that the parallelism here is emphasizing an uncertainty or a certainty about America's shapelessness?" There were too many silent students and not enough attention to devices, but overall I loved hearing what these students talked about with this tough, very tough essay. They spoke for 25 minutes without teacher interference and really, I think, got to the bottom of some of Baldwin's ideas.

The second discussion, though, felt totally different. About two or three students came very well prepared, having comments thought about ahead of time and plenty of clear devices and techniques. Others had half-formed comments that were apropos of nothing much else being said. Still others did not seem to be prepared but said intriguing things that unfortunately were cloaked within a din of incoherence that drowned out the intriguing ideas. Students were not, in large part, listening to each other, and the discussion was largely unsuccessful. Only a couple of conclusions made, with overall minimum attention to what Baldwin is doing to create these ideas. And I feel like I can't come down too hard because I don't want any of them who are trying to stop trying and shut down. Students who can sit silent for 25 minutes in a graded Socratic Seminar are also an issue that I'm trying to fix, and I don't want to multiply them. Socratic Seminars are supposed to raise questions, but not in this way.

It's also so hard to assess, because often it is about the dynamic of the students in the particular Socratic Seminar. I want some students to elevate the discussion ("a rising tide lifts all boats") but I'm tempted to put all the super-quiet kids in one seminar to make sure they talk, and the talkative and quick kids in another so they don't drown out other students. But then the feedback will come, from the outside circle, and that might be too harsh for certain groups who need to be more concerned with reaching an analytic understanding rather than the format of their comments. I don't particularly want a student who barely has the guts to share a comment to be critiqued for mispronouncing the word "etiquette," for example.

So much dissonance for me right now, about a forum that I love to teach in but often end up with issues like this. For this text, we're spending three weeks with two Seminars a week, so the issues with seminars are coming back to the forefront for me in my classroom practice. I'm grappling with it so much, in fact, it's almost like I need to have a Socratic Seminar to talk it out with a group of like-minded folks.