Earlier in the week Jerz's Literacy Weblog pointed to a news story on The Denver Channel about a teacher who tore a bible in half in front of her classroom during a discussion of Ray Bradbury's novel, Fahrenheit 451, in order to illustrate the concept of censorship. Sure, it might be a sin to destroy "the word of god" in some folk's eyes (but hey, even Moses broke his tablets)...but more importantly, I have to wonder: As a teacher did she do something wrong? Was her approach pedagogically unjust?

I took the poll at the news site which published the news report, and was relieved to see that about 60% of those polled agreed with my vote -- that she shouldn't be suspended because ultimately she was "just making a point."

Or more precisely, she was being overtly theatrical in order to drive home a concept with emotional impact. I'm certain her students will be more conscious of the dangers of censorship for quite some time... if only because now they have a story to tell. Good teaching is often highly theatrical -- energetic, animated, passionate, and engaging the students in the learning experience as if engaged in a true event. Lessons can be consciously performed, rather than rotely spoken about in a lecture. And outrageous acts of theatricality like the teacher and the bible can really stick with a student for life. My wife tells a story about her freshman composition teacher, who once calmy read Swift's "Modest Proposal" to the class while dismembering a baby doll, limb by limb, without batting an eye. She's forgotten a lot about the texts she's read for that class, but I know she remembers Swift's famous satire to this day.

Although I don't usually go to such lengths to make my points, I fancy myself as being somewhat theatrical from time to time in the classroom, too, when warranted. For example, earlier in the week I put a very poor poem on an overhead by a former student (for a class unit on "how to critique poetry") and I read it in a very puffed up and emotional manner...I even made the horrendous piece sound good! I was trying to get the students to see that even when a poem is poor, the author usually imagines that the piece is wonderful because she hears it filtered through her own voice. We tend to enunciate the words in a particular way in our mind. The tone of voice and intention of the author color our assumptions about how the poem communicates ideas. But the words on the page are all that readers really have to go by. If you've ever been to karaoke night, you know what I mean.

My exercise in theatricality was nowhere near as "shocking" as pulling a Sinead O'Connor move on the Holy Bible, but I still risked offending students because I was rudely mocking a past student's work -- which implies that I'm not as nice as I might seem on the surface, and that I might do the same to any of them (which, of course, I wouldn't... a core of kindness is something a teacher really needs to have to be effective).

Nevertheless, theatricality teaches through direct experience, especially when it generates cognitive dissonance intentionally as a learning strategy. When a topic is defamiliarized, students will often do a "double-take" which requires them to step outside of their own skins and challenge their own assumptions. Cognitive dissonance generates, for example, a particular psychological stance -- often defensive -- in relation to the educational experience. As James Atherton suggests in his website on "Learning and Teaching," cognitive dissonance in the classroom can help students become more invested in understanding the material. "If learning something has been difficult, uncomfortable, or even humiliating enough, people are not likely to admit that the content of what has been learned is not valuable. To do so would be to admit that one has been 'had', or 'conned.'" So students who are shocked by theatrical performances in the classroom -- those acts which cut against the grain of what teachers are "supposed" to do -- can learn, and often generate critical responses rather than just simple gut reactions of anxiety or offense. More often it's the parents or administrators or colleagues who weren't in the classroom during the event to begin with who are riddled with all the anxiety and fear.

However, I would add, too, that it's imperative for the instructor to contextualize or explain their theatrical behavior after the shocking event has transpired. If I mock a poem in class, I tell them afterwards that I'm "joking" yet also being melodramatic for a reason (e.g., to show how the poem might ideally sound in the writer's mind...and how wrong we often are). The teacher who tore up the bible explained to her class, I'm sure, that their emotional reaction approaches what it would feel like to exist in a world like Bradbury's novel portrays.

Indeed, theatricality for its own sake is exhibitionism at its worst. As in all cases of teaching, the student's need to learn should be more important than the teacher's emotional need to perform (and receive its concomitant psychological rewards -- often feeding a neurotic desire). But a student's need to learn should not mean they are required to be sheltered from shock. Shock teaches. And sometimes we need to shock students to help them to see things more objectively in the future.

For example, when I teach Literary Criticism, I often throw a horror film like The Exorcist on the syllabus, alongside all the heady literary readings. One of the rationales for this is that I believe one needs to practice observing objectively those texts from popular culture that are crafted primarily in order to have us react emotionally. Ideally, students learn to critique a "shocking" film in a way that trains them to resist the demand by such texts that they bracket off their critical faculties in the name of entertainment. It prevents them from being "had" or "conned" by mass culture. Shock, cognitive dissonance, a moment of theatricality in the sober venue of the classroom, the unexpected use of a joke, defamiliarization -- these methods of teaching all have some validity. You shouldn't use them all the time, naturally, but sometimes you have to take a fish out of the water long enough to make it realize what it's really swimming in.

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