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This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your device and you'll help us know that you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe that's podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe or click the Follow or Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

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Welcome to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula and teacher led classrooms.

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Now your host, Scott Bertram.

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Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More episodes at podcast hillsdale.edu or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website k12 hillsdale.edu. engaging in literary analysis and writing original, thoughtful papers is a daunting prospect for students and a difficult thing to teach well, but it is a necessary ability for anyone looking to fully appreciate great works of literature and participate in the great conversation. Dr. Justin Jackson, chair and professor of English at Hillsdale College students, spoke on how to introduce students to literary analysis at an October 2025 center for Teacher Excellence event on the art of Teaching Literature. His insights are valuable and his new book, the Elements of Analysis, is essential for students and teachers of literature alike. Here's Dr. Justin Jackson so first let

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me apologize for what I'm about to do to you. I am just naturally a lecturer. I like to have like three words on a piece of paper and then go. But today, because I want to be a bit disciplined in tackling this question of lit analysis, I'm going to read to you some excerpts from my book that's coming out here soon, should be out in November, just simply because it will present to us kind of the problem of trying to teach children lit analysis. The book is primarily targeted for college students. I have four children, two have already graduated high school and I use this stuff with them in their own education at a classical private school. So that's the first apology I'm going to read, but it won't be long and we can open things up. The second thing is you've been given an excerpt from the book, and this excerpt is essentially probably the best exercise I've ever given to students for them to be able to look at. What does analysis look like? What do we do? And so what you'll see is I've given them three different paragraphs trying to do analysis in some way, shape or form. But what my co author and I did is we dissect every sentence so that students know here's what this sentence is doing. I think it's pretty important anytime we're doing analysis, anytime we're doing writing, that there always has to be a sense of purpose. And what I found is students have no sense of purpose in writing. They just sit down in front of a blinking computer screen and then they just write. And they probably just follow whatever empty forms we give to them because they think that's how they will be graded. And so I want to push very hard on trying to think about content and to think about the purpose of why we write in the first place. If why we write in the first place is just to finish an assignment, we're probably doing something wrong, severely wrong, I think. And I mean this at the college level, but I certainly mean it in 9th through 12th grade as well. So that's the second thing I want to focus on. So please read through that handout as I'm talking. It's great. Hopefully we'll have some time to work through it. But I wanted to put something in your hand, something that you could digest, something where you could see, oh, here's how you can get students to start thinking about their own writing. All right. I'm delighted to see that there is a wonderful array of teachers here from public school, from private schools, from homeschooling. That's wonderful. And it's wonderful because I'm going to insult all of you. I have found classical school and private Christian schools are very allergic to the word analysis. What they think is that it's a destruction of something, simply a pulling apart. But it's not. It's our way into getting into the beauty of literature. And. And I hope that's the purpose of teaching literature, is to teach that beauty of that thing in front of us, even if it's ugly literature. There is a beauty to ugly literature. And by this I mean something along the lines of, oh, I don't know, Goethe, Faust. Utterly nihilistic at the. I mean, just crushing, soul crushing. I like to show students, here's why it's soul crushing. Let's work through this sort of thing. So that's kind of my introduction to what we're doing here. Just an origin of the book. Dutton Carney is my co author. 12 years ago, we would just sit on his front porch and have a bottle of port and smoke cigars, which is a wonderful combination. And we would talk about literature, and we would talk about trying to teach our students to read literature. And we were very frustrated because we would have students who averaged 1400 on the SAT. And you give them a book, you give them Hamlet, and they can't do anything with it. They can tell you about wisdom and virtue and morals and whatnot. But then when you ask them, okay, great, but can you show me where you're getting this? They can't. They're allergic to it because it's hard. They're good writers, and when you write analytically, sometimes it messes up your prose. It simply does. And they don't want to do that because they've been graded for so long on their prose and their style. So I kind of give them a free pass when they're freshmen. Please write grammatically correct sentences and mechanically correct sentences. But I understand your prose is going to be garbled because you're trying to work through very complicated ideas, through the minutiae of the language itself. So Dunton and I tried to figure out for many years, how do we do it? And then we just decided it's time to write a book compiled from the handouts that we've given over these years. So it's a very practical book. It's not very theoretical at all. Again, you'll see in the handout that I've given to you. So I'll begin. When asked to write an essay based on careful literary analysis, the first thing students often ask is, what is analysis and how do I do it? These are great questions from students and really hard to answer for teachers. Teachers appreciate the innocent profundity of the question. Teachers really know the struggle we feel. Turns out, at some point in a teacher's academic life, she asked herself that very question. Whether or not there was ever a concrete, actionable answer, it makes no difference, because teacher and student must now answer the question, what is analysis? And how do I do it? In some ways, this book is also a book for teachers. For those of you who still don't know what analysis is, here you go. It's inescapable. As long as we continue to teach the great works of literature and ask students to write about them. For students and teachers alike, pursuing the craft of literary analysis is both a burden and an absolute joy. It turns out, as the history of exegesis will attest, there's no one way to do careful analysis. Indeed, there are an assortment of approaches to Language and images, and careful analysis becomes an exercise in the use of those techniques. Every piece of literature is unique, so the techniques employed must conform to what the piece of literature offers to the reader. Homer asks different things from his reader than does Tolstoy. Every author has his own grammar of literature, and it's the reader's task and eventual joy to study that grammar and to enter into that author's world. We can do this primarily through the literary text, though history and biography are also very important. Nevertheless, there are some basic principles of analysis that are applicable to every author and really to any piece of literature one reads as early as the seventh grade. Students are more than capable of creating insights based upon close reading. However, writing instruction often remains focused on highlighting textual summaries, grammar and style. With the growth of the classical education movement, moral formation through literature has reemerged as a pedagogical end. This is a welcome phenomenon, but not if we sacrifice a deep, honest reading of literature to achieve it. Then we just become ideologues, which most great literature is allergic to and indeed pushes back against. We need not fear a moral relativism while employing a hermeneutic of charity. We can enter into the world of an author whose own view is not our own, not historically, culturally, or even morally, without blindly accepting it. All of these foci can often shift our attention away from pursuing the wonder of literature, the act of simply reading literature for itself. That's the fundamental principle of liberal arts. You do things because those things are good in and of themselves. We cannot read literature for itself if we impose a prefabricated hermeneutic upon it. What emerges from that approach is an explanation of the hermeneutic instead of the literature. Literature is a mode of knowledge pulling readers into the author's world, challenging us, disturbing us, giving us great joy and clarity, ultimately demonstrating that actions entail the consequences of choice. Our greatest literary works often assert ambiguity. Ambiguity, which requires an interpretation, a wrestling with the text. This is how we honor these authors. We don't put their books in a museum. We annotate these books. We mark them up. We throw them against the wall. Any of you have ever read Dostoevsky's the Idiot? You must throw that against the wall at the end. I guess that was a spoiler alert. And then we write about them so as to enter into a conversation with the greats. Hence, literary analysis. It is our assertion that the particular details of a text communicate and participate in an intricate, ongoing dialogic relationship within the overall narrative. The beauty of the whole cannot be understood separately from its particular parts. The significance of the parts makes very little sense outside the context of the whole. It's a mysterious literary and exegetical dance, and one that has beckoned readers for millennia. But identifying and explaining these relationships requires analysis. This is a book about analysis. Because it is a book about analysis, it follows that it is also a book about invention and organization. Invention is the discovery of our deeper understanding of the text, what it's up to, how it accomplishes its vision of the human and our place in the cosmos. Organization is the logical and coherent presentation of arguments. Analysis both precedes and is the fruit of invention and organization. This book will teach you how to isolate one to eight lines of text from a larger narrative. One need not be dogmatic about the numbers here and then to analyze them and to show how how these particular parts relate to the whole text or even refract its overall vision. The insight gained from this analysis will then serve as the driving force of the essay, its thesis, the part, be it a word, line, passage, an entire scene. The part is then used as a vehicle to understand the overall significance of of a piece of literature through this concentrated illuminative moment within the text. And the student's essay will be focused on this aspect, will highlight it, and will use it to help the reader understand not only the importance of this passage, but through this passage, something about the entire work. You can't be comprehensive about a literary work in five to eight pages. That is impossible. However, you can be thorough in your analysis of one to eight lines, and you can be thorough in applying that specific analysis to the entirety of a work of literature. Addressing these issues will mean thinking through one of the most important tensions in all of writing and writing instruction. Form and Content Much of writing instruction in classical school curricula, which are following tried and true methods, and also in public school instruction, which are trying to garner high scores in state mandated testing places, often form above content. It seems that form more easily demonstrates that students have absorbed the curriculum. The hope is that they can produce clear writing, grammatically correct, organized thesis, five paragraphs, all done in a timely manner. Both models, classical and public, we believe, use form in order to place an emphasis on objective outcomes, but more importantly also on moralistic therapeutic teaching, be it according to traditional American values, the classical school model, or more progressive American values, the public school model. See, I told you I was going to insult all of you. We reject both moralisms as the telos, the purpose of reading and writing about literature, the Study of great literature is an end in and of itself. We need to habituate students to pursue these great works not because they assert a certain worldview, but because they're wrestling with the messiness of existence. This is the telos of reading and writing about literature. Not to reflect the parochial ideological world we inhabit or wish to inhabit, but to enter into a conversation with great minds who have already thought about such things and have mostly been disposed to reveal that the world will never fully conform to those ideals, be they personal, familial, political or religious. It would be a crime, an absolute crime, not to teach the forms of composition at an early age. Invention, introduction, thesis topic, sentences, transitions, conclusions. Form can easily be taught by imitation. I'm a big proponent. My goodness, the handout I just gave to you is predicated upon imitation. Form can easily be taught by imitation, which young children thrive on. But at a certain point, once they have the various formal qualities of composition down, then we have to push our children to do something more. How can they use form to communicate their encounter with great literature? In all of our years, we've not yet seen a five paragraph essay. Even if it's not five paragraphs, but 15 pages using the five paragraph essay form that can contain one's true encounter with any great author. It's an absurd game we play, and students know that it's absurd and yet it's the only form they know. Until we disrupt the pattern. And disrupt it we must, for the love of literature. After having taught at an elite liberal arts institution for decades, we can tell you with no hesitation that this model of form over content is severely flawed. Nevertheless, our students must learn these basic compositional forms from an early age. We ask that teachers not give up on teaching basic compositional models and to continue to do it with rigor. It helps students to generate and to organize their thoughts. But thoughts become far more complex as students age. A 10 year old thinks not in the same way a 17 year old does, though I have a 17 year old. They could be dumber. So when college asks them to pursue ideas they've never imagined, these childhood forms simply fall apart and fail the student. And yet, even at the college, freshman level and beyond, we often teach the same form of composition, a sort of warmed over five paragraph essay, which may be 20 pages for a senior seminar essay. If the purpose of this book is to give students rich analytical content to put in their papers, then we really have to think about our disposition towards their reception to the very act of analysis itself. Many students from high school to college, when asked to write about literature, have two basic apprehensions with a lot of subsets therein. 1. I think you guys probably all know this. Is this what the author intended? 2. I feel like I'm just making it up. These are legitimate concerns, and from the outset we are sensitive to both. We want to address, not resolve, these two major concerns. Trying to discern an author's intention is a lifelong project. Unless one becomes a master in the necromantic arts, then the question of any author's intention will never be put to rest. But through decades of careful study, reading all of an author's works, various biographies about the history and culture which formed her habit of mind, etc. One can eventually come to a point where one can assert the most probable reading. This is not the goal of this book. We believe the first step in cultivating a love of literature is simply to read the primary text. We assign our students plenty of historical, cultural, and biographical supplementary texts, but we do this with the hope that it enhances their love of literature in the work and allows them to dig even deeper into the details. Quite simply, we reject an either or proposition here. Do we just give the students a text and see what they will come up with? Or do we get the students to learn about history, culture, biography first so that they can see how the work fits into all of these things? Because we are teachers of literature, and because we're being asked to teach how to write about literature, we're going to privilege the primary text and ask students to interact with it despite their not having anywhere near a basic knowledge of history, culture, biography. It's a risk. I think it's a good one. Those things will come, and when they do, a student's reading will no doubt change. But for now, without resolving the issue, we just want to focus on the primary text. Here's what we've learned over the years when it comes to writing about literature. If you're afraid of being wrong, then you'll never write a word but just jump through hoops to finish an assignment. That's an impoverished disposition towards these texts, disrespectful towards the authors, and simply a cowardly way to live. Be brave, be bold. To love these texts is to risk being wrong. For those of you who are married, I think you know this phenomenon quite well. This brings us to our second issue. The students fear of just making things up. In the first lecture of every freshman Great Books class, we like to ask, along with other questions, how many of you are afraid that you're Just making stuff up that what you think you see isn't really in the text. Usually, about 80 to 90% of the students raise their hands. On the one hand, this is a beautiful affirmation of our students intellectual honesty. They do not trust their own reading and await an expert to tell them what's really going on within the text. On the other hand, it's clearly an obstacle that impedes their journey into the text. Our advice is be brave, be bold. You may be wrong in your analysis. Oh, well, you may write something horribly wrong. Stupid, even. We've all been there, your teachers and professors alike. It's really not a big deal. Literary analysis is not an exact science, and experts disagree over minutiae. We can't tell you how many times we've had to adjust our own readings after discovering another scholar's insights. But that's the point. As a reader, and, we hope, a lover of literature, one must take risks and be vulnerable in approaching this sort of study. You may find out that your initial reading of a piece of literature was just horribly wrong. That's okay. Here's a good rule of thumb. When you engage in literary analysis, you're amongst friends who all love that piece of literature. They want to hear your ideas and they want to learn from you. But this means they also want to push back and give you their reading. It's not a matter of debate, per se, but simply a matter of dialogue. Those are very different. If you come to analysis knowing that your reading will change with every new reading, or with the discovery of research in whatever form, then you've done honor to that work of literature. Dostoevsky famously was often surprised by his own characters. He didn't even know how they'd develop. He read what he wrote and then let his reading lead him in exciting new directions. In short, our best advice is just to give yourself free rein and just make it up. And then see if your insights remain consistent throughout an entire text. Is there that logical thread? If you find details in the text that you cannot account for, then you simply must go back to the drawing board and try again. Ideally, this is the case even if you've already handed in your paper and have received your grade. A love of literature is not about getting a grade, but about learning to love that piece of literature. All of this leads us to our next question, a question that must be addressed by teachers and students alike. Who is my audience for this literary analysis? This question has been addressed from the earliest times. One needs to know one's audience when one is Writing about anything. If I'm a physicist and I am talking quantum physics to ninth graders, well, it's not going to be the same talk I give to fellow quantum physicists. This is obvious. We think it a grave mistake to assume that the audience for your paper is simply your teacher or your fellow classmates, because there is constant engagement with the text amongst this classroom group. You may assume too many things when you write it. References to lectures, implied understanding of certain particular and interpretations of the work. We advise that you think more universally in this way. Pretend that your paper will show up on Google Scholar and that everyone who reads your paper already has a great love of that work. Pretend that they want to know what your argument is. This means that you don't have to summarize the entire work. You can be confident that they know the characters by reading your essay. They wish to engage in dialogue with you, even if you were to meet them in person. In short, it's your job to teach them something, and they've downloaded your essay so that they can learn from you. Show them how you can dig into details and show them what they've maybe missed. They'll love you for life if you do. One final note for teachers, you'll notice that we don't shy away from citing translations in our examples of close analysis. We've done this purposely. There are two camps on this question. In one camp, they argue that close analysis cannot be done because we are not reading the original language in which the work was composed. Maybe many of you have felt this frustration. It follows, then, that we are not analyzing the work at all, but simply the translator's reading of that work. This is a legitimate point. Indeed, we concede this point. If you really want to know what Ovid is up to, and you should, you should study Latin and read it in the original. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, we believe that students need to be introduced to two things. One, great literature, obviously, I hope, and two, the art of analysis. According to the logic above, these two things are at odds. If we want students to do analysis and to read the greatest works of literature produced, then something has to give. As teachers of literature and writing, we'd be derelict in our duty not to teach Homer, for example. Better yet, our students learn Homer best when they write closely and analytically about his work. So then, do we only teach analysis through works in the English language? We can read Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Beowulf, Chaucer in translation, but we can't allow our students to do a deep dive because they aren't fluent in that Language, that seems hardly a solution. So we offer this very modest compromise. If your students read and learn to love Dante in translation, this may prompt them to study Italian so that they can read him in his own language. But they'll only develop this desire through translation. And most likely, they'll only develop this desire when they write about Dante. Most schools, public, private, charter, homeschool, have a year long unit on world literature. So we strongly recommend that you do not avoid teaching them the tools of analysis because it's only in translation. Why? Because students need to learn the discipline of analysis, even if it's in translation. We contend that analysis, when done right, rather than dulling our senses to an appreciation or or even a love of literature, heightens it. Students need to learn this skill. So if you're teaching a unit on world literature, that is literature and translation, you can still gift your students the craft of analysis, even via translation. The analytical skills they learn via translation, usually taught in their ninth grade year, will ultimately be honed as they enter into studying British and American literature, their mother tongue, wherein they have more ability to appreciate the nuance of specific word choice. To wait for that transition to literature written in English means delaying developing this analytical skill set for a year in some schools too, a dogmatic rejection ultimately impeding a student's ability to read literature meaningfully. We do not believe this is a good trade off. It may seem that our primary goal here is merely a practical one to give teachers and students a small handbook that outlines some of the tools of analysis. We hope this little book will give you a jumping off point to discuss the craft of analysis, some general points regarding writing, and a common language that helps to ameliorate the frustrations that come with writing about literature for students and teachers alike. In this way, we hope very much that this book is useful, practical. But that is hardly our primary goal. It is an effect, not a cause. Rather, we want to give students the basic, fundamental tools of analysis because we think analysis is the fertile soil that will grow a love of literature. People often assert that analysis kills the beauty or the joy of literature. We think this is exactly wrong. Literature read ideologically through a specific lens for specific cultural and or political ends certainly can kill a love of literature. Dogmatic cookie cutter approaches to literature certainly rob students of joy and blunts their creative faculties. But this book offers none of these things. Often we are asked if we ever read just for fun. Our response is simple. Analysis is fun. Getting to know some of the greatest texts in literary history, getting to interact with them Deeply, in deeply intimate ways, entering into their world and pouring over their very words. My goodness, you're reading their words for the love of God. Coming to discover some of the reasons. We were struck initially by a work's beauty and now being able to articulate it. These are the grounds of joy, when done out of love and respect. The analysis of literature isn't just fun, it's fulfilling. It's humane, it's joyful. If we can share this with our students, we will have given them a gift for life. Thank you for bearing through my reading of this. Let me just say a couple, and I do want to make sure we have time for questions and answers here as well. I had a former student who was in. He was a journalist for, oh, my gosh, 12 years. And he decided he wanted to go back to grad school. So he went to Oxford, and he emailed me, and he says, I've been doing journalism for so long, I've forgotten how to do this stuff. Do you have any of your old handouts? And by that time, I'd had a first or second draft of the book, and so I sent it to him. I said, here, just read this. And he won an award for Outstanding Grad Student at Oxford because he was just doing simple things. And then all of his fellow grad students asked him for a copy. Because I try to keep things as simple as possible. Doing lit analysis is not rocket science. I'm not a smart man. I promise you, it's easy. You just have to know how to ask certain questions. I'll show you. It's a profound line. Emily Dickinson. Oh, is Kelly here? Oh, good. He'll correct me. He's a Dickinson scholar. Dickinson. And you guys. I think you guys all know these two lines. Although I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me. I just want to stop. It's profound and it's profound. Two lines. But I think there's just one profound word in those two lines. Kindly. It's the adverb. You can ask students. What does that mean? Kindly student, raise her hand. Yes, kindly. Well, this seems kind of weird. Well, why? Well, death acting kindly out of charity. There's a sort of decorum to this, a generosity that seems weird. Is she inviting? Is she inviting death? You would think death would be frightening. It is in some of Dickinson's poems. Great. Nice. What else? How else do you guys understand kindly? And I take them back. Like, what about the word kind? What does it mean? Hopefully, I have a biology student in class at Hillsdale. All Students have to take a year of great books, no matter their major. But we believe that's important in the formation of a human person. And by the way, all English majors have to take physics and chemistry and biology because we think that's important to the formation of a human person. So hopefully I'll have a bio person and I'll say and kind like. You mean like nature. That's where we get it. Middle English kind. It's of nature. It's of a kind of species, but of a kind. Something natural. Uh huh. And then you'll get the student who raised her hand. So which one is it? How is death acting kindly here? Generously, patiently? Whatever we want, or naturally? Please answer this for me. And my answer is yes. That's a profound vision of existence for Dickinson to say. The way in which death comes to us naturally is also generous, kind in that polite sort of way. And then the rest of the poem bears it out. You go through childhood till you finally get to the grave. Simple. One word, all you have. You just need a dictionary and an inquisitive mind. That's it. And it turns out the beauty of this is that Grok can't answer that question. Not yet. The people uploading the information to it, they don't look at those good articles. They turn to Reddit. I suppose that's the beauty of it. One word to give you a vision. Not the vision of Dickinson for death, but in this poem, this particular poem. And then if you want to have fun, maybe they have two other Dickinson poems that talk about death. Great. Go find that word. Where's that one? Just one word. That's all this project is trying to do. I want to stop. Then open it up. Question. Answer for you guys.

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We have about 20 minutes for questions because this is being recorded. Please wait for the microphone to come to you. I will do my best to get there as quickly as possible. And yeah, floor is open.

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All right. We call this a pity question.

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Do you have any advice on how to get those students that are afraid to just make it up, so to speak, to get past that barrier to where they're actually writing?

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Yes. And that's a tricky one, because on the one hand, my honest answer would be give them an non graded assignment so there's nothing at stake. Low stakes writing is fantastic for this stuff. That's on the one hand. On the other hand, if your students are anything like mine, they need motivation. So what I do in my classes, I have writing exercises where they have to do this. And I actually Put grades on their paper, and I'll put brutal grades on their paper. And then after. Well, brutal but honest. I don't like lying to people. Lying gets us nowhere at all, especially with writing. If you're telling a student, this is an A paper and you know it's a C paper, you're doing that student no favor. And I understand the pressures that you guys have to under. I don't have those pressures. The president, I think he likes me for my beard. And he can insult me, and he likes me because I'm a hard grader. But I don't think I'm a hard grader. I think I'm just honest because I have a goal for the students. Do you want to learn how to write? Do you want to learn how to. I played sports my whole life. I never, ever had a coach. If I did something adequately or maybe even wrong, I never had a coach go, that was great. They would scream at me. I would have to do push ups and then go run lines. Yeah, okay. Well, this is kind of what there's with writing and reading literature. There's a certain aesthesis to it, a sort of discipline that goes with it. All right? So I give them these writing assignments, and then I tell them on their last one when they hand it in, oh, by the way, I don't really count these grades unless they help your overall grade. So I just. After I just gave my talk about honesty, I'll ask the sisters is withholding information. I withhold a little information. Right. But that's how I do it. I think to get students to do it, it has to be low stakes. How you motivate them is slightly different. I have a colleague who does it, and his motivation is it's low stakes. It's not graded. But if you've done a barely adequate or even adequate, do it again. So in some ways, students don't like taking that time. And if you have to do it again and you don't get it, then you. Well, my colleague is Dutton, who wrote the book with me. Then you go and talk to him in his office hours. He will walk you through this. And he's a wonderful teacher, and I think he probably has more athletes and he's a hard grader, but he has more athletes in his class than I think any other colleague at the college precisely because he does it in the way that they're used to. You do something, you don't do it wrong, you get corrected. Now do it again. And now do it again. Now do it again. Is that time consuming? It is. So it depends on your curriculum, what your headmasters or principals allow you to do. But I'm a less is more kind of guy for me, I have them do small writing exercises, and this is for the freshman at the 100 level. Then they write their paper. After about eight weeks of going through these small exercises, pretty fast for me to grade and comment on, they write a paper. And then their second paper is. They now have to analyze their own writing, asking, what was the purpose? Where's your topic sentence? I make them do analysis of their own writing. And then so their second paper is a rewrite of the first. And what's fun is in their writing reflection, which I have the assignment sheet in the book. I make sure they do that before I hand their papers back. Do you know how excited they are when they see that? They notice the same wrong things that I noticed. It's very empowering. It gives them a sense. Look at Hillsdale. We believe in self governance. It gives them a sense of autonomy. It gives them a sense of control, of willfulness. I can do something in this world. I can notice what my Prof. Just said is wrong. And then it's fun because some of them just. I think they want to impress me with their being so hard on themselves, and I don't accept it. When they're too hard on themselves, I tell them, that's not true. You have to come and see. This is actually pretty good. Don't just beat up on yourself. Let me show you. That's the other thing. If we're talking imitation. And again, I'm a huge fan of imitation. Rene Girard was a teacher of mine, and so I love it. And so what I offer up to them is to say, this is good. Do this again and again and again when they do something. Well. But it's just like coaching. You do something well, it's, yes, do that, do that, do that, do that, keep doing that. So you want to show them it's best for them to be models for themselves, which means we have to pay attention to it in grad school. It's the worst pedagogical advice I think I've ever gotten. And so I didn't do it. I did, but in a really, I don't know, disrespectful way. We were told, always begin comments with something positive. And my question was, what if there's nothing positive? To which the answer was, well, just make it up. I couldn't do it. So my first comment was often, I liked your font. Now let's begin. And I understand that you guys are coming from a different place where I'm coming from. My administration supports me. They like this approach. Not to assume yours doesn't, but you know, I mean, look, I'm old. When I was a kid, parent teacher conferences where it was the teacher and my parent just kicking my head in the whole time. Now it's the student and the parent against the teacher. That seems absurd to me. So I'm very sensitive with what you guys are having to do and put up with. And I understand this is a difficult teaching. It's why we wanted to create the book so at least you have something for you and the student to work through together. A common language. It's not an exhaustive book. I don't think I've ever used a book about literature or writing. You know, that's 250 pages. This one hits maybe 100. That's it. I want you to be able to utilize it the way in which you see fit for your students with just some pretty simple, simple tools. Sorry, that was a very long answer. That was an excellent question. I'm sorry, I don't think I heard

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the name of your book or when it's coming out.

B

Well, so the intended name of the book, we'll just say there's been a wrinkle with the editor about the title. But the intended title will be Elements of Analysis. An Introduction to Careful Reading. Again, it's simple and that's how I like to do things. I think the editor at the publication house thinks it's maybe a little too simple. So that's it so far. I don't know what the final form will be. So they told me at the latest November, meaning next month. So it's close. What you guys have there is from the latest proofs. I just blew it up so it, so it would fit there so you're not having to look at pages like that. But that's exactly the form it looks like. So we get the title. Elements of Analysis. I just stole it from Strunk and White. Elements of style. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's like that's brilliant. That's what I'm trying to tell the publisher. In fact, it's the first line of the first sentence. Strunk and White was developed at Cornell University as an in house style book. I use drunken white in my classes. Well, Dutton and I made this book as an in house analysis guide. Many of our colleagues use portions of the book in their own classes. So it really was supposed to be Hillsdale College specific, I asked the K through 12 program, hey, do you think 9th through 12th graders could use it? I have lots of friends who homeschool, and so they will use something like, iew is the writing program. But they were a little worried that it wasn't very content rich. And so I started to help developing. Oh, here's how you do all this form stuff, but here's the content that can be worked into that as well. My children use IEW up to a certain grade. I think it's fine. It's just the content the homeschoolers wanted to know. This just seems too cookie cutter. And I agreed. I'm like, oh, you can build something into that as well. So the elements of analysis really was just this idea that we were going to use it at the college. But what we discovered quickly, as soon as we started handing it to colleagues at other places, they were like, oh, my. And when I say 100 pages, golly, I think maybe 70 of those are kind of what you have. But another 30, 35 are just appendices. Grading criteria. How many of you can define what an A paper is if it's based on analysis? Bet you can't. I give that to you. What does a B paper look like? What does a C paper look like? I don't do numbers. I have no idea what the difference between an 84 and an 85 is on a paper. No idea. I have a PhD in literature. I review books for university presses. I review articles that will be published in academic journals. I think I know the difference between a B and a B plus. I can even tell a student, here's why your grade is. And I know you guys probably all hate this grade. B plus slash B. I can tell a student how. We can look at the grading criteria sheet, Usually the grading criteria sheet. If a student has a problem with grades, like, why did I get a C? It turns out I don't mind that question. They should be able to ask that. I take that as a pedagogical question. Not questioning my authority. I don't take it as that. So then it's easy. We're not going to argue about the grading criteria because, I'm sorry, I'm the teacher of record. This is my criteria. Until someone from administration tells me, change your criteria, I am not changing my criteria. And even then. But what we can discuss is to look at that description of a C paper, and then I can ask the student who thought that he maybe deserved a B. After we go through the C Do you know what the question actually is afterwards? Why wasn't it a D? And then we can walk through that and I can say, here's why. Here's the description of a D. Let me show you these things that you've done for a wholly adequate, correct paper. That's it. So I have all sorts of those things in the back. A sample essay that you guys can look at with all sorts of techniques of analysis going on there. Oh,

C

I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about the short assignments that you give. Because one of the things that I've run across is pushback, saying, just have them write more papers, more papers. And I have pushed for more process, shorter assignments, like, here are four lines of poetry. I want you to give me 25 good observations. I don't want a paragraph yet, but I want 25 observations or things like that. And I've gotten pushback, saying, no, just more actual writing, more papers, more paragraphs. So I wondered, you mentioned shorter assignments, what those look like.

B

So that's great. I'm delighted to hear you do that. And the reason why you're getting criticized is because they want you to teach form. And what you're trying to do is teach content. I don't. If they push back hard and they say, then you just make small assignments that do the form for them. You understand? Like, there has to be compromise sometimes. But don't give up that. Hopefully, if you give them the 4 lines and 25 observations may be a bit much. A little. But again, it doesn't matter. For me, I do something similar. The first essay they have to write, first exercise. They do have to put it in paragraph form, but no thesis, nothing like that. I give them a poem from, say, Dickinson or Sappho or something like this. First paragraph. Just summarize the poem for me. Just tell me what its narrative is. Students think that's analysis, but it's like, no, that's just summer summarizing what it's saying. After that, show me the three most important words that distill. So I'm trying to get them to start thinking in part and whole. So when you do these shorter assignments, you have to have a clear purpose in mind. You have to be clear so that when you comment, commenting is fast because you're looking for two things, two. And then you let the students know, I'm looking for two things. And for me, it's not mechanics and grammar. In those things, will I circle a misplaced comma? Will I tell them if it's run on, sure, fine. But I really am looking for, are you doing something with the language here? Are you getting beyond plot summary? That's the biggest thing, guys. That students just want to tell you what something's about and what happens and what we want to push them to do is to say, great, you're right. The question for me is always, would a reader not understand this on a first reading? If so, that's just summary, by the way. You can have summary assignments. I think that's fine. But no, to do the analysis, I like that especially. Even if you want to break them free of worrying about mechanics and grammar, just those short, brief ideas I think are fantastic. But the key thing for this is a key thing for all of you to do, whether it's writing or literature, anything you do in your teaching, you got to think about purpose. Why am I doing it? If you don't think about purpose and why you're doing something, you're going to waste your students time and you're going to waste your time. As soon as you understand your purpose, then you can just home in on exactly what it is your comments need to be in order to introduce students to that concept you're trying to teach them. If you're trying to do 20 different things, they're not going to be able to follow. You're going to be spending a lot of time just figure out what are the two things I'm trying to do. My students all know at the 100 level, I'm doing three things. Three. That's it. Can you write an introduction? I have a whole chapter on introduction. Can you write concrete, specific topic sentences that lay out a clear direction for the paragraph? 2, 3. Can you do analysis? And those three things actually work together, like, beautifully. Right? That's it. At the 300 level, different, the 400 level, different. But at the 100 level, freshmen and sophomores, no, it has to just be those three things. I can't work on prose style at that stage. I can't. Maybe at the 400 level with a really gifted student, we can talk pro style, we can talk word choice, but that's a long time coming. That's excellent. I like the fact that you're willing to go, no, we're doing content. But you can see why people would be allergic. Because then what's the objective? What's the objective outcome? Well, I'm sorry, reading literature, I don't really. Objective outcomes are simple. It's just plot summary quiz questions. That's your objective. By the way, I do that I do that at every level at college. I don't know about the rest of you. I was a terrible college student. If I read through something and I did not like it, I just would stop. I wish I had a professor. I wish I. I have huge gaps in my reading that I have to fill in over decades. I wish I had professors who gave me a quiz. They thought it was too insulting at the college level. And they're probably right. But some of us need a choke chain. We need accountability. So I have no problem with objective outcomes. Just know what it's for. And what it's for is to make sure you've been reading. Heck, if you want to teach students how to take a reading notebook, how many of you try to assign a notebook or a journal? Just so you know, if you have young men, I would not use the word journal notebook. Show them, model for them what that looks like. Those are where thoughts start to percolate. So guess what I let my students do on their quizzes? They can use their notebook. If that's the way in which I can bribe them to be taking notes while they're reading, of course I'm happy. I hope they. All my quizzes are designed to get them an A. I want them to get an A. Some of them don't, but I want them to. But that means I have a purpose for why I'm doing those. Why I'm doing those things. Based on the cookie cutter theme on your 100 level classes, do you give

C

them a scaffolding structure such as a six paragraph analysis with specific themes like author's purpose and language analysis?

B

No. This is why Dutton and I wanted this to go back to 9th and 12th grade. By the time they're in 12th grade, you should be able to hand them Hamlet and say go. So your question, I think would begin at the ninth grade. If I were teaching ninth grade. No. No, I would not. Want to teach me in the ninth grade? No, please, please, no. But if I were doing that, I would be very specific in my questions. I would actually show them. Here are the passages that you will look at in order to answer this very specific question. Does that make sense? So in 9th grade we start that. So when you're saying scaffolding, I'm thinking of it in terms of years. When they're in ninth grade, let's introduce them to those sorts of questions they can ask of a text. Text. Let's show them the passages they have to go and look up. Heck, even as an exercise or maybe even essay. Here's the thesis you're going to prove for me. And here are the passages you're going to look at. I think that's perfectly acceptable for ninth grade. If you're doing that in 12th grade, you may be hindering your students a little bit, because when they come to me, it's here are these exercises I. And by the way, I have an assignment sheet as an appendix in the book as well. So for me, I try to show students there are generally four approaches scholars take when asking these questions. You can use one of the approaches. You can use all four of them. That's what we often do to help them navigate asking their own questions from the paper. Some of you may be wondering, gosh, if it's wide open, aren't you worried about AI? It turns out AI is actually much easier to utilize if you have a specific prompt, because students don't quite know the. So I come from the school of thought that if you. If you. So, for example, if you gave them a thesis, you've given them the solution. If you give them an essay prompt, a smart student can dissect what you're looking for. So I come from the school of thought. If you give them a solution, you've already worked through 90% of the problems for them.

C

Them.

B

I like them to have to wrestle with the problems like, what's that question? How do you find a focus? Those sorts of things. But I think you can scaffold even that. Trying to get them to an exercise I used to use often was, each of you are going to craft for me for freshmen in college, you're going to craft for me an essay prompt. I want to see how do you formulate this problem? How will you do it? And then you go from there, and then you just tell them, this is too broad. You can't do five pages with this. You can't do six pages. It's impossible. So I love the idea of scaffolding. And do I think you can do it grade by grade? I do, but when I'm thinking of scaffolding, I'm thinking like the long game here. And again, this means you literature teachers, whether you're 9th grade or 12th grade, you need to be talking, you need to be working together. This has to be collaborative, right? At Hillsdale College, we understand college collegiality is a partnership. In our English department, we all abide by the same agreements with regards to writing, with regards to page length, type of assignment. It's beautiful because that means students aren't going into these disparate classrooms where they're learning something wholly and completely different. It's not cookie cutter. We all do things differently, but we all have that same purpose and it makes it much easier. So if you're a 12th grade teacher, you should be talking with the 9th grade teachers. How do we do this scaffolding? How do we build this sort of thing up?

C

All right, that is all the time that we have for this session. We will be back here at 10:30 for the program to continue. Thank you, Dr. Jackson.

B

Thank you.

A

That was Dr. Justin Jackson talking about the elements of analysis. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K12 Classical Education Podcast. I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast, Hillsdale Edu or wherever you get your audio.