Books not only introduce us to new knowledge, but also immerse us deeper into things we already know. I understood totalitarianism, but I understood it on a much deeper level after reading Yeonmi Park’s 288-page account of a harrowing escape from North Korea, To live. I knew the term caste system, but I didn’t really understand it until I read Isabel Wilkerson’s book. Caste: the origins of our discontent. I knew that stress could have negative effects on my physical well-being, but, again, I gained a much deeper understanding after reading Bessel van der Kolk’s work. The Body Keeps the Score: The Brain, Mind, and Body in Healing from Trauma. And I thought I knew a lot about Martin Luther King Jr., until I read Jonathan Eig’s remarkable, in-depth biography, King: a life. There is a depth to these books – a depth not found in instant reading. A closer look at areas where we previously had superficial thinking.

It would be a mistake to think that this deepening of knowledge occurs only through reading non-fiction. Fiction has also enriched my understanding of several subjects. Rebecca Makkai The great believers taught me a lot about the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan Crazy honey opened my eyes to the transgender experience. Danya Kukafka Notes on a performance made me think about the death penalty in different ways, even though it was a topic I had been thinking about for years.

Fiction not only deepens our understanding of subjects, but also develops the skills we try to develop in our students. As Christine Seifert notes in Harvard Business ReviewRecent neuroscience research has found that reading fiction helps develop “self-discipline, self-awareness, creative problem solving, empathy, learning agility, adaptability, flexibility, positivity, rational judgment, generosity and kindness” (2020). Reading fiction deepens our knowledge of the world, but it creates an added benefit: it deepens our understanding of what it means to be a good human being.

One of my favorite poems is “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen, which describes the horrors of the Western Front during the First World War. In the poem, the narrator describes a gas attack and the image of a comrade unable to obtain his gas mask in time. This haunts the narrator as he watches this tragedy unfold through the windows of his gas mask:

Faint through the foggy windows and the thick green light,

Like under a green sea, I saw him drown.

In all my dreams before my helpless gaze,

He throws himself at me, dripping, choking, drowning. (29)

One could read this poem and understand the horrors of war. But I would argue that readers gain deeper meaning if they know the context in which the text was created. Before composing this poem, Owen enlisted and was sent to the front. During the battle, he was caught in an exploding trench mortar shell and spent several days unconscious, lying among the remains of his comrades. Eventually rescued and hospitalized, he was diagnosed with what was then called shell shock (today’s term PTSD). While in the hospital, he suffered numerous nightmares, which prompted him to begin writing war poetry. One of the many poems he wrote while hospitalized was “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

Knowing Owen’s story and imagining him suffering from these horrible nightmares while hospitalized adds a level of emotion to reading the poem. But wait, the story doesn’t end there. After Owen “recovered”, he was given the opportunity to return home; he chose instead to return to the front, where he ended up leading numerous assaults against enemy positions. In one of these assaults, Owen was killed in action a week before the end of the First World War. His parents learned of his death the same day the war ended.

The poem reads differently when we know that Owen died just seven days before the armistice was signed. Even after teaching this poem for several years, knowing Owen’s story left me feeling a lump in my throat every time I revisited it.

The idea that having prior knowledge leads the reader to gain a deeper understanding is certainly also true when it comes to reading novels. Recently, I read Julie Otsuka’s Swimmers, which delves into a mother’s gradual descent into dementia. Here is the narrator describing a visit to her mother in a care facility:

Every time you leave, you lean in and give him a kiss. Sometimes she walks away. Other times, she looks at you and turns an indifferent cheek. Still, as you walk away – you can’t help it – you turn and look back. Sometimes she looks at you, but she doesn’t seem to recognize your face. Sometimes she stares into space. Sometimes she leans back in her wheelchair and stares intently, with fierce concentration, at the tops of her feet. She has already forgotten you. Today, however, when you turn and look back, his hand is half raised in the air, slowly waving goodbye to you. (2023, 169)

If you’ve never had a loved one with dementia, perhaps this passage gives you an idea of ​​what it’s like. I say “a feeling” because if you haven’t been there, you don’t understand it. Reading this passage took me back to my mother’s memory care center and stirred up several memories related to the last year of her life. It brought back the drip, drip, drip of losing someone you love. I lived it and this experience brought a deep resonance to my reading of the Otsuka passage.

The value of having important prior knowledge has consequences for how we structure our new units. Think about the most difficult book you teach: the one that keeps you up the night before the unit begins. I suspect one of the reasons this particular book is difficult for students is that it is so far removed from their prior knowledge. The Great Gatsby becomes a less profound reading experience if you enter the first chapter without knowledge of the Jazz Age or the mores of the Roaring Twenties. The Grapes of Wrath is a more difficult read without knowledge of the Great Depression or the Dust Bowl. The scarlet letter It’s more difficult if you go into it without understanding 17th century Puritanism. And so on. It’s not necessarily the words on the page that make these books difficult; it’s the lack of prior knowledge.

I learned this over many years of teaching Robert Louis Stevenson’s book. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2022). When I first taught this classic, I started by planning the unit backwards. I asked myself what I wanted my students to take away from this reading experience. I decided that I wanted them to think about the duality present in human beings, which is affirmed when Jekyll states “that man is not really one, but really two” (70). Stevenson suggests that there is good in every bad person and bad in every good person, and I wanted my students to think about the nature of temptation and what that means in a modern context. (At the beginning of the story, Jekyll controls Hyde, but as the story progresses and Hyde takes more and more pleasure in committing evil acts, Jekyll loses control. Over time, temptation dominates him. ) I wanted my students to go beyond the overly simplistic framework. The interpretation that humans are half good and half bad – realizing this is much more nuanced than that. This is the story of what can happen when you start to give in to temptation and the internal conflict that arises. All wrapped up in a tightly constructed murder mystery.

But here’s the problem. When I first taught the short story, I didn’t teach it very well. It always took me three or four years – and sometimes more – to polish a new novel unit. Some lessons were abandoned; others, revised or created. There is a process of shaping around the teaching of any novel, and it was during this process that I realized the one area where my Jekyll and Hyde unit had failed: I hadn’t done it well enough. highlighted.

I once heard Jeff Wilhelm say that the setting of a novel depends not just on the time and place of the characters, but also on the time and place of the author. In other words, to truly understand a book, you must understand the context in which it was written. I learned this while teaching Stevenson’s classic: a reader cannot read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in depth without first understanding that it was written in Scotland during the Victorian era. Because if you know what life was like in Victorian Scotland, it completely changes your reading experience.