When I began to teach at the University of Minnesota (1964), many students told me they were the first in their family to go to college. As students in a Shakespeare course, they felt “stupid” because they had never seen one of his plays or read one of his plays. I was gifted with these words as my answer: “You are not stupid; you are ignorant because you have not been exposed to Shakespeare. You are taking this course to get exposed to him and it is my job to help you do that.” As time went on, I decided it might be my job to help adults get exposed to wonderful writers, so I became interested in ways to do that initially through the University, but eventually through a variety of avenues. There was a program run out of the Extension Division with the nickname “Rusty Ladies.” It was attended by very smart white women, often graduates of prestigious schools, who were married to men climbing their professional ladders fast. Their wives were expected to enhance that progress but not be independent thinkers. When the woman running this program asked me to teach a class in downtown Minneapolis, I jumped at the chance. I stopped referring to the group by the odious nickname and we read and discussed wonderful books as the women began to grasp that they still had brains and that I was asking them to turn up the volume.
In the decades since this first outreach to community education, I have facilitated many remarkable groups of serious adults willing to read whatever I ask them to read. And, though many tell me they feel “stupid,” I just wave my hands and ask them to keep reading and speaking. What I get from creating spaces where regular readers can strengthen their critical abilities is a major feeling of usefulness. John Milton has a sonnet written to his postman shortly after that person died. It seems the man had delivered mail for decades, but finally had to retire. He died very shortly after he stopped walking his beat, and Milton’s sonnet talks about how he lost his purpose in life.
I want to share about these groups I’ve formed since working with the “Rusty Ladies,” because each of them has given me so much fresh insight into the authors and themes we have studied together. For two long periods, I led a group determined to read every wor\d Shakespeare ever wrote, even really silly plays like “Much Ado About Nothing” or “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” When the second round of people finished with the Bard, they asked me to continue by leading them to discuss Greek tragedies, about which I had hardly thought since a mythology course in college. That group still meets for six evenings in the fall and then again in the spring.
Several months a year, I go to the gorgeous Minnesota Arboretum and discuss books about gardens/gardeners, nature, the environment, other species of living beings. And forty-five years ago, I agreed to form a monthly women’s book group because those wishing to join wanted to see what women writers from the past and the present had to say. Recently I retired from leading that group, but they have paid me the ultimate complement–they have continued the group with new facilitators.
Finally, for four evenings in the dead of winter and in high summer, I read two hard books with a motley assortment of people, mostly women. These discussions are the ultimate proof of what I believe about teaching in the community, because members work so hard with the searching prompts I provide before we meet, and then speak in spite of shyness or relative unfamiliarity with the authors. They hear themselves become more comfortable and fluent as critics. And I delight in their growth.
So I am so glad I looked beyond the classroom setting and trained my abilities to foster dynamic “talking spaces” where anyone willing to attend and work hard can find just how good they are at finding meaning and sharing insights into serious literature.