In Totality

It's amazing how intelligent hard-working students can contrive to miss the point of a poem or passage set as an 'unseen' exercise. I've always known this, I mean as a teacher, but it's useful to be reminded of this law of the universe in another set of marking. I suppose it relates to the fact that the tone of a piece emerges as a result of everything else, like consciousness as a mysteriously emergent quality of biological processes, and if you don't quite get the everything else you'll have little grasp of the tone.

When I'm reading a cheerfully extrovert relaxed sort of work it seems obvious to me that that's what it is. There may be other shadings usefully colouring the fabric, adding variety, and you come to expect these, but they don't generally confuse the main issue. It all seems to me a matter of common sense. But I know that to others, some of whom I teach, it constitutes a sometimes impenetrable mystery. My job is to de-mystify, but I'm not at all sure how this might be done despite having spent over thirty years worrying at the problem.

Oddly, when you ask students to read something out loud they often get it right, even down to the subtleties. Perhaps the answer is to find ways of by-passing the intellect, to avoid over-thinking?