Years before Holly Messitt joined BMCC’s English faculty, a boss of hers – the head of a public relations agency – decided to recruit several doctoral candidates as staff writers. “He explained that he needed people who knew how to think,” she says. “He said he could teach public relations to them, but he couldn’t teach anyone to think.”
In point of fact, Messitt, an assistant professor in BMCC’s English department, is forever reminding her students that “the ability to think critically — to know how to ask questions and follow up – is the most valuable thing you can get from college.” Indeed, critical thinking is the key element of the 300-level English courses she teaches – in the novel, the plays of Shakespeare, and especially the short story.
Love and hate in literature
“Regardless of which course I’m teaching, my aim is always to get my students to engage with what they’re reading – to find the places that hook them, whether they love or hate what the author is doing, and then use that as a way to go deeper into the work and ask questions about it.”
In a class last semester, a narrator’s comment in the short story, “Drown,” by the Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz, provided just such a hook for a Haitian-born student.
“At one point, the narrator says, ‘We couldn’t have been any poorer unless we were Haitian refugees,’” Messitt recalls. “The student was upset and wanted to know why the author would make such a remark. I got him to tell me something about the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans and learned that Haitians were looked down upon in the Dominican Republic as refugees.”
Rather than accepting the student’s reaction at face value, Messitt challenged him to probe more deeply into the author’s intent. “I asked, who is characterizing Haitians in this way — the author or the narrator? If it’s the narrator, what is Diaz trying to tell us about him?” The student’s upset became a way of “getting deeper into the story — and ultimately resulted in a much deeper and more satisfying experience,” Messitt says.
Asking the right questions
Writing figures importantly in Messitt’s courses and typically takes two forms — more formal papers, and what Messitt calls “reaction papers,” in which students are asked to summarize the action in a story at a particular point in the plot and ask questions about it.
“They don’t need to know the answers,” Messitt says. “The important thing is that they know what questions to ask.”
