Lesson plans and activity books or outlines that you get about not just my book, any book, worry me, because they start to channel you into responses that are not really yours. You have to then deal with someone else’s or what someone else wants you to do. I have an enduring memory when I was a kid of reading things, coming into class, bubbling over with my insights. I didn’t call them insights then, of course, and telling and learning from the teacher when she would let all the kids go through and say things and then would sit and explain what it really meant. And you would sit there saying, how could I possibly have missed all that? And I didn’t miss anything. I just made it mine, which we should allow kids to do and don’t. So I don’t like the idea of directing all of this stuff.
There’s a wonderful old Peanuts cartoon that from some years ago, and I can’t remember exactly, I think it’s Linus or Charlie Brown and Lucy talking about poetry. And the next to the last box, one of them says to the other, “but how do you know what it means?” And the last box, the other one says, “someone tells you.” And of course, that’s pretty much the way poetry is taught or has been in schools for a long, long time. And I object to that strenuously. So always when I visit schools, the question comes up rarely from the kids, but mostly from the teachers about what I’m trying to show them or tell ‘em or teach them or what the message is and everything. And it isn’t, I mean, I have things on my mind of course, when I’m writing about it, but when they read it, they may not be the things that they’re thinking about.
Because if it touches something, a chord and then it makes them think about something or has some importance for them, it may be entirely different, but it’s real and it’s right. So you have to let them talk. And most important, you have to listen. This is the thing I think so many parents are not terribly good at. Yes, they hear what a child is saying, but quite often I’m not really listening to it or not really responding in the same spirit that the child is. And I think that’s the great art form. And that’s for teaching too, I think is listening more than lecturing or teaching or getting a point across or making sure someone understands the lesson. I remember when I was in service, we did a little bit of teaching. There were various kind of courses and things, and they always told you the military method, tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them and tell ‘em what you told them. And so the message always got through was if someone had a hammer and a big nail pounding it into your, because at that level they weren’t interested in your ideas. They were interested in getting a message across. That’s not my idea of literature.