Either-or fallacy

How do we reconcile the two very disparate halves of our discipline?

I know the key is to not think of them as separate, but I keep tripping over myself trying to choose between the two, so I want to write down somewhere exactly what I am thinking about.

The study of literature is exposure and understanding. We read the things that should be read and see things from someone else's point of view. We improve reading comprehension. Why should students be able to tell me about the story after they read it? I want to know that they actually understood what they read. Why should they remember details about the story once they have demonstrated this? So they can talk about more complicated things with the details as support. If they forget the entire novel, how can they make an argument about it?

And there it is. The key...

Because writing an argument, analyzing a text, is the other half. They should be able to think about a complex issue and form a complex opinion about it, to go deeper than "this is bad/good" or "I like/hate it" or "people should/shouldn't". But then they need to know how to do research, right? Isn't that part of my job too? And teaching them how to puzzle through academic jargon and use it with a reasonable degree of ability as well? And where do I find time for that around everything else? Or how do I put that in with the rest?

Here's another part of my dilemma, I suppose: I don't actually have much of a clue about what high school writing can be expected to look like. I didn't have to do any of this stuff in high school, actually, which says more about my school than it does about me, I know, but I'm still at something of a loss. I had students showing up for college with a very solid ability to write a 5 paragraph essay, and then I had some who had possibly never heard of the idea (this was me, to be fair).

It's been terribly long since I had to do it myself, and that isn't great, is it. If I am asking kids to do this, shouldn't I be comfortable doing this as well?

I mean, I could just assign myself a research paper or something. I do actually like to do research on things I find interesting. And I want to get back into the swing of the writing thing.

This is off topic. 

The point is, I'm trying to get out of the mindset that my discipline is so push-pull between two hard-to-reconcile tasks and figure out how they should be working together instead. Does anyone else have this mental block? I want to do well, so I keep buying and borrowing and finding things to do instead of designing from the ground up, because designing things means having a good grasp of what I want them to get from it, and that means I need to know what they should be getting from the class overall, and that's just So Much and I can't get my head around it; this is the problem, you see. I want to absorb this, understand it, and be able to form a complex opinion about it. (There's your research paper if you want to write it, my friend.) Unfortunately, the information keeps pinging off my skull, like there's a barrier between my brain and being better. (I couldn't resist the alliteration there, even if there is a better way to say it, something more like "between my mind and the absorption of information critical to my success"....semantics, words, tossed around my head like there's a blender blade bent out of shape, and there I go again with the alliteration, because what does that even mean? Stream of consciousness is just a stream of nonsense when your consciousness is so disorganized that nothing makes any sense anymore, and you're just letting your fingers keep typing, typing, typing, typing, typing, typing everything that comes into your head, your fingers are the voice in your head because there isn't one and never was; who is talking to you, who is speaking now, is it me, is there me, is there anyone there, james joyce if you can hear this please tell me how you got it to stop

Stop.)

I'm going to end up in tears right here in this Louisa coffee shop, at a table full of people I can't talk to even if I wanted to, right in front of this lady in the hat with the nice blazer who sits across the table behind the clear Covid barrier.

What exactly am I even doing...I write things on blogs, and this is the fourth or fifth I've made now, so I can pretend I'm talking to someone and not no one. Putting all this in some kind of diary doesn't give me the deluded illusion that someone can hear what I'm saying. Anyone would do. The internet, as an entity, will have to do. 

I feel very alone. (Thanks, therapist, for the phrasing. I am not alone; this is not an inherent characteristic or a quality of myself, but it is how I feel right now.) Just writing things where I alone can see them just makes it worse? For some reason.

So this is the first of probably no other posts about my teacher thoughts for now. Maybe I'll come back. Maybe not. It's better than dumping all of this on my poor, long-suffering friends, though.