Of skorts, skirts and pants

Not a day has gone by in my 200-level Latin American and U.S. Latin@ literature class titled Beyond Borders that we haven't mentioned Britney Spears.

One of my students even argued that she is a "transborder" personality, meaning (I guess) that she is now beyond any restraint or limit. But I disagreed, especially because Ms. Spears doesn't in any way, shape or form, that I can think of, fit the transborder framework, at least not within the context of my class.

And while I'm not particularly interested in Ms. Spear's public train-wreck of a life, a part of me is glad that the students feel they can make connections between the theoretical constructs we discuss in class and issues of public interest to them today.

That's one of the main points of the whole exercise of my teaching. I want my students to see literature and literary theory (well, some of it) as applicable to their lives, not as something esoteric or alien or over their heads. I want the students to learn about life through the literature. After all, that's one of the greatest gifts a book can give us.

I'll likely never visit Chile, and I definitely wasn't there before or after the 1973 military coup that changed that country's history forever, but I "live" through that time everytime I re-read and re-teach Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits.

The funniest and most recent example of how the students make connections between the literature and the theory and their lives, was when one student suggested that Allende's novel vacillated between giving women "pants" (metaphorically speaking, he stressed) and keeping them "in skirts."

"It's like skort literature," he ventured.

"Skort?" the rest of the class snorted, "What's that?"

He proceeded to explain, quite informedly, that the skort was half a pant and half a skirt.

"We could see it as a transitional phase," I ventured.

"But what's wrong with pants, why can't women just wear pants?!" one of my more feminist students demanded.

And so it went, as the whole class got into a discussion of gender roles through the metaphors of pants, skirts and skorts, and of how the novel, while written by a clearly feminist writer, reflects an ambivalence about gender roles.

This ambivalence is clear in the fact that while the women play very significant roles in the novel, which tells the story of a family in Chile before and after the coup, it is the men who wield most of the power.

I wondered what a visitor would have thought of my class. Would they perceive that as a pedagogically rich moment in which the students were trying to make sense of the literature in their own terms? Or would they see it as too simplistic an analytical move?

Personally, I had a ball, as I do each and every day I teach. When people ask me: "How did your class go?" I always have to answer: "Great!" Because it's always great for me.

I remember one student a few years back who said she loved coming to my class because there was always a laughing moment and she always left smiling. That's exactly why I love my class, too. I always leave with a smile on my face, and invariably, we all end up laughing about something, somehow. It's great therapy, let me tell you.

I have class in a few minutes and God knows what the metaphor-of-the-day will be as we move from Allende's novel to Pablo Neruda's poetry. I hope I do justice to The Poet, who marked the beginning of the end of my own career as a poet. As I tell my students, I used to write poetry once upon a time, but then I read Neruda and never wrote again because all the great poetry has already been written.

While I may have given up on poetry, I haven't given up on writing. And I hope that I have many, many more years of teaching left in me. When it comes to writing, that's one of the greatest things about this blog. I don't have to compete with Neruda to enjoy it.