Luc Travers is a good friend, and I was thrilled yesterday to get to grill him on how he leads kids into falling in love with great literature.
Long-time readers will remember Luc as the genius (yes that is a loaded term, but if it quacks like a duck…) behind the book Touching the Art: A Guide to Enjoying Art at a Museum, which lays out a method that I put at the center of A Painting a Week°.
What you might might not know is that teaching the visual arts isn’t even the main thing Luc does.
Luc1 also runs literatureatourhouse.com, where he runs live online seminars that lead homeschoolers into emotionally meaningful experiences with novels and plays. In conversation a week ago, he mentioned a parallel he’d recently seen between
his experience taking middle-schoolers through Victor Hugo’s novel of the French Revolution ’93, and
the weird crap kids are doing in theaters at the Minecraft movie.
What connects ‘em? Communal fervor.
He got me asking: how can we create a communal fervor in a class of students? How can we lead students into crying at the climax of a story?
Obviously, I wanted to hear more about this — especially since my one experience teaching middle-school literature was one of my bigger fails as a teacher. And I thought I’d share it with you!
In this interview, we touch on…
what novels & plays should we be guiding middle schoolers through?
what sorts of note taking help kids understand their own emotions?
what do you do with a 60-page description of the Paris sewers?
what very different thing do you do with a 30-page description of Jean Valjean?
why are we even having all kids study literature in the first place?
This was a blast to record. If you work with stories, or with teens, or with anyone with emotions, I predict you’ll find this discussion fascinating.
It’s French and is pronounced “Luke”; isn’t it a shame we’re not all more cultured?
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