#turns out you it's detrimental to pretend all school subjects don't exist in a vacuum

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

Being a teacher's kid, I very much understand the "curtains are just blue sometimes" people.

It's a bit of a long one so:

Starting at... Ninth grade the latest, for a lot of main subjects in school (math, native language, some sciences, second languages that have been taught since grade school...) there is, potentially, more than one solution to a question. It's a stage you reach at some point if you want to get decent-ish college acceptance rates.

A halfway competent teacher recognizes that and either keeps track, or follows/question the logic to see if it holds water. If it does, your method gets the same passing grade as the one they have been teaching you, though occasionally begrudgingly. (To my Latin teacher who forgot to put "explain" behind a 8-point closed question and got called out by me linguistically when my "yes" was deemed inadequate: hi.)

Native language teachers, in my experience, detest this with each grade it becomes more true. Because you're supposed to use what they're teaching you, instead of "feels right, feels wrong", even if "feels right, feels wrong" works more reliably most of the time. You learned 80% of what you need to know in previous grades. You can usually bullshit your way to a passing grade, even if you've not paid a huge amount of attention.

And then comes the time to analyze a novel, usually relatively late after the point where even the math teacher will give credit if you can stump them.

They can do this by asking students to read it at home. How many will? Ehhh. Depends on the class, really. Or teachers can decide to read it in class and analyze as you go.

With either option, this teacher has read that book back to front for years. They've looked at literary scientific analysis. The experts say, the blue curtains symbolize This Thing, and the experts make compelling arguments based on psychological theories (which the students have had little to no exposure to) and previous highbrow works or historical genres (if it's mentioned in different subjects, those teachers might not have gotten to that part of the curriculum yet).

So now there's a class full of kids who are used to independent thought, asked to analyze what is basically art. If they've read the novel entirely before, their teacher can put forward the idea that the curtains in chapter 3 out of 24 are foreshadowing something intangible. And you'll probably get a decent amount of people agreeing with the Experts on vibes alone (because the experts also work on at least 20% vibes alone). If you're reading in class and have to fill an hour or two with baby feeding the concept of things meaning something else, you are more or less forced to ask students if think the curtains mean something. This makes reading even more of a chore than it already is for the people who weren't going to read the novel at home, which will do absolutely nothing for the atmosphere in the room.

And you'll get a lot of wrong answers. You'll also get a lot of answers that, honestly, would probably make a very interesting and valid literary science bachelor's paper.

But without either the rest of the novel to use as a foundation, or previous experience analyzing a text for meaning, they can't argue on the level they need to get credit. So you are winding back the clock to eighth, seventh, sixth, even fifth grade and saying "No, that's wrong, because I say so". And it's on something that feels like that shouldn't be possible: this is a literary work, it's art, you just said it's open to interpretation. So you get teenagers and even adults pushing back defensively that "the author isn't here, you can't know that!"

Citing experts after several years of "experts used to think" in other subjects isn't really effective unless you can provide the work, which most teachers can't due to time constraints, language barriers or paywalls.

There's teachers who can handle directing this almost inevitable situation into an interesting discussion about intention of the author vs. effect of the text--which they were gonna have at a later point in this course anyway. There's also teachers who snap at being argued with and "finally" have something to put their foot down about.

And, in the latter case, the students know a tantrum when they see one. So you've got years of "if my logic is sound, it's correct, if it's not, I'll be told where I went off the rails" meeting a hostile situation missing the second part.

So not only are the curtains blue to the student, there's now a memory of people who disagree being like [insert crotchety 11th grade teacher here] and their explanations not being worth listening to because there is no substance to them. And there are texts where the color of the curtains is, well, window dressing, which will reinforce that bias.

Easiest way to prevent this annual meltdown? Interdisciplinary cooperation. You start spoon feeding kids early not only "experts used to say", but you also sneak in very low stakes literary analysis in other subjects. (And, in return, occasionally shoehorn other subjects into the ones that require literary analysis later)

If you mention homosexual behavior exists in all recorded species in Earth during Bio, you let the 8th graders know a guy writing about randy penguins did so in obscure Greek and ask them what personal feelings might have motivated that choice in a time when English or Latin were the accepted ways to report findings where this guy lived. Usually in the last 10 minutes of class, so that if they take it too far, it's the next teacher's problem

Different scientists disagree about theories? Let the students see the titles to the studies and ask why they read like a conversation when these people were very much not working together, using the other's theories or even living in the same country. Any schism this creates during 9th grade Phys tends to resolve when it turns out they were both wrong, but made some interesting points.

If you've got a personal historian disagreeing with archeological evidence and observations from travelers, you can discuss that in class. You can also point out where there are "interesting" word choices or phrases that suggest even the author being paid his weight in gold and threatened with execution wasn't enough to entirely wipe out the suggestion that Ingo the Inept Dingleberry might have been at least partially responsible for the twelfth famine of his seven year reign.

Is this more work for teachers? Totally. But it also keeps students invested, so it saves them work in trying to convince Stacy and Kenneth to care, if not about Econ, then at least their Econ grade.

By the time you get to blue curtains... Well, students might still not read the novel at home, but at least they'll be more likely to grab the curtains and run with them than throw themselves to the floor and scream that those curtains are just fucking blue.

I'll never understand the "curtains are just blue sometimes" people. I was soooo fucking excited learning about symbolism. You have a story and what the story tells you. Then you have the fact that it was written at all by someone and that's another story. And then there's also hidden extra story info?