That's the last time I am coming to a Parent's Meeting with you

Teachers and Conveying Meaning to Pupils

As  I walk to the school for a meeting with my daughter's teacher I am having Socratic fits of abstraction. For it has always been difficult with teachers - how to convey what I want for her - not what the teacher wants.

I pass seniors tending their garden they smile benignly - pensioners with their defensive property pretensions. Others are surly and scowl as if shouldering debilitating glooms.

I sit opposite my daughter's teacher in the grand oak panelled hall.
"I mean by 'literary theory' the shift from the hermeneutical process of identifying the meaning of a work of literature. 

There is a pause, I shouldn't have said hermeneutical.

"You know, the depth model, the hidden meaning of  a piece of literature. Teaching them to hunt out the X of the piece, what is its quintessence."

"Yes, so what would be your approach be in explaining the meaning of a piece of literature?"

"I would like you to focus occasionally on the question of how that meaning is generated."

"Come again?"