Few books stay with me, but Sherwood Anderson’s (1919) Winesburg Ohio has become part of my life. I remember sitting in high school, reading a short story, Hands. It deeply touches me in ways it took years to understand. In college I discovered it’s actually the second chapter of the novel, which I’ve read over and over again through the years. Despite being more than a century old, I feel like Winesburg Ohio contains timeless lessons, especially the common thread weaving the book together – try not to be grotesque.

Winesburg, Ohio opens with an elder man, a writer, who collects stories of the lives of people he meets. Every person is a tragedy, never meaning to be, but somehow always becoming alienated and suffering alone, instead of being connected to our common humanity. But why? Each person finds a truth. These really are genuinely true and they’re beautiful. Each person lives by their truth. They cling so tightly to their truth it becomes who they are, which twists their truth and deforms them into a caricature. They don’t see outside their truth anymore and they become grotesque.The elder man never writes his Magnus Opus about these distorted alienated people. But, to me, the elder man is Sherwood Anderson himself and the novel’s narrator George Willard. Winesburg, Ohio is The Book of the Grotesque.

I guess I sometimes feel like the narrator, observing life, and maybe fooling myself into believing I know something in my detachment. I know very little. But I’m learning to live life. Even so, I still observe, and I’m struck how every educational truth becomes twisted into a grotesque. I would like to share some of my observations with you and hope you will consider when we might become grotesque and how we can refine our art of teaching.

When I began learning about pedagogy, I heard a refrain so often it’s almost cliché: the person doing the talking is the person doing the learning.It admonishes us not to keep lecturing but instead make students active. It’s true.When we have students being active learners, we push them to greater depth-of-processing and they’ll remember our lessons better (e.g., Hyde & Jenkins, 1969). But what if we cling to the active learning truth?

When I was a graduate student teaching assistant, I taught breakout sections of a large Developmental Psychology lecture. Sitting in lecture, I loved how the professor teaching the class explained childhood. He told us to have students role play attachment styles in our sections, and I did as I was told. I’m sure the activity helped solidify definitions in our students’ minds. They’ll do well on the test. But I was horrified. My students portrayals of insecure attachments were caricatures of utterly irrational damaged persons. Definitions miss the deeper lesson about how insecure attachments are rational, functional, responses to childhood environments and our internal working models stay with us long after they lose their usefulness. It reminded me of Winesburg Ohio and how honest character portrayal cam through, and how nearly everybody had an insecure attachment style, like George Willards parents distancing themselves and Louise Bentley’s desperate, but unfulfilled, drive for intimacy. Today I teach insecure attachment styles in my own classes with Anna and Elsa from Frozen; complex characters acting rationally from their life experiences. Despite doing a great deal more talking than my students, they’re actually learning.I can see their moments of insight.In part, we need to remember an active mouth is not synonymous with active mind. In part, my students learn because I’m talking. While they reflect, I model empathy and a nuanced way of understanding humanity (Grobman, 2005, 2015).

If we set the bar high, students rise to the challenge. Totally true. Students need a rigorous education. We see examples where they don’t get it - professors needing approval of administrators might “dumb down” class because easier grading means better course evaluations (e.g., Eiszler, 2002). Personally, I love being a student in rigorous classes. I learn so much. When I was a Physics major I ‘failed’ every exam, always less than 50%. But so did everybody else. Our grades were scaled so we got A’s and B’s. We had something to aspire to. It worked. Whenever I took a higher-level Physics class, I’d look back and think just how easy it was before. It wasn’t easy, but each class pushed me so hard, I kept growing. But just because rigor is beautiful, doesn’t mean it can’t become grotesque.

I became a Philosophy graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.Our requirements included two introductory undergraduate computer science classes – 100 level. Bizarre, but I think it’s because we need skills when we fail to become professors. What do you do with Philosophy? As a Physics major, I needed to take computer science and I aced it. But these classes broke me. They’re new computer science major “weed out” classes at a school competing with MIT.I’d sit in a lecture hall, me and over a hundred freshman who I imagine we programming in kindergarten. I thought I understood my homework, until I tried.I spent far more hours doing computer science homework than my other classes, combined! By the end of the semester, I’m the only grad student of my cohort who had not dropped. I genuinely learned so much and I’m frustrated my undergraduate professor didn’t feel, I guess, we were worthy of more rigorous education. I got through my second semester and my programming ability is a qualitative leap beyond when I was an undergraduate. And I despised programming. For years, I literally became nauseous doing anything like programming (like Psychology stats). Computers aren’t my natural way of thinking, like the freshman in my classes, but I was capable, and I’m creative so I feel like I could have done something with computer skills. But more rigor left me less capable.

I’m still not totally sure why rigor works so well, and fails so abysmally. I think it was how I’d barely finish my homework successfully and, before feeling happy about my accomplishment, I was thrust into yet another struggle to avoid failing. My experiences guide me to push my students to think as deeply as they possibly can about psychology, feel uncomfortable, but through their struggle I make sure they reach a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness about their deeper understanding of our world.

If we just babble in class about our subject matters, our students would be confused. What should they pay attention to? What’s a key point versus an interesting aside? Inherently, teaching is goal-directed, so even if we’re not explicit, we have learning objectives for our students. But what if we cling too tightly to the truth of learning objectives?

They become “SMART,” which is anything but.

What happens when we rigidly make our learning objectives SMART, when they’re: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound? We let go of all the beauty in our subjects.We need to touch our students’ hearts with grand meaningful ideas we’ll never measure their progress towards because they’re timeless questions humanity faces. Deep down, each of our fields is an exploration of truth, goodness, and meaning. Why would we sterilize our teaching and trivialize students’ learning.

When we make SMART objectives, “smart” students easily hack them for grades. They feel like they did what the teacher expects of them, and they never gain a deeper understanding. Why should they care? They’re fulfilling an “objective” we set. Not theirs. I’m unsurprised SMART comes from a business management consultant, George T. Doran (1981). SMART learning objectives are more akin to a business manager keeping employees on task towards a company mission. SMART has its place. But in stark contrast, liberal education is about empowering students to find their own objectives. To become curious. And to keep growing throughout their lives.

I chose highlights I feel strongly about, but these are just examples of realizing how grotesque we become. When I taught high school, “engagement” was the buzzword. Engagement is wonderful, until we cling too tightly. English classes are so engaging when we read good books, but we still need grammar. Physics classes are so engaging when we discover during labs, but we still need to derive equations. Making grammar and equations as engaging as possible is wonderful, but I have seen teachers become grotesque by barely covering grammar, equations, and other ‘boring’ but important aspects of our subjects. Similarly, classroom management taken too far stifles creativity. Teachers enamored by technology can lose sight of how the latest thing isn’t always greatest. New technology fails and students need to adjust to technology when they could be focusing on our subjects.

At the scale of policy, standardized tests have an important place for us to track our progress. They’re useful for researchers, like me, exploring patterns. But all too often I’ve seen children defined by their scores.From a scientific perspective, that’s ignoring error variance. From a personal perspective as a parent and as once a child who was labelled and tracked poorly leaving me bored and in a loop of hating school, it’s grotesque.

I’m guessing even the truth of avoiding becoming grotesque can become grotesque. Like someone who rightfully acknowledges the world’s complexity, recognizes both sides have points, and internalizes political moderation as a virtue. Political moderation typically makes sense, but it can become grotesque if it leads us to impartiality about evils like slavery and authoritarianism.

If we try so hard to be balanced across every pedagogical approach, we might fail to hone our skills enough in any specific areas. For example, a professor of mine was a student of Carl Sagan and my experience of awe watching Cosmos brought me to major in Physics. A professor mine was a student of Carl Sagan.I watched him bring classrooms to tears with the vastness of the universe. I aspire to become a speaker who moves people with her words. It means something I’ve investing so much time cultivate my speaking skills, even though I know lecture can certainly become grotesque.

Becoming grotesque is natural for us. Teachers are passionate about what we do. We care. We find what works. And we can cling to those truths tightly. Perhaps just being mindful any pedagogy can become grotesque helps us notice and refine our art of teaching away from it. In some ways becoming grotesque is an outgrowth of confirmation bias – our tendency to interpret ambiguous evidence as support for our beliefs and actively seek evidence supporting what we already believe (e.g., Darley & Gross, 1983). Telling people to be unbiased or to critically think does not reduce confirmation bias, but consider-the-opposite does (Lord et al., 1984). We need to ask ourselves to be our own devil’s advocate and try to make the case for opposite perspectives. I do it, and I end up finding new information and discovering different ways to interpret evidence. Similarly, with any pedagogy I try I ask myself, “how could this go too far?” and “what good might come from teaching an opposite way?”

More than a century before Psychology identified a bias in our thinking to confirm what we already believe, Sherwood Anderson noticed something similar - how we can cling to a beautiful truth so tightly it becomes grotesque. Every example I shared is beautiful. Active learning, rigor, clarifying learning objectives, engagement, classroom management, technology, and standardized assessment are beautiful truths about teaching. We shouldn’t abandon them. But we need to be mindful to consider how we can cling too tightly and leave our teaching grotesque.

Anderson, S. (1919). Winesburg, Ohio. New York, NY: Viking Press.

Buck, C., & Lee, J. (2013). Frozen [Film]. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Darley, J. M., & Gross, P. H. (1983). A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 20-33.

Doran, G. T. (1981). There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives. Management Review, 70(11), 35-36.

Eiszler, C. F. (2002). College students’ evaluations of teaching and grade inflation. Research in Higher Education, 43(4), 483-501.

Grobman, K. H. (2005). Attachment styles - Getting stuck in unhelpful boxes. CopernicanRevolution.org (Revised in 2015 with Frozen movie references)

Hyde, T. S., & Jenkins, J. J. (1969). Recall for words as a function of semantic, graphic, and syntactic orienting tasks. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(4), 471-480.

Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231-1243.