On “meeting them where they are”

In The Atlantic, Walt Hunter suggests that teachers of literature teach difficult texts, whole books, and stop meeting students where they are (gift link):

The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.

Amen, and amen.

Hunter’s essay makes me recall a moment from the day-long campus visit that got me my job on the tenure-track. A faculty member asked what I was teaching, and I ran down the reading list from my freshman lit class: Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces (they went together well), some Shakespeare sonnets, some Dickinson poems, The Turn of the Screw, Barthes’s Mythologies, and a little bit of Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books. “Oh, you could never do that here,” my interlocutor replied. “Well,” said I, “I take my students as I find them.” It never occurred to me to say that I would “meet them where they are.” Why would anyone do that?

And why, speaking of “meet them where they are,” do so many teachers refer to students as they and them ? As in “I gave them an assignment”: gah!

A related post
Parts and wholes (On teaching whole books, difficult ones)

[I wouldn’t choose to teach A Confederacy of Dunces in 2026 — its comedy has worn badly. But I would still teach, say, Bleak House and Infinite Jest, novels that I taught in sophomore-level lit classes. Those two took up the semester. Why not? Grapple, readers, grapple.]