When Students Don't Think / When Students Don't Read And Exactly Why Do I Want Them to Do Both

Tuesday Morning. Multicultural Literature. We're discussing Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." The first question concerns why the villagers have found a woman turned into a spider more interesting, more compelling than an apparent ancient angel who has crash-landed in the courtyard of Pelayo and Elisenda. Answers, proposals, thoughts are slow in coming and as I proceed with observations of how the "angel" does not live up the expectations of Father Gonzaga, how the villagers poke it with a burning iron, and how the angel and a child both come down with chicken pox, I begin to wander (to myself) if my students just believe this is a crazy story about a decrepit angel when everyone knows that angels are bright, young and above ill-repute. Conceptual thinking is slow-going at the mall-about-to-be-destroyed. How should I let them know that reality is put together each day in more or less the same way that the angel is shoved into a chicken coop and that the "human story" of a girl punished for defying her parents and going out at night to dance by being turned into a spider is going to win over the incomprehensible and incommunicative any day? And then, why do I especially want them to know this?