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One of my literature teachers in Form Five confused me with her peculiar approach to teaching.

She took us through In the Fog of the Seasons’ End novel by Alex La Guma sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and chapter by chapter.

I got really disturbed. This was not the way the greatest teacher I have had in High School approached the teaching of set books in my “O” Level. While at Kivaywa Secondary School, Okiya Oriang handled the study of literature in Form Three differently.

He began by telling us a bit about the author, the context and the dominant ideas in the book, all the time citing incidents, characters and their interconnection. He also insisted everyone reads the book before he started taking us through it.

We had earlier, in Forms One and Two, been introduced to a different teaching method, but similar to the one the literature teacher in “A” level was replicating. But that was not literature. Our class teacher in Form One made it very clear to us that this was not literature but lessons in class readers.

Basically, class readers is about extensive and intensive reading. It helps one build literacy skills, vocabulary, reading fluency and language.

It was under this exceptional pedagogic framework that teacher James Kedogo introduced us to Barbara Kimenye’s three books under the Moses series in Form One.

We literally lived in two secondary schools for a whole year: Kivaywa and Mukibi’s Educational Institute for the Sons of African Gentlemen, the virtual school in Moses, Moses in Trouble and Moses and Mildred. In that virtual school, we met naughty students like Moses, King Kong and The Itchy Fingers.

In Form Two, we were taken through George Orwell’s Animal Farm and James Bridie’s Tobias and the Angel.

Our teachers took us through the five books sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph and page by page.

But the study of literature proper was not about words, sentences and paragraphs. It was not about comprehension. It is about nurturing literary appreciation skills.

The understanding and making a critical judgement of the theme, style, use of figurative language as well as other elements of a literary work.

It is about the context of the literary work, the structure, the figurative devices and how effective they are in conveying meaning. It is about the identification and appreciation of the various themes in the work.

Literature is about the ideas and the aesthetic use of language to capture and convey the central ideas or themes in a book.

Taking students through a work of art, which is what set books are word for word, paragraph by paragraph is a waste of time.

Literature is about the high points or denouements in a book and seeing many interlocking storylines within the bigger plot because each storyline, incident, or character is a point of intersection with other incidents, characters or storylines.

The challenge of the teacher is to identify for the students the different connections or patterns in the book.

Literature is about discovering patterns and threads, other than the plot or storyline. It’s not about comprehension or the isolated meaning of words in a localised context.

Literature is about a philosophy, an outlook, a vision of life. It’s about truth and beauty. Words – carefully chosen and woven – are the vehicles. Words in isolation don’t mean much, beyond their own dictionary meaning.

Such an approach to the study of literature opens up the eyes and minds of students to new vistas, worlds and new heavens.

Students get the feeling English poet John Keats had in his poem On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, likening the feeling to the one-star gazers have when they behold a new star in the skies.

A proper approach to the teaching of set books makes students understand life in newer ways.

Literature is not about comprehension. Comprehension is looking at trees inside a forest. Literature is looking at a forest, the entire forest, from a higher ground or vantage point.