SOURCE: Reinsmith, William A. “Literature and Life: Helping Students See.” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 3, no. 1 (fall 2002): 10-15.

In the following essay, Reinsmith relates the experience of teaching “Gimpel the Fool.”

In twenty-seven years at my small university I have never had the pleasure of teaching English majors. The focused students who appear in my classroom will be going into various health care professions. If they persevere in a difficult curriculum they will become pharmacists, physical or occupational therapists, physicians' assistants, biologists, toxicologists, science teachers. Yet they all must take a required number of humanities courses, one of which is Introduction to Literature in the second semester of their freshman year. I have fashioned this course so that it deals largely with short fiction.

Not having English majors, I found early on that it useless to expound on literary theory of any kind. These attempts leave my...