For someone who thinks the discussion on meaning should be over, I sure do talk about it a lot. =) In the very first post, I state a conflict between the intended meaning of a sentence and what I want it to mean. (At least I’m holding true to the idea that both readers and authors have the right to make meaning.) Of course, I use the quote to support what I want it to mean, a meaning that matches my personal experiences with literature — which leads me to the biggest trend in my blog posts: an attempt to put a nugget from the reading into the framework of my experiences. Unfortunately, having no literature teaching experiences, the contexts I put my little nuggets into are my experiences as a writer, student, reader… and consumer of coffee.

Perhaps this is why my posts also tend to put me in the role of a student empathizer. I latch on to methods that address frustrations I have had as a student or that promote practices of teachers I have appreciated. I latch on to ideas that start with the individual students, that help validate student ideas, and that teach students that it’s okay not to understand everything.

As Jennifer writes, “I tend to blend the lines between the analysis of the text I read and the analysis of my life experiences.” Apparently I find interpreting the meaning in everyday life to be a difficult, yet worth while task, and I want to help students use literature as a means of accepting and confronting this difficulty. To this end, I am drawn towards methods and ideas of teaching that show students the complications in texts, that allow for different and even conflicting interpretations, and that focus on developing critical thinking skills that do in fact blur the lines between textual reality and actual reality. As a writer (back to that again), I have embraced the notion that the goal is to capture some element of the human condition. As a reader, I work to connect with the writer’s representation of that condition. And as a teacher, I would hope to help students in their search for that connection.

In looking at the structure of my posts and the construction of my ideas, it’s clear that my ideas tend to circle back on themselves in a sort of spiral. My writing circles around the same threads, pulling in ideas from past readings, classes, and others’ blog posts as it goes around. While I wish the loop were a bit wider than it is, that I had more experiences to draw on, and that I were incorporating a few more new ideas into the loop, I think this spiraling shows that, for me at least, the blog is a way of putting the reading into contexts that are meaningful to me and is, therefore, a useful way to build those mental connections that are essential to learning. And that is one reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about the egocentric nature of our posts.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in my blogging is that in reviewing these, I don’t see the ideas I missed. I stick so closely to my experiences and the ideas that I’m attached to that even in reflection I don’t see where my lack of experience has caused me to misunderstand or completely miss something. I can’t see where (as the TEAPOD discusses) what I know is actually the cause of my difficulty. But I guess that’s where reading the posts of others and classroom discussion comes in. And this is another reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about our egocentric posts: not only are we putting the ideas in meaningful contexts for ourselves, we are lending our contexts to each other. For those of us without teaching experience, this is tremendously valuable. Now that I have made myself aware of my biases, perhaps I can use the ideas and experiences of others not only to build my spiral, but also to knock it onto a different (faster, wider?) track from time to time.