Words, words, everywhere. What am I to think?
Although I am not a teacher, I still found Salvatori and Donahue’s advice to be really helpful. (A lot of underlining and sticky-notes in my book.) My question for all the current teachers in the 610 class is: Would you have found TEAPOD helpful if you read it before you started teaching? And I know that seems like an empty question, because I just said above that I thought the text is helpful, but feel free to disagree with me and say that nothing comes close to the real experience of teaching, or every class is different, etc.
My favorite was the idea of commenting and using the notation system as a way to create a “visual record of the reading process” (TEAPOD 19-22) especially for larger text. By the end of the book, I even had a few regrets. I found myself wishing, “If only my professors and teachers had me write difficulty papers for Great Expectations.” (I vividly remember the dinner conversation with my parents that fateful night in my sophomore year of high school. When they asked if I was enjoying Charles Dickens, it was so easy for me to criticize, and explain exactly what I did not like, besides just saying that a text is boring.) I think it would be really great if you had your students do the difficulty paper exercises (or maybe even as a group activity). In response to the middle of page 43, referring to the Rime of the Ancyent Marinere exercise, which asks the reader to recall a reading in which the narrative viewpoint provokes confusion, the first novel that came to mind was Wuthering Heights and even though the narrative confused me at first, it remains one of my favorite novels!
Sidebar: I haven’t read Othello, but I saw the Bollywood interpretation titled Omkara. I expected the subtitles to be easier to follow instead of reading the text in a modern translation. After watching the movie, I decided that the acting, dance sequences and the cinematography were fine, but the plot itself was awful! I was so relieved to read Brendan Cotter’s comments (117-119) about his “difficulties” due to his expectations and previous assumptions of Shakespeare’s writing. I also think that I should apply the elements of difficulty (and trusting/testing a response and identifying pre-understandings) to cinema and watching literary interpretations.
I also did my own mini-difficulty exercise with the Cathedral short story - which I enjoyed! I have to admit that I read the questions at the end of the story before I started reading. The third question was my “difficulty” point. I questioned myself; What part of this narration can give me the answers? What are my assumptions? What did I predict/pre-judge would happen at the end, before I knew the narrator would change his point of view? (I’m sure we’ll discuss our own conclusions in class on Wednesday, but I just wanted to add a minor part of my conclusion for the blog.) This was a stream-of-conciousness short story about faith, not necessarily in the religious or spiritual sense, but having faith in ourselves. Although our narrator is completely ready to give up, he is able to make a blind man see/understand something as massive as a cathedral, then he understands why his wife is such great friends with Robert. This also reminded me of Shulman’s conclusion in Taking Learning Seriously - “…we do not choose between the skepticism of reason and the hope grounded in faith…we must learn to do both.” At first our narrator reasons that the task is pointless to teach to Robert, since a blind man will never physically see the cathedral, but then to his amazement, both him and Robert, benefit from their drawing experience.
Add comment January 27th, 2008
