“There is no such thing as the meaning”.Crosman, Robert.  “Do Readers Make Meaning” Reader in the Text.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980. 154.

          Crosman’s analysis on finding meaning in a text reminded me of the class discussions that surfaced in my tenth-grade class today after conducting a Think Aloud.  (I was so enthused after observing the Think Aloud activity last night that I decided to try it out on my own students today.  I have to admit that I’m quite enjoying using my tenth-graders as guinea pigs for the various strategies I’ve learned about in class, and they have all seemed quite successful so far.)  But before making connections between his article and my “experiment,” let me first discuss how our Think Aloud worked.

            Though I was a bit nervous that my students would be intimidated by the process of not only cold-responding to a poem, but doing so in front of their peers, my fears were soon assuaged.  All I had to do was ask for “three courageous volunteers” and I had several hands go up.  Because I knew most of them would be familiar with the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, I decided to use Louise Gluck’s “Gretel in Darkness” poem we examined last night.  Interestingly, my students remembered details of the plot of the fairy tale much more clearly than we had been able to; this is perhaps because it’s been fewer years since they’ve read the story.  The three participants focused first on clearing up vocabulary issues; the words “kiln,” “firs,” and “spires” stumped at least one of the students.  They jumped around a lot, looking at bits and pieces of the poem; they were particularly drawn to the image of the shriveling tongue.  To my astonishment, after only about eight or ten minutes, my students had voiced many of the same insights and comments as our participants last night.  Of course they noticed the connection to the fairy tale, but they also suggested that Gretel might be suffering from some type of insanity, that the absent step-mother might actually be present in the poem as the witch, and that through the characters of Gretel and Hansel the poem illustrated the theme of holding on vs. letting go (of the past, of fear).  I was impressed. 

            The class discussion that followed was just as interesting.  Students came up with at least five different, supportable interpretations of the poem, but the kept asking me for the “right” answer:  What does it really mean?  Which one of us has the right answer?  Is it really about the Holocaust?  Or is it simply a retelling of a fairy tale?  Are you holding back on us?  Can I look on Wikipedia to find out the REAL meaning?  If only I’d read Crosman’s article earlier, I could have told them “there is no such thing as the meaning of [the] poem” (154).  But I essentially told them the same thing:  as long as you can logically support your argument, you have a valid interpretation.  I insisted that I had only seen the poem for the first time last night and that I wasn’t “holding back on them.”  They seemed to relish the idea that their thoughts were just as valid as the teacher’s.  That I didn’t necessarily hold the key, the “right” answer, the final judgment.  They insisted that we practice this activity again, with the caveat that I choose another poem that I’m not familiar with so we can “figure it out together”.  Imagine, I’m in cahoots with my students, at their request, to figure out the possible meanings of poems.  I never would have believed it….