All of the different suggestions and ideas in the Sheridan Blau book this week really got me thinking about getting my students to actively engage and think about what they are reading. This reading, in conjunction with some of the other readings we’ve done so far this semester, was still in my head when I went to work this morning (and, if I am to be perfectly honest, I was reading it during my planning period :-) ), so I decided to try a little experiment.
It just so happened that today I was starting The Odyssey with my ninth graders. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand why that text was chosen for ninth graders, but in previous years, I’ve always ended the unit feeling like they really had no idea what was going on. I was thinking about how Blau was enforcing in his book that many students hate reading because they feel like they don’t understand, and that talking about what we read is useful in helping us to assess our knowledge of the topic (as evidenced in several of his workshop examples). On page 56 of the reading, he posits:

    Group work on problem texts is also crucial to the learning that needs to take place in literature classes because of what it contributes to the construction of a particular kind of classroom community and classroom culture and for the sort of ethos it fosters for intellectual work within such a culture. Working in groups on interpretive problems helps to build a classroom culture that honors the process of noticing and acknowledging difficulties in understanding texts….In a classroom where intellectual problems and confusion are honored as rich occasions for learning, students and teachers will be more inclined to confront and even seek rather than avoid the textual and conceptual problems that offer the richest opportunities for learning.

Like many teachers, I’m sure, I often become frustrated with group work because it never ends up being work. It ends up being a time for the students to socialize and answer a few questions when they get around to it, in between discussing the drama of who stole who’s boyfriend, and what they did over the weekend. At the end of last week, I had my kids studying world mythology, and instead of leaving my desks in the traditional rows, I arranged them into little pods of 5 desks. I decided to leave them like that. So when the students came in, they were already set up for what I hoped would be meaningful group work.
In the spirit of, as Blau says, honoring confusion, I started off by telling them that I knew the story would be difficult and that even I struggle with it. I asked them how many had purchased a video game or some kind of puzzle, beat it in a few hours, and then felt unsatisfied and bored at how easy it was. Many of them raised their hands. “See,” I said, “when things are too easy, we don’t have any interest in them. Inherently, we want a challenge.”
I tried a different approach with each of my classes today, but at the sake of not taking up the entire blog page, I’ll just describe what I did for my last class of the day, which, in my opinion, worked the best. As a class, we read the introductory material and background information. I covered some terms with them and refreshed their memories after their 5 days away from my class about where we were coming from and going to in this unit. I instructed them to get out a piece of paper. They immediately wanted to know which questions they had to answer at the end (those awful text book questions). I said that what I wanted them to do with that paper was keep track of their difficulties and questions, as well as what they think they understood with some degree of clarity. The section we were reading was relatively short, so I told them to read it twice. On the first reading, they were to write down questions and difficulties. On the second reading, they were to note if there were any moments of clarity, as well as any further questions and difficulties. I gave them 25 minutes, and then I waited. Usually about 5 minutes into an assignment like this is when I start finding out what’s going on in everyone’s social lives. But today, I heard them actually working! They were talking about what they were reading. They were calling me over to ask me questions. It was wonderful. I couldn’t believe it! At the end of their 25 minutes, I called their attention back up to the front of the room. I told them that for the third reading, I was going to read it to them. In two of my three classes, when I started reading, I heard comments to the effect of “oh, THAT makes sense now!” I thought that only happened in text books or with teachers who had been teaching for years upon years, but it happened to me in my third year of teaching. After I finished the reading with them, some still had questions, understandably. Blau says that the reading process is as much about the teachers learning to interpret the material as it is for the students. This is very true for me, especially since I had never read The Odyssey until I had to teach it. I’m a very visual learning, so in an attempt to help my students as much as myself, I made stick puppets with magazine pictures of celebrities. I put them on magnets and drew some rough drawings on the board and proceeded to “act out” today’s reading for them. Because they were interested to know which celebrities I used and they thought it was funny, they were paying attention. At the end of that performance, I had even MORE students saying that they understood.
So even thought this little experiment of mine isn’t commenting directly on the reading, I thought it was worth sharing because I really did enjoy the chapters from the Blau book. They gave me so many ideas for my classroom and allowed me to question certain conventions that I hold about teaching literature. Sorry for such a long post!