I cannot seem to leave comments…so Renee, I’ll just say here that I did not mind your supersized post.  It was terrific to hear exactly what I have been thinking or wondering about during the course of our readings.  I kept thinking that the group discussions were so tedious as a student.  No one works in them.  They chat.  I have always considered them hangover days for the instructors.  But to hear that you had these same concerns and as an actual teacher, which I am not, had some hesitation to use groups made me read on and really enjoy your post.  I do not have that sort of classroom experience, so it is essential that I learn a lot from those of you who do.  I especially liked your adjustments.  I liked that you worked with the difficulty papers and then proceded and that those papers excited your students. 

The funny thing about the reading this week is that I had the same reaction and have had the same reaction that I think students will have to the prospect of not getting “the answers” from the instructors.  I read Sonny’s Blues and when I began reading the piece about it, Confronting Resistance, I was set back on my heels at first to her mention of homosexuality in the piece she had been teaching to her class.  I thought, what homosexuality?  Did I misread this?  As I read on, I realized that her title is odd because she only touches on Sonny’s Blues and that she was discussing a different story.  When she finally arrived at Sonn’y Blues, I was very happy to see that my interpretations had been correct, at least according to her.  I was, in spite of our readings and the fact that I am sold on the idea of self-exploration, really happy about that.

 So the reading goes on, and in the Blau book I had the same reaction again.  I really wanted to get through the chapter to the final analysis of each poem that we read.  I wanted confirmation.  But something else happened as well, the tension has eased as I think some of the teachers in class have mentioned as they experiment with these techniques in their own classes.  I am less “freaked out” by the prospect of weeding though a piece and picking out those parts that I used to gloss over.  I want to do more.

At the gym one of the trainers said to me something along the lines of, so why do you study English?  Why don’t they just write what they mean instead of hiding it?  I wanted to ask him why he liked going to school and studying muscle tissue and nerve response, but held back and wrote out the l(a poem by e.e. cummings for him.  I told him to go through and pick out what hurt in the poem. (Word choice he understands only too well) He stood there for a moment and asked me difficulty questions.  He asked, was this a parentheses.  He asked why is was written that way.  I told him the form may have to do with meaning.  He told me he got a really high math SAT.  I told him I did not.  And then, while I struggled through leg raises and scissor kicks, he figured out the poem, or a lot of it. 

So I am not a teacher yet, but the readings do support me as an individual and give me some confidence that I may know how to approach this idea of teaching when the time comes.  As far as the lecturing, which someone wrote about, now I find it a relief in a way but I think also that it depends on the teacher.  My writing teacher talks for two hours a night and the time flies.  She uses the readings to illustrate a specific style and then expounds on it before we read our own work.  She is truly an excellent guide I would say rather than lecturer.  But, that said, I do now see through the experiences I have heard about in class, in the readings and from Renee today that these techniques are truly effective.