As I started my journey through the pages of Scholes, I was interested. True, it was a much more theoretical text, but it has been awhile since I’ve been able to contort my brain into his way of thinking. I was fine with all the binary oppositions that he set up in the beginning pages, and I was on board with the need to rebuild the ‘English apparatus’. Then, I found myself questioning him and disagreeing with more than I agreed with, and then I agreed with him, scratched my head, screamed and threw the book across the room, had a drink, went to bed, got up and tried it again with only marginally better results.

I enjoyed his humor at times, like when he said, “Milton’s Mammon not too long ago materialized as our Secretary of the Interior” (14). I can only imagine given the publication date that he is refering to Donald P. Hodel…I giggled.

I applauded him when he stated that, “We must…ask[ing] what we mean when we proclaim ourselves teachers of literature” (11), and that “we must stop ‘teaching literature’ and start ‘studying texts'”(16). However, I realize that he has the priviledge of having an office in that Ivory Tower, and can live in the theoretical world postulating about what ‘we’ (don’t you love the use of the Royal ‘We’) must do. Then I almost lost it when he so nonchalantly states, “In our hypothetical introductory course, we cannot expect our students to read widely in any single author, but the process can at least be enacted by a teacher who had read widely and makes the fruits of this reading availabel to the class for thier use, rather than hoarding them up to enrich some superior, teacherly display” (51). Only four pages after saying, “We, as teachers, may or may not wish to trouble our students about this theoretical dispute, but we will have to make up our minds about our own positions in it, simply in order to decide whether to make this material available or conceal it”(47). Persumably, if we are going to make it available, it will be in some ‘superior, teacherly display’.

Oh, I could continue on for hours, but I shan’t bore you any longer expect to say the following.

I did like what Scholes had to say about ‘studying texts’ instead of ‘teaching literature’; however, the ‘English Apparatus’ is a huge machine that has only been strengthend within the walls of testing army (I’m speaking primarily of K-12 education), and it takes a lot of courage to stand up against those forces, especially within the design of the current system. For example, even though I have 7 years of teaching experience since I have not been teaching in my present county for 3 years, I have to turn in weekly lesson plans for review. Mostly, I’m trusted and they only get a cursery look; however, when they do get looked at more thoroughly, I get questions like, ‘when are you teaching…’, or ‘why haven’t you covered…’. Persumably, knowledge that will be covered on the oh so important test. Now, there are teachers who have less experience than I do, but since they have been in the county for three years they don’t have to turn in lesson plans. However, they’ve been following the ‘teaching for the test paradigm’ since they first walked into the classroom, so that’s what they do because there isn’t a lot of emphasis put on reflective practice once you step into the classroom. This in turn leads to the students’ ‘school behavior’ where they want the answers and they don’t want to ‘study the text’. I face this with my students constantly, many of them are starting to come around, but still some of them wonder why we haven’t blazed through as many texts as the other classes and why I ‘never tell them the answer and make them figure it out for themselves’ or ‘why did Ms. so and so say it meant…’.

 Alright, seriously, I’m done now.