Reading Renee and JJ’s posts allowed me to spend some time reflecting on my own journey through academe. Like Renee, I was a carefree student through high school graduation. I was absolutely consumed by my schoolish behavior-in elementary school, I would race through worksheets just to be the first one finished. I prided myself in slapping down my completed assignment on my teacher’s desk and proclaiming “Done!” before anyone else had that high honor. Despite my quick grasp of new concepts, I often lost points because of careless mistakes. I was so focused on getting the attention and praise of being the fastest thinker, I often didn’t take the time to think deeply about anything. My habit of cursory thinking and superficial completion of assignments was rewarded and continued throughout high school.

Like JJ mentioned, most of my classes covered a wide breadth of material without requiring much deep thinking. If I recall correctly, most of the critical thinking was done by my teachers, or whoever created the lesson plans they used in class. That information was then solemnly passed down to me so I could regurgitate it back to my teacher in the form of a mindless “research” paper, a conglomeration and rearrangement of the notes I had scribbled during lectures. When I finally got into a class that required me to develop my own interpretations, to think for myself (AP English Lit), I struggled, I resisted, I got a D+.

I also found myself floundering when I got to college. Putting aside my excessive partying and immaturity during my first three attempts at college, I also found that I had never learned to study or to think independently. I never learned how much time and effort it takes to come up with a new idea. To my relief, some of my classes still required and rewarded my refined abilities in schoolish behavior, but some wanted more. Some wanted me to work hard. Never in my 12+ years of education had I worked hard to receive an A. Though I appreciated the grading system at the time, I can now clearly see its flaws.

In this vein, and because of recent meetings at my school encouraging teachers to eradicate Ds and Fs on report card grades, I’ve been investigating trends in grade inflation: according to a NY Times article from 2007, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/education/23tests.html?_r=1&scp=10&sq=grade%20inflation%20high%20school&st=nyt&oref=slogin) high school students’ grades have gone up while their reading and math abilities have gone down. This study conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress illustrates an unsettling disparity between grades and performance that my school is starting to contribute to. As compassionate a bleeding heart I can often be, I’m fed up with the second and third and fourth and fifth chances we (at my school) are being “suggested” to give students who consistently refuse to take responsibility for their actions (or, more often, inactions). I’m saddened and angered and frustrated by the disservice we’re doing to students: they are learning the lesson that they don’t have to do anything to merit a reward but still receive it. This strategy is creating a plague of entitlement among young people. Our feeder school even goes so far as to absolutely refuse to fail any students, regardless of ability or effort put forth.

I agree with JJ’s call for a complete overhaul of our educational system, as daunting as that may be. Instead of giving students grades based on what we hope they might one day possibly be able to achieve/learn/demonstrate/understand, I believe that a much more effective, meaningful, and honest method would be to give students grades based on demonstrated learning. I believe that authentic assessment tools can gauge this criteria quite well. However, more emphasis is often placed on repeating things that other people have learned, instead of using higher level thinking skills to demonstrate one’s own learning. In my school, emphasis is also placed on “How many times did the parents call complaining about the grade?,” “Will the student be able to wrestle if he fails your class?,” and “What good will it do the student to keep him here another year?”.

I apologize (to those of you who have read this far) for my ranting and raving. However, as we have been talking about the various purposes for reading and for writing, I’ve found this particular piece to be quite . . . therapeutic.

  “A disconnected curriculum tends to be low in redundancy, the reinforcement of convergent messages that enables us to map our environment and gain confidence in our ability to negotiate it.”  Graff, Gerald.  Clueless in Academe.  London:  Yale University Press, 2003.  p. 70.Though his claim is made in the dense, academic language he criticizes, Graff makes a good point.  I understand him to mean that students need stuff to be repeated, not just in consecutive content courses, but throughout the curriculum as a whole.  And students can apply this repeated stuff more easily to their world if they’re not getting mixed messages the whole time.  Though I wish I had a solution that would allow students to experience this effective redundancy, instead I have a story about more mixed messages.

Two summers ago I spent two weeks working with a  dozen other teachers to revise the K-12 curriculum for teaching research.  Our group discovered and debated several models of research and considered which would be the most effective for teaching our students.  We spent hours dividing up the skill sets between the thirteen grades, each year building upon those mastered in the previous years.  We even made charts and checklists demonstrating for teachers what their students should have learned before coming to their classrooms, and what new skills needed to be introduced in any particular grade level.  We assumed that by repeating the process of introduction, practice, and finally mastery of skills throughout the grades, by the twelfth grade, students would be research experts. 

We were wrong.  We were not necessarily wrong in our thinking, but unfortunately, after all of our hard work that summer, the county decided to discard our plan in favor of. . . no plan at all.  Needless to say, that was a little disheartening.  But what is more disheartening is that many of our students, even at the twelfth grade level, lack basic skills in finding information and applying it to their own lives.  Our plan, though catered specifically to the language arts curriculum,  still would have been a stepping stone toward that “redundancy…of convergent messages” that Graff mentions.  Instead of research building blocks designed reinforce methods of finding and applying knowledge, systematically adding complexity through the grade levels, we now (still) have a hodge-podge of methods that are effective, but also contradictory, in various degrees.  Just as one illustration, some teachers swear by formal notecards as a starting point for serious research, while others (myself included) have never authentically used notecards in their own research processes and can’t justify teaching students a fake methodology.

Despite the curriculum team’s best efforts that summer, our students are still going from class to class, trying to find out what exactly their new teacher wants.  Because our school system was unable (unwilling) to make available a tool for teachers, the students are learning, unlearning, and relearning research methods, depending on who’s receiving their final products.  To their credit though, most students seem impressively able to adapt.          

Only having read a few of the sections of When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading so far, I’ve found it to be one of the most useful assigned readings of this course. I particularly connected to Cheryl Glenn’s “The Reading-Writing Connection-What’s Process Got to Do with It?” Throughout her journal entries, she stresses the importance of reading, writing, and speaking as processes that begin as rough drafts that may be polished and refined through more reading, writing, and speaking.

This semester I’m teaching a 12^th grade literature course to the same group of students I instructed last semester in composition. I’ve found that they are terrified of expressing their opinions about literature, especially when it comes to poetry. Most of these students are college-bound, but have not ever taken advanced courses. They don’t seem to have the vocabulary to talk about literature, and are afraid of saying the “wrong” thing. This week, I spent a good portion of the class teaching them about the possibility of individual interpretations of literature, that there’s not necessarily one “right answer” to a poem, that I don’t have all of the answers.

Because I had spent so much time working with these students to develop writing fluency, they are very familiar with low-stakes writing; one of my mantras during quick writes was “write first; think later.” Just getting something down on the page was a great achievement for many of these students. So this week, I applied that same technique to reading and the discussion or literature. While we were looking at a new poem, I encouraged them to jot down whatever came to mind, to “brainstorm the poem,” that there were no wrong answers. They appreciated the idea of having a “rough draft” of reading; this strategy enabled most of the students to take the risk of jotting something down or adding to the discussion. I have to admit that reading Glenn’s chapter gave me a sense of validation regarding my teaching method. I enjoyed seeing in print an approach I had tried just a few days earlier. Despite my success with this method, I still had a few students who insisted they had nothing to add to the reading of the poem; they just “didn’t get it.” I’ll need to work on another strategy for including them in this process.

One of the most appealing features of Glenn’s chapter is the detailed explanation of writing prompts that she uses in her ENGL 205 course. The writings she assigns early in the class focus on summarizing a text, whether in a few words, a sentence, or a paragraph. Her emphasis on teaching students to effectively summarize before moving on to interpretation follows the chart we discussed in class last week: a reader must have a literal understanding of the text before she can move to a deeper, more critical reading. Based on the student samples Glenn offers, this strategy seems to work well for her class; however, I was often left wondering if she only opted to choose the best student work to be included in her chapter. It might be more representative of the effectiveness of the assignments if both less successful and more successful examples of student writing were included.

As a bit of an aside, I would like to build on our prior week’s discussion of grading; I feel that Glenn is working toward a successful balance between high and low-stakes writing. One of Glenn’s students, Gretchen, comments that “with the three critical responses and seven ‘freewrite’ journals that this class does a great job of combining the two” (110). Glenn grades several written assignments solely on completion, allowing her students more freedom. The three critical responses are examined and assessed more closely. The one area of assessment where I would question Glenn’s technique is in the overwhelming amount of time she spends conferencing. It’s not clear if all of these student conferences are occurring within standard office hours or if Glenn is staying late to get through the long lines of students hoping to discuss their revisions, but she often remarks how tired she is and how much time she’s spending in this area for the course.

On several occasions throughout Textual Power, Scholes makes remarks about the challenges of designing an English curriculum. His claim that most resonates with me is that “school is the one place where our major concern is to study what we don’t know, to confront Otherness rather than to ignore it or convert it into a simulacrum of ourselves” (59).

I would like to highlight this passage from Scholes’ book and mail it to my Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Hatrick. It seems that recently Hatrick’s goal has been to pretend that Otherness doesn’t exist, to hide Otherness, to keep it under lock and key. I am speaking of his recent decision to ban And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book based on the story of two male penguins from the NYC zoo who “adopt” an unhatched egg. Though the theme of the story is the importance of family, unarguably it contains a family with two daddies, which, translated into the human world, would be a family with homosexual parents. Because one parent thought the “themes” of the book “too mature” for elementary students, ultimately it was taken off the shelves of all county schools. However, the resulting backlash toward our Superintendent forced him to reverse his decision in all schools except for the one with the complaining parent.

Though I whole-heartedly disagree with Dr. Hatrick’s banning of the book, I can recognize that he, as someone with power over texts, is often faced with difficult, delicate decisions. Those classroom teachers fortunate enough not to have their reading lists dictated to them must similarly decide: What texts should I teach? Should I stick with the classics or move beyond the traditional canon? What texts can simultaneously engage my students and teach them to think critically? For my first two years teaching, a primary consideration was often “For which books do I already have teaching materials?” I was so overwhelmed just keeping up with the day-to-day lessons, I never paused to consider the “otherness” of a text. Other teachers shared their plans with me, so for the most part, I taught what they taught.

Now, as I am considering a position for a lead English teacher, a position that would allow me to develop an entirely new curriculum, ultimately for grades 6-12, the passage about including and examining Otherness speaks forcefully to me. I would be shifting from an overcrowded, predominately wealthy, Anglo rural suburbia HS anchored in tradition to a small, fledgling, inner-city, public charter middle school with rich socio-economic and ethnic diversity. The job change itself would be an experiment in Otherness. But it raises some interesting questions for me. At my current school, many of the students are sheltered, naïve, unexposed to elements of Otherness. Their friends, their classmates, even their teachers, are very similar to them. This year in particular, I’ve noticed that this homogeneity lends itself to judgmental, self-righteous, and often ignorant attitudes toward Others. In my classroom, we’ve had discussions about people, beliefs, texts that are somehow different from my students, and I’ve struggled with trying to expand some of their narrow views. I wonder how the prior knowledge piece of Otherness will have affected the belief systems and attitudes of the students at the DC school. I’m wondering if, as important as prior knowledge is to understanding difficult texts, it is just as important in navigating “difficult” belief systems (difficult in that they are different from our own). My hypothesis is that an immersion in Otherness opens the mind to even more Otherness.

Now I just have to figure out What to Teach…

–Karen

    Analyzing my weekly blog posts has allowed me to notice several trends in my responses. Rather than comparing several of the assigned texts to each other, my posts consist of an examination one text and its relevancy to my own classroom teaching. Each week, I identify either new methods I hope to implement or those I currently utilize with my students. Embedded throughout these reflections are comments on my emotional responses both to the texts we read and the strategies I practice in my classroom.

Throughout the blogs, the primary focus is on practical application: How can the knowledge presented in this reading

• • Make me a better teacher?
  • Help me more fully engage my students?
  • Enable my students to attain higher levels of critical thinking?

Repeatedly, I choose to examine ready-to-use strategies such as establishing a repertoire; writing difficulty papers; translating a “highlight” into a verbal response; and “thinking aloud.” The commonality between these methods is their function; each offers a clear process for students to surpass mere literal readings of texts on their way to more interpretive understandings. As I mentioned in my first blog, a professional development workshop in August prompted me to make deeper reading of difficult texts a targeted area of instruction this year. Conveniently, many of our readings have supported my pursuit of this agenda by offering specific strategies applicable to the reading of difficult texts. In my posts, I explain the appeals of each strategy and what qualities make it a successful match for my classroom. I also offer evidences of success in my own classroom: my students’ overwhelming excitement for the Think Aloud activity; their deeper understanding after completing Difficulty Papers; and the effectiveness of connecting art to poetry. Hearing stories of successful classroom experiments gives me the courage to try my own; it is for this reason that I feel it’s so important to share what works with our students.

Speaking of “feeling,” I was unaware of the frequent inclusion of my own personal emotions toward trying new strategies until I reread my blogs. In the course of four posts, the span of my declared emotions is incredible: nervous, afraid, excited, enthusiastic, insecure, relieved, impressed, eager, interested, and convinced. This range of emotions speaks to the deep investment I have in my students and my profession; I am passionate about discovering and sharing with my students the best information, the most useful tools for their success both in my classroom and beyond.

Another observation I’ve had relates not to the content of the posts themselves, but to their publication dates-I tend to publish early in the week, usually Friday or Saturday. My reasoning is twofold: time constraints force me to complete most of my work early, and I enjoy reading others’ comments on my posts. The encouragement and additional suggestions for improving my students’ learning are much appreciated. Because my only response which did not elicit comments was published very late in the week, it seems natural to assume that the earlier I post, the more likely I am to receive much-desired feedback from classmates.

I’d like to first mention that I was pleasantly surprised to see Blau mention the National Writing Project; his introduction to The Literature Workshop provides a useful and interesting history of the Writing Project system for teacher development.  As a relatively new teacher, I have only recently learned of this nationwide community of teachers and its local affiliation, the Northern Virginia Writing Project.  Every teacher I have met who has completed the seminar reflects on her experience as “life-changing.”  Because of the overt enthusiasm shared by NVWP participants, I decided to apply for this summer’s seminar.  Blau mentions that the NWP helps teachers articulate and define the theories which influence them; currently, I feel under-qualified in this area and am enthusiastic about developing the vocabulary necessary to explain why I teach how and what I teach (if that makes sense). 

To be honest, I have found myself feeling quite insecure, wondering “Why wasn’t I taught more of these theories in my undergraduate education classes?” and “As a third-year teacher, why do I not already feel comfortable explaining my personal educational theories?”  You can imagine my relief when Blau mentions in Chapter 6 that “in teaching, practice often precedes theory and…teachers must be willing to develop and trust practices that they feel work well for their students, even when they can’t articulate a rationale for that practice” (144).  His claim definitely holds true in my classroom, where over the past few years I’ve implemented several of the reading strategies he includes in The Literature Workshop.  The difference is, he has a clear rationale based in educational research and theory for using the strategies; my choices have been based more on the idea that “it feels right” or “it seems to work.” 

As a teacher of British Literature to tenth-grade students, I often struggle with preparing students for the entirely different world they enter when reading texts like Macbeth, Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, etc.  Many times, especially with average or below-average readers, I find that students dread these works because of their seeming foreignness and difficulty.  I know for a fact that a considerable number of students, in my classroom and others, skip reading the original text altogether and go straight for the interpretations offered by SparkNotes or Cliff’s Notes.  Those struggling readers are certain that they could never develop their own understanding of the text.  Blau’s “Background Knowledge” experiments strike me as the perfect remedy for this way of thinking.  By referring to readers of difficult texts as “travelers in foreign lands,” Blau generates an excitement for the unknown (80).  I’m interested to see how this workshop will work in my classroom; I assume that students will pay more attention to the relevant contextual information that is given to ease their reading and will feel less pressure to “get” the text on the first read. 

Because of the clear explanations of theory behind practice as well as detailed examples and instructions for incorporating varying reading strategies into the classroom, I’ve found Blau’s text to be the most relevant and readily applicable to my own teaching.  I’m looking forward to “experimenting” with my students to improve their literary comprehension, interpretation, and analysis.      

“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….

After reading through several Visible Knowledge Project posters, I’m interested in exploring further the definitions of critical reading given by Sherry Linkon. I’d like to consider how I could better implement the qualities of critical reading as Linkon defines them (inquiry, connectivity, recursivity, self-awareness, and synthesis) in my classroom.

In terms of inquiry, I liked Professor Sample’s suggestion from class last week: instead of highlighting, write a comment or ask a question. When I saw my students on Thursday, I encouraged them to use this technique on their next detective short story. I know from my own experience that highlighting is not nearly as effective as marking questions or summarizing in the margins; when I return to a text, I often forget the reason for my initial highlights. In addition, while highlighting consists of a rather passive interaction with the text, being forced to summarize, question, or comment on the text creates a much more engaged relationship between reader and text.

Since my first student teaching experience, I have been convinced of the effectiveness of connectivity, primarily in sparking interest in a text. Usually, I consider the varying connections that could be made to a certain text, and then consider my current class. Depending on their varying interests and ability levels, I try to find a few connections to focus on; because we do so much reading and writing in English class, I seek out activities that reach what many educational theorists refer to as the “whole student”: music, art, physical activity, etc. For instance, before teaching a novel, I may choose a relatively accessible poem with a similar theme. I read the poem aloud to students several times; while I read, the students use markers or colored pencils to draw their responses. Even though many students do not consider themselves “artistic,” the images they create most often lend themselves to thoughtful discussion.

As I posted in a comment to Francois’ blog, so far I’ve found the difficulty paper to be an excellent tool for creating self-awareness in student reading. It also seems to be a valuable method of recursivity, encouraging students to reread portions of the text. I’d be interested to know if any of you have additional suggestions for student reflection or recursivity that could be adapted to a variety of texts.

To be completely honest, I’m afraid I’m not requiring or encouraging my students to do much in the way of synthesis, at least in terms of combining reading and research. The research we do in my class is somewhat of an island, distinctly separated from the rest of the curriculum. We do one MLA research paper per year, and it doesn’t really connect to the literature we’re studying. I’d like to spend some time this semester developing a plan for making the research process more relevant to my content; perhaps I can use this goal as a starting point for my teaching presentation in this course.

During my staff development days last August, I participated in a workshop on teaching students difficult texts. That experience prompted me to spend significant time and energy this year focusing on, in the workshop presenter Kelly Gallagher’s words, creating “deeper readers.” The concepts Gallagher shared with me and my fellow teachers directly connect to this week’s readings, particularly The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (TEAPOD) and “How Experts Differ From Novices,” by recognizing the importance of teaching students to embrace difficulty while demanding that they think more critically.

While reading TEAPOD, I immediately began questioning: How exactly can I incorporate Salvatori and Donahue’s methods into my classroom? Because it seems apparent that students cannot successfully embrace difficulty without first developing some level of self-awareness, I decided to focus first on helping my readers, 10^th grade English students, determine their “repertoires.” The authors’ word choice to describe students’ prior knowledge and skills appeals to me because, unlike much educational jargon, “repertoire” has an artistic, edgy sound to it that I think many of my students would like to identify with. It has undertones of musicality, talent, the makings of an engaging performance. I imagine the word, slipped into our daily blackboard agenda, will at the very least pique my students’ curiosity, and could even go so far as to generate some enthusiasm for what will hopefully be an effective reading strategy.

Though the authors suggest establishing students’ repertoires through poetry analysis, I am approaching a unit on detective fiction; therefore, I’ve decided to start where I am. So instead of having students question and reflect on their beliefs about poetry, I will ask them to do the same exercise with detective fiction: What experiences have they had with mystery stories as a child? A teenager? Did they love watching Scooby Doo reruns and always finger the Red Herring? Have they consumed page-turner mysteries as summer beach reads, watched Saturday marathons of Law & Order SVU, or seen any Agatha Christie film adaptations? Did they watch Murder, She Wrote with their grandmothers? (No, that was me…). Do they posses powers of intuition and reasoning similar to the best detectives? Are they keen observers? You get the idea… . Responding to such questions will allow students to start examining their prior assumptions, expectations, and emotions; my hope is that by considering all of these, we can eliminate some of the barriers to engaged, critical reading that would have otherwise developed.

With this newfound awareness, my students will tackle The Difficulty Paper as discussed in TEAPOD, reflecting their struggles in the Poe short story I’m assigning to them. I’m eager to see how this level of meta-cognition affects their readings, and if it immediately lends itself to a deeper understanding of the text. Because many students are accustomed to answering primarily literal, plot-based questions on a first read, I’m interested to see the results of their reflections. My students will be completing those papers in the coming week, so I’ll keep you posted on their progress…

Karen Goldman