I’ve had a really tough time trying to teach the research paper in the past. I assign it, but I find that it’s very difficult for me to bring what I know about writing research papers down to my students’ level. I try to help, and I end up confusing them even more. Somehow, while reading Graff’s book and taking into consideration many of the conversations we’ve had in class, I became inspired. The argument templates on page 169 might be a little too structured, but that kind of structure might be what 9th graders need (they need something involving some kind of structure anyway. They’re animals!) at least to get started on organizing themselves a bit.

I know we’ve talked a lot about not adhering to traditional research papers and the debate over whether students should be able to write an interesting paper or a grammatically correct one, but I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t think we can break the rules until we know them, and so I want my students to know how to set up an argument. To reduce their anxiety over trying to come up with an argument in the first place (a problem I continually have, myself), I’m in the process of thinking of a way to trick them into writing about it before they even know what’s going on. This seems evil and deceitful, but it might work. Graff points out a few times that students know how to argue, but that when they’re told they have to do it, they seem to convince themselves that they can’t do it. This is completely untrue. I hope that I can get them to take an issue they feel strongly towards, and get them to flesh that idea out until it becomes something that they want to investigate. In the past I’ve used the same assignment and everyone in the class was writing on the same topic with some degree of variation (they chose their own sub-topic). I know some people in the class have mentioned how they allow their students to choose their own topics and they have success this way. I guess this is something that I learned in my education classes was bad, but then at the same time, learned that it was “progressive.” Those mixed messages mixed me up and I ended up doing a little of both.

I’m getting a bit off the topic of Graff here, but seeing those templates, as I mentioned before, got me thinking a lot about the research paper my classes are about to begin. I usually dread this. OK, I’m not kidding myself. I STILL dread it. Ninth grade writing is not my idea of a good time. But I’m more interested this year to try out some new Graff-inspired ideas and see where that gets me.

High school was pretty much a breeze for me. My classes challenged me, but I never had to put forth much more than just the minimum amount of effort to stay ahead, and I still ended up graduating with honors. This is not to say that I did poorly in undergrad – I didn’t, but I did struggle a lot more to keep up with the discourse. It was my sophomore year when it really hit me, sitting in my Study of Lit class (criticism/theory), that I had no idea what the hell was going on. As soon as I realized it in one class, I started realizing it in others too. I would do all the reading, but most of it was done on cruise control. I couldn’t remember what I’d read because it was so convoluted with terms I didn’t understand and concepts that were totally unfamiliar to me. I looked around at my friends. I looked at my classmates. I looked at my roommate –  the salutatorian of her high school class. They all seemed to have it under control. I started feeling like it was just me. I started getting so antsy when I read because all I could think about was that I didn’t understand what I was reading. Convinced that I was on the brink of failing out of college and living in my parents’ basement, I actually went and had myself tested for a learning disability.

As soon as I started reading Clueless in Academe, I was so relieved to see that this problem of mine is so much more common that I’d ever thought. I didn’t have a learning disability, and I obviously didn’t fail out of college (or live in my parents’ basement), but I did struggle through my studies. It’s frustrating to me now that there are books and things that I know I’ve read, discussions I know would be beneficial, but I just can’t remember them because I couldn’t connect on that level. I spent so many years thinking that this made me stupid or unintelligent. Reading Graff for me was in some ways like reading a self-help book for education. It made me feel better about myself, being one of the students that gets distracted by the  ten-cent words and unfamiliar discourse. His ideas seem so simple (like his writing), but yet, I feel like it would take a lot to get more professors to see it his way. I KNOW that I must have students who, like me, tune out and shut down as soon as the teacher starts speaking a language they don’t understand, so to speak.  I really think this plays a large part in why some students (again, like me) are less vocal in class. In that Study of Lit class, as well as quite a few others since, I’ve not wanted to open my mouth for fear that whatever I said was going to sound stupid coming after the brilliant comment before it. It’s really hard to be overwhelmed by information overload. And life after undergrad (and sometimes even IN undergrad) doesn’t always allow the time to stop and take every piece of reading apart and figure out its meaning.

This reading gave me ideas for how to avoid unclear messages in my classroom, and, to some extent, how to deal with it when I’m the student. In any case, it’s nice to know that there are enough people like me to warrant doing the research and writing the book :-)

I know that as an English major and now a grad student, I was and am supposed to take literary criticism very seriously. Or so they say. Parts of it interested me in college, but most of it, no matter what I did, just wouldn’t stick. I would read it, retain none of it, re-read what I could, and give up. When my professor or a classmate would talk about it in a “Lit-Crit For Dummies” sort of way, I’d be okay. For a long time, and even a little so as I write this, I feel like this makes me some kind of academic fraud – like to fit in with the “cool” English majors, I have to be able to carry on a philosophical conversation about literary theory. The truth is, I will fall short of that expectation every single time. Part of me is afraid to write this because I don’t want everyone to think I’m an idiot. I’m really not. I just don’t “get” literary criticism all that well. This is me being a realist.

I started reading Textual Power. And I was trying to understand it. I really was. I was making notes in the margin and asking myself questions. Some parts weren’t that difficult, but it just got so dense that I found myself re-reading pages and pages trying to figure out what was going on. I tried these techniques we’ve been talking about in working through the difficulty, but there aren’t enough hours for me to re-read that much (I’d never get my other homework or my grading done. Or sleep.)

And then Hemingway showed up.

I don’t at all care for Hemingway. I’m not familiar with his body of work, so there are large parts of this text that I just couldn’t even relate to, no matter how he tried to explain it. I have read criticism that is still academic sounding, but that I can actually understand. I felt like in a lot of this book, the Scholes was unnecessarily wordy and made things too complicated. At some points, he was down-right snobby. I wrote this in the margin of my book and continued reading. About 30 pages later, I came to a page that had been marked up by a former owner of the book. Next to a comment much like the one I marked as snobby, this reader had marked the same thing, only in slightly more vulgar terms.

So at least I know that I’m at least getting something someone else is :-)

I don’t usually care much for Kate Chopin either, but I really liked this story. It’s short and to the point and contains so much in such a short period of time (as the title would imply). I’d really like to use this with my 9th graders for examples of irony next year.

As far back as elementary school and even up through college I used to keep a mental list of teaching strategies that I liked and didn’t like. I observed my teachers carefully, knowing that I wanted to be one of them someday. I had this huge list in my head and always said how I should write it down before I actually got in front of a classroom. I never did, telling myself for years that I had plenty of time. Then one day, sans a hard copy, I was suddenly a teacher.

What that little anecdote tells me about myself is that I like to observe and try to get ideas by seeing what works and doesn’t work for others. I think that this holds true for my blogging experience thus far in this course as well.

 As I read through my posts, the first thing I noticed was that I was always trying to figure out how I could use these ideas in my own classroom. Lots of ideas have been given in all our readings, from TEAPOD up through the Blau book, though plenty of them have been exemplified in college classrooms. This gives me the challenge of figuring them out how to “translate” the ideas from the college classroom to my classroom.

 In that same vein, I also noticed that my posts are laced with doubt. Because so many of the ideas seem to be adapted for college classrooms, I worry about how my 9^th graders would do with similar activities. I often doubt that their maturity (or lack thereof) will allow me to get very far with any of these lessons, though I was pleasantly surprised at how well they did with the exercise that was Blau-inspired last week (and they continue to do so!). In trying to figure out how to adapt these lessons, though, I am given the chance to practice working through difficulty, which has become another major theme in my blogs.

 Working through difficulty is one of those things that had occurred to me before, but that I had never actually tried, and therefore never really encouraged my students to do. Since reading TEAPOD, it has been something that I have kept coming back to in my posts because I have found that much of our reading has expounded upon that first exposure to it.

 The questioning that I do ties in with my aforementioned themes. I often question the reading and say “that would never work for me” and then think of the reasons why. This eventually led me to begin questioning my own questions, and I ended up with wonderful lessons :-) 

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!

As an undergraduate, my literary criticism class was one of my most difficult. It wasn’t necessarily that the material itself was difficult, but moreso that it was dense, and I seemed to get Teflon-brain every time I tried to retain it. As I started reading the two Johns Hopkins articles, I was struggling to recall the slightest bit of information. I was hoping it would come to me, but it took the digging out of my trusty Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism for me to have that “duh” moment of “oh yes, THAT one.”  In the end though, neither of those articles really interested me in the same way that the Crosman article did.

Because the title is posed as a question, I immediately tried to answer it. “Of course readers make meaning,” I thought. “We just do it in different ways depending on who we are and where we come from.” By the end of the first paragraph, I was already prepared to revise my answer. Implicitly, I guess I always had this intrinsic understanding that there was more than one way to define meaning, but I had all those definitions boxed up together, and never really got around to choosing to unpack them. I had to have another “duh” moment while reading this article and think about all the “meanings” of meaning. This one common word can mean so many things, from intention to a definition, a synonym to a value. So often, the way we choose to understand it is as significance, but we don’t necessarily mean what we say. We haven’t really unpacked all those definitions yet.

So now let me revisit the title. Do readers make meaning? Well, if by ‘meaning,’ we’re talking about authorial intent, then no. In that instance, the author is the one who is shaping the literature. They’re the ones who are putting the pieces together to create something with meaning.  That meaning is, though, open to interpretation. Even the author can’t always necessarily get back to the exact same place he or she was when the piece was written. Or perhaps there was never a written account of what the piece was about, and so authorial intent is, in some ways, skewed and/or lost. However, if we’re talking about sense or understanding, then yes. The reader has to make some sort of understanding of what he or she reads. An interpretation is formed. In that way, the reader DOES make meaning. Furthermore, through readings that are of an imagist or affective nature, we’re able to use our imaginations to make every story, in some way, our own. This is, I think, partially why I have so much trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of New Criticism. From my perspective, it limits me too much in my thinking. It restricts me to a close reading, but I don’t feel that it allows me to consider things from multiple angles, necessarily.

If nothing else, this week’s readings taught me that I have to come up with a better plan for my students than using those awful questions in the text book. I know they’re awful, but I continue to use them anyway. But when I think about it, it seems like maybe those questions are coming from a New Critic’s approach because they ask the students to examine carefully certain passages in order to answer the questions. And of course, there is only ever one right answer, which, as we see in the Crosman article, isn’t necessarily so. I get really angry when people tell me that my interpretation is wrong because, by the very definition of the word, an interpretation can’t be wrong. It’s just my understanding of something – the way I’m reading it. Therefore, I don’t think it’s very fair of me to give these questions to my students and imply that there is only one right answer and one correct way to read the story. If more teachers would do that, I wonder how many more students would like reading?

Between the two different projects that we read about, I would have to say that Sherry Linkon’s was the most interesting to me. I also probably had the most questions about that one and how I could apply it to 9^th graders as opposed to her college students. There are some ideas that she gives that are obvious in how they could connect. For example, I really like the idea of having students annotate, so I’m trying to think of how I can have them do so even though the books don’t belong to them and I can’t provide Post-It notes for everyone. After our discussion last week in class, it got me thinking a lot about myself as a reader. I remembered Prof. Sample saying that if you just highlight things, you’ll forget why. So I practiced annotating this article this week, and wow! What a difference I had in ideas. I could feel myself thinking more about what I was reading and interacting more with the text than I normally might – even if I’m just highlighting. I might be hooked on annotations now. I want that for my students. I feel like it’s something that would be easy to incorporate with ninth graders.

Another idea I really liked was that of recursivity. I think that by having students look at the text more than once, we’re forcing them, in a way, to become experts with it. It’s true that we might read something once and understand it enough to be able to discuss and form opinions and ideas, but the more we read any text, the more we will understand it. The problem is getting students interested enough to want to motivate themselves to read beyond just that first reading. I admit that this is something I struggle with as well. I know it will be easier the second time, but there are usually time constraints, etc. that prohibit me from being able to have just a second reading, much less a third and so on.

This leads me to my first questioning of the reading. In a collegiate atmosphere, I can see how it would be really beneficial to a student to have the entire 14 weeks to read and re-read a select few texts and think about them in order to develop questions and learn how to successfully seek answers. However, in a high school atmosphere, I’m a bit skeptical, mostly because of the time constraints. As high school teachers, we don’t have much choice in the curriculum that we teach. I have a guide that tells me what I need to complete each marking period, and it doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to allot for re-reading of texts. I’m torn between wanting them to become experts and knowing that I have only so much time in which to do it. Not only that, but if the kids aren’t prepared for their benchmarks and SOLs and administration finds out that I’ve been having them re-read material instead of teaching them new, they will certainly be coming to have a talk with me.

The second aspect of Linkon’s project that I found myself questioning was the lack of paper. I think that the portfolio idea is wonderful and I like how she spent more time going through the steps and letting the students work on smaller pieces at a time so that it didn’t seem overwhelming. But I have to wonder if there was not still some way to incorporate a paper into that assignment. Sure the students did the research and they learned how to think effectively, but the lack of formal assessment makes it almost seem like busy work – just with more learning involved. She says, herself, though, at the end, that her next step is to figure out how to incorporate some kind of formal assessment in there. I think how I would incorporate it is similar to the way I saw it done when I was in high school (is that allowed?). We had a graduation project to complete and we spent chunks of time throughout the year getting ready for it and writing small pieces of it at a time. While I wouldn’t have the whole year, I think that, if spaced out properly over the course of the marking period, it would be beneficial to the students to not feel like everything is being piled on them at once.

Disclaimer: I’ve been incredibly sleep-deprived the past few days with trying to get all my grades and homework done. So if there are parts of this (or all of it) that don’t seem coherent and don’t make sense, I apologize in advance. It’s just one of those weeks :-)

After reading TEAPOD, I found myself thinking about what I have taught so far this year. The first two things I thought of, and my two major units thus far, were short stories and poetry. I really wish that I had read this book before I started teaching, because it gave me so many great ideas. I know that in undergrad I took a class about teaching reading. However, I seem to be suffering some of Schulman’s amnesia, because I can’t really remember it. I have vague memories of thinking it was geared more toward elementary teachers and making posters with a group, and I can see the text book still sitting on my book shelf, but that’s all I can come up with. If I was taught, the information didn’t stick with me. So with all of this in mind, there are a few things regarding our readings that I would like to address.

I really like the idea that difficulty doesn’t always equal impossibility. In fact, since I read that, I’ve been already trying to incorporate that thought into my classes. I know it hasn’t really sunk in with them, but I hope that it will. I really wish that I had been able to read this before I taught these units. I think I would have been more effective, particularly during the poetry unit. I can’t say for sure that I was ever really taught how to read poetry. It was just something that I found that if I sat and thought about it long enough and read and re-read, I could eventually figure out something intelligent to say. No one ever said, “I want you to think about these things.” Because of that, I really don’t know how to teach my students how to read poetry. In fact, I’d actually forgotten that I was able to do that until I saw “One Art” in the book. As a senior in high school, “One Art” was given to me as my mid-term for AP English. The assignment was to break the poem down and analyze it, then write it in an essay. I ended up with the highest grade in the class because I could take all the pieces apart. I stopped using that skill, and I forgot that I had it. (Amnesia? Yes.) In the past few days, I have been grading their poetry book projects, and when I read their analyses of poems by other authors, I find that it’s a really small percentage who are actually able to pull a poem apart. When asked “what sorts of poetic devices do you see in this poem?” many responded by saying that they used it because they just happened to like that particular poem. That’s it. No rhyme or reason. I have a really hard time trying to convey that aspect of my knowledge to my students.

This brings me to my next point, which may be more like an interjection. TEAPOD said that often times, teachers will have a tendency to teach in the way that we, ourselves, learned. And in the article that we read, there was an example of two English teachers, one of which teaches his ninth graders in the same way that he learned when he was in college. At some point, all of this has applied to me. I have been tempted to try to mime my teachers from high school and college. When I first started teaching, I was still so much in the college frame of mind that I had to almost let the 9th graders break me down before I could get on their level. Once I did, I found that I didn’t need to try to emulate my college professors and their course material. I could relate to my students on my own. Now that I’ve been teaching for a few years, I can’t necessarily say that how I was taught best was and IS the only way.

What I would like to do next year (and I plan to try to somehow incorporate this on a smaller scale into my curriculum for the rest of this year, too), is to have more poems that I go through WITH my students. I want them to really understand that difficulty is a GOOD thing, and not something that should make one ashamed. I want having difficulty to be the cool thing to do (on a good level, of course). I think the difficulty paper is a good idea, and I think giving students the opportunity to interact with the things that are hanging them up is a good way to help them understand what they’re reading on a deeper level.

With that in mind, I’m wondering, what do you do with a student who just absolutely insists that he or she has NO trouble whatsoever with a poem? (And maybe they really don’t, or maybe they’re just suffering from fantasia!)