She is a model student. Always on time for class. Never skips. Turns in each assignment with confidence, having started them all at least two weeks before the due date. Her course load is challenging, her GPA high. In the staff room, where teachers always talk about their students, her name is only mentioned in moments of praise. Yes, she is a model student. But a model of what?

Has anyone ever asked her what she really thinks about the subjects she studies? Have her instructors, so admiring of the bright, hard worker who is “a joy to teach,” ever given her the opprotunity to explore her own growth as a reader, thinker or writer? Have they acknowledged the agonizing effort she exerts to produce the “well-developed, critically aware” discussions of their subject matter?

Is she even human?

In most cases, no. Her teachers are not like Bloom, Glenn, Greene, Elbow or Lovitt. They are mechanical apparatuses, seeking to profess the knowledge they have obtained through years of study and thus stamp out little versions of themselves. She is a gifted reader, a gifted writer. But only because of what they gave gifted to her.

Perhaps my feelings on the matter are biased, tainted by my own experience as a “model student” followed by several years of employment in the mechanical institution I have previously railed against. I would like to think that I am simply jaded, but sadly I fear that is not the case. Writers and teachers like Bloom (et al) have for thirty years been writing about and teaching in the mode of self discovery, creating and espousing environments wherein the student is treated humanely and the authentic development of her knowledge base held paramount. Yet the prevailing sentiment remains – “IT’S LITERATURE! ALL HAIL THE WRITTEN WORD – so long as it’s canonical, anthologized and definitely NOT written by you.”

So what do we get? Graduate students who have submerged rich throughtful voices, only to be resurrected through challenging exercises in creative nonfiction and personal discovery. Glenn’s students who, so enamored with the novelty of conferencing, line up outside the professor’s door just to talk about their writing because, for the first time, someone will actually listen. And we see “readers” initially unable to connect their own lives to a text until allowed to step out from under the authority of academia and the auspices of analysis.

Glenn is right. When writing teachers teach literature, we honor the process, not the machine. We encourage our students to interact with the text – analyze it, own it, become one with it and in so doing transform it in their own critical, creative way. We help them learn to silence the judge – that voice that tells them they are not good enough, not bright enough, not wise enough to navigate safely through the difficulty of a text and write deeply, passionately about its (their) meaning in the world. We open doors for our students, inviting them into a community that respsects individual progress and values the social nature of reading.

We honor their abilities. We accept and treasure their humanity.

I don’t have a higher tolerance for failure than my students. I agonize over every reading, every assignment, every word on the page. So help me if I have – or ever will – instill that sort of fear in one of my pupils. I don’t want any model students. I want readers. I want thinkers. I want writers.

I want human beings.

-Ginny

At the end of last week’s class when Professor Sample referred to Textual Power as more of a theoretical work than a “practical” work, a particularly disturbing and potentially embarrassing image danced across the stage of my unconscious. I saw myself sprawled across the dining room table, snoring – the pages of Scholes’ text and my own notes crumpled and wet under a heavy, drooling head; an errant sticky note rising and falling in concert with my rhythmic breathing while my daughter demonstrated her burgeoning artistic talent with mommy’s unused pen. I suppose you could say I was expecting the worst. Mr. Scholes, however, proved me wrong. Textual Power is absorbing and engaging in its approach to teaching literature and applicable to both the collegiate and high school classrooms.

I first realized the practicality of Scholes’ theory during one of my tutoring sessions this week. I work with an ESOL student who is about to enroll in NOVA’s English 112 for the second time. She came to our Friday session having read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” convinced the story was about using the lottery as a way of deciding what games to play in an historic community. She balked when I asked her to reread it and complete a double entry journal for our meeting this coming Monday, convinced she had completely understood the story without any difficulty at all. We were at an impasse until I remembered Scholes’ discussion of the levels of reading. I explained that she was at the first level, working to understand the basics of the story such as plot and character. Her study of the text that day, as well as a return to it for the double entry journal, would help her to interpret the text (make judgments about plot, character and theme) and ultimately criticize the text (make judgments about the text’s connection to or statement about the outside world). She thought for a moment, then exclaimed that this process was exactly what her professor wanted her to do the first time she took 112. I smiled quietly and we moved on, but on the inside I was really pleased with myself.

That is until I remembered something else Scholes included in his discussion of teaching literature.

Scholes wisely asserts that there is a “bright little student” inside each English teacher, and that we are all desperately trying to show off our knowledge of our subject to our students. This proclivity for show and tell gets in our students’ way, he argues, such that they are hampered in the ability to develop the skills necessary for critical interpretation. Scholes places this claim within the university setting, but I think it is an issue that runs far deeper into the educational apparatus (if I might borrow Scholes’ phrasing).

Though Scholes does not directly state it, his subtle negativity toward high school English classes leads me to believe that he sees the larger picture as well. There are several instances where Scholes notes a lack of critical ability in college freshman, and it is up to the college literature professor, then, to help students develop this skill. To this end he argues for a complete overhaul of the standard university English curriculum, one which ultimately helps students no longer “fear the other” but embrace it, integrating difference into their own world view so that they can criticize a text, speaking not only for themselves but for a larger community as well.

I think the issue in high school English curriculums is that most teachers (or overly gifted, eager students in positions of authority) tend to look at their students as kangaroos and Numb-eels. Though aware on some level that students can build a schema for critical interpretation, they somehow find themselves devoid of their own frame of reference for this perception. Rather than assisting students in the development of their own sense of cultural literacy, they revere the text as almighty and its meaning as a matter to be handed down from on high, not discovered through textual study and an awareness of one’s place within the world. High school students are much more perceptive and world wise than given credit for, and I believe they can successfully be challenged in the manner in which Scholes espouses.

How to do this, however, is another matter – one which I will have to think about for my teaching presentation in April. Until then I will work on shedding the “bright little student” persona…

I’ll keep you posted on that.

– Ginny

I recently celebrated my thirtieth birthday.  And oddly, looking at that statement in print just brought more anxiety about the turn of another decade than did the actual day itself.  As to the reason for this incipient unease regarding my fleeting youth I can only say that there is something intensely meaningful about putting thoughts down on paper (or, as in this case, on a computer screen).  Musings are made permanent, private discourse becomes public and life feels, well, cemented, for lack of a better word.  Perhaps this is why people blog:  it aids in constructing meaning out of our own days and questions of existence (for me, it has lately been a matter of identity.  Who am I?  Mommy? Teacher? Student? Gourmet chef?  Freelance writer?  Jack of all trades and supreme master of absolutely none?). 

 Reading through my blog posts has been enlightening, to say the least.  Aside from an annoying proclivity for longwinded discourse (sorry about that – I’ll keep this one brief), I tend to use the weekly post as a way to contextualize the readings within my own framework.  In other words that would make Peter Elbow proud, I write to figure out what meaning the text holds for my current situation as a teacher on hiatus, temporarily pursuing a different career (though one that is in many ways similar to what I used to do).  My posts seem to carry different variations on a theme, all centering on the teacher’s role in creating a community of learning wherein the student is guided toward constructing her own knowledge in concert with peers and current educator.  I value student-centered practices and assessments which connect the critical thinking skills necessary in expert reading to those outside the classroom walls.  I seek to inspire students to virtuoso status, guiding them to develop and apply critical creativity in the questions they ask and the thoughtful research in which they engage.  I hope to help them see learning not as a “read, memorize, repeat” endeavor but as a life-long, open-ended product worthy of revision and deeper inquiry. I look for ways to evaluate my teaching through my students’ eyes and model the meta-behaviors I want to cultivate in them.  In the end, it seems as though I take from the readings and synthesize that information which, when added to my teaching toolbox, will help me become the kind of teacher who embraces difficulty along with her students and leads them down the path to becoming better readers, thinkers and writers. 

As for the voice of this sleep-deprived mommy of an insomniac toddler, I noticed a distinct shift in the third week’s post.  I started to fear that I wasn’t sounding “academic” enough, that my posts were inferior to that of my peers because I was focusing more on personal experience than academic discourse.  So I changed how I wrote, and to be openly, viciously honest – it stinks more than a day-old dirty diaper.  I don’t think the last two posts sound like me, nor do they convey what I wanted to say as clearly as I would have liked.  I’ve since gone back to the real “me,” and it feels much better.

Reviewing my writing has thus helped me realize that while these posts are (1) an assignment and (2) read by my colleagues in the course, they are really for me.   They are a record of my efforts to make meaning of the course material and apply it in a suitably challenging way to my professional vocation.  They allow me to go back and review my development as a thinker and writer, an act which is integral to intellectual growth.  And they make my search for knowledge a concrete and communal undertaking rather than a cerebral, solitary act. 

So, yeah – maybe this is why people blog.  Here’s looking forward to my next thirty years of self discovery.   

I had never thought about it much, really – my purpose in life as an English teacher. That is I never realized that I needed to think about it until I found myself at the optometrist for an annual eye exam. In a darkened room, perched uncomfortably in a metal and leather space-chair with a phoroptor pressed against my face, I concentrated on figuring out just which lens was clearer…one or two? As he switched attachments and fiddled with the settings, the doctor casually inquired exactly what it was I did for a living.

“I’m a high school English teacher,” I said, squinting slightly at the squiggly black lines on the opposite wall.

“An English teacher, eh?” came the reply. “Can I ask you a question?”

Still attempting to decipher the stubborn hieroglyphics, I absentmindedly answered, “Sure.”

“What exactly is the point of English class?” he began, and I felt my neck stiffen. “I mean really, why did I need to learn about the themes and symbolism in Moby Dick when it had absolutely nothing to do with what I’m doing now?”

Now this is a question one would not normally expect from a grown man. A teenager, yes – but an adult with an advanced degree? Several responses flooded my mind, including some choice words which will not be repeated. But I thought better of myself and answered, “Well, it’s not just about recognizing a theme or a symbol and being able to spit it back out. It’s about developing critical thinking skills and learning how to express yourself in both oral and written language.”

I don’t remember what he said in response, or what happened during the rest of the appointment, but I do remember that moment as the beginning of something much greater than a new prescription for my contact lenses. I suddenly realized that my efforts in the classroom were integral to my student’s lives. That even though a large number of them would never go into a literary field, they would need to analyze, evaluate and, most importantly, express themselves clearly and professionally. I had to ask myself – were my lessons and assignments preparing my students for life outside the classroom walls? I wasn’t sure. This epiphany led me to apply for the Northern Virginia Writing Project’s Summer Institute and, upon completion of the program, a completely new way of looking at the teaching of writing and literature.

I had all but forgotten about this moment until I started reading Blau’s Literature Workshop. He reiterates my realization at the eye doctor when he notes that

“in teaching the operations of mind that are fundamental to the study of literature, we are also teaching and providing students with regular practice in a process of evidentiary reasoning that is the basis for effective intellectual work in any academic field or profession they might enter, and that also defines critical thinking in every enterprise of business, civic, or private life” (53).

Blau (and Wilner as well, as I will discuss momentarily) understands what behaviors lie at the heart of effective teaching. What I would like to do, therefore, is highlight the habits of effective teachers as indicated by Blau and Wilner.

1. An effective teacher recognizes the importance of communities of learning and applies such pedagogical thought in the classroom. Blau reminds us that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, begging the question – what does this mean for our students? Just as teachers benefit from programs like the Writing Project where teachers teach and learn from one another, students benefit from an environment in which they are teaching and learning from another as well. I began using a classroom blog in the Spring of 2005 with one of my freshman English classes. The assignment required once a week posts on topics of interest from the reading. After posting, the students were expected to comment on one another’s posts, cultivating a dialogue about the topic at hand. My intent was to provide as little guidance here as necessary, though I must admit I was a tad concerned about the end product. I needn’t have worried, however – the students crafted some of the most thoughtful, engaging discussions of literature I had seen since entering the classroom five years earlier. This explosion of critical thought spilled over into the classroom: textual discussions were more vibrant; quiet students who previously said little suddenly came alive with brilliant insights. My students recognized this as well. As one of them posted at the end of the year:

“[P]osting on the blog…has allowed us to have some really interesting and analytical discussions. We were able to start conversations and carry them back and forth from the internet to the class. I appreciated the chance to not only voice my own thoughts and opinions but to hear everyone else’s, including those of you outside [our class].”

2. An effective teacher identifies and supports the balance between guided practice and cautious revelation of background information. As Blau indicates in the Mora workshop (and as we have discovered during class discussion regarding critical theory), there is a fine line between providing too much and just enough historical context for a literary text. Professor Sample’s handout on “The Flea” showed us the benefit of thoughtfully placing a text within its environmental framework. But we also discovered that knowing too much (or too little, as Blau discusses in Chapter 4) about a text’s or author’s background can lock students into a particular interpretation that may or may not be appropriate. An effective teacher, then, determines how much information is suitable for the situation, providing the most favorable conditions for the development of true critical thinking in the explication of a text.

3. An effective teacher not only crafts instruction based on his or her own academic knowledge, but considers the perceptions and prior knowledge of the students as well when designing appropriate lesson plans. I found Blau’s ability to consider the implications of particular teaching practices highly enlightening. I never would have considered, for instance, that skipping over difficult lines might indicate to a group of students that they are “too stupid” to figure them out on their own (27). He also appreciates the vast body of cultural knowledge (or in some cases, lack thereof) a student might bring to a text and how this would affect individual readings. Wilner, too, exhibits this ability, and I was inspired by her willingness to revamp an already developed curriculum in order to help her students work through a knee-jerk response. By embracing activities that were neither part of her original curriculum nor traditionally used in a collegiate setting, Wilner helped her students craft critical responses that dug beneath the surface of their novitiate interpretations.

4. An effective teacher uses writing about literature as a means to foster critical thinking. Relevant writing assignments allow students to explore their own processes for making meaning. An effective teacher guides students in code-switching and the development of an individual voice tailored to the needs of the writing environment. In addition, an effective teacher emphasizes critical thinking skills necessary for constructing suitable analytical content over archaic and unnecessary “rules” for writing such as the avoidance of first person and “to be” verbs.

Effective teachers, then, create communities of learning in which student and teacher are partners in the construction and expression of thoughtful, relevant meaning. They understand their role in preparing students for life as thinkers and seekers of knowledge and, like Blau and Wilner, teach confidently in the face of questions like, “What’s the point of English class, anyway?”

-Ginny

Reading through Crosman’s essay, I found myself in complete agreement with his thesis.  Readers do make meaning, but there are multiple meanings within a text.  Individual “translation” can only be viewed as wrong if the interpretation does not logically fit within a wider context.  As Crosman points out in discussing In a Station, the average reader does not look for meaning beyond the literal level.  It is only within critical circles, universities, and classrooms that readers seek a deeper meaning.  The case with most students, though, is that they are average readers.  They typically do not look for meaning beyond the literal level.  It is up to as teachers, then, to revive that natural sense of curiosity.

If I may take a step back for a moment, reading is indeed translation; we take what the author writes and make it our own.  There have been numerous times that while reading a novel I have created specific images of characters in my mind – only to be disappointed by someone else’s interpretation when the work is translated into film.  The Think-Aloud groups demonstrated this act: they gave meaning to the poem by connecting various words to images.  Like Crosman indicates, the group members filled in information where it was lacking and provided a context for the images in the poem.  For example, Naomi connected the green bottle to a medicinal flask.  It follows logically, then, that multiple meanings can, and do, exist when individual readers translate the text in different ways.

The danger here is that students might take this “there is no one right answer” theory and run with it.  I can clearly envision a ninth grader sitting down to plow through a text, shouting “I’m done!” and writing “This means X, and I’m right because you said there is no one correct answer”, then tearing off into the next assignment scribbled into their homework pad.  The trick is to teach our students to think critically, in opposition to Hirsch’s antiquated view.  Hirsch views teachers and professor as supreme knowledge-givers, ready to fill up empty minds with as much institutionally approved information as possible before it begins leaking out of their students’ ears.  The question thus presents itself – why bother teaching students to think critically when traditional higher education seems to eschew such skill?  Fortunately not all lit professors are like this (and I think they are becoming the exception rather than the norm), nor are high school English teachers.  I used to tell my students the story of a paper I wrote in undergrad for my Contemporary American Novel course.  I took a position completely contrary to that of my professor, one upon which she had actually written her doctoral dissertation.  But because I placed my translation of Glasgow’s Barren Ground within a logical context, I received an A on the paper.  The message to my students was clear – no answer is wrong as long as it is provable within a valid framework.  Then, to help avoid assertions that A Tale of Two Cities was really about the American Civil War (shades of Professor Sample’s anecdote regarding The Flea), we practiced making statements of meaning and supporting them with text. 

I found, though, that the concept of ambiguous meaning was difficult for some of my students to grasp.  As Karen revealed, they want an answer and generally dislike uncertainty.  Their beliefs are dictated by traditional schooling mores – in their minds, the teacher is (like Hirsch’s view) the supreme knowledge-giver.  The student’s goal is to find what the teacher wants and present it accordingly.  The “schoolish behavior” lens causes them to do what Crosman says; they create the truths of their academic universe in concert with their “ethical, social, or political needs or wants” (163). In other words, years of fetching brings about academic misconceptions clung to as though they were the absolute truth. 

And so we are left to ponder – how do we open up our students’ minds?  The answer is simple: by opening our own, first.  We must accept multiple readings of a text and understand that all of us – writers and readers alike – make meaning.  We must also accept the responsibility of cultivating deeper thinkers and helping our students learn to ask good questions.  Because from good questions come good answers, and at the end of the day, isn’t that we really want?

Ginny

Like any fourteen month old, my daughter has had her share of difficulty. Whether the result of realizing she can’t carry three plastic balls in two hands or growing increasingly frustrated with the task of carting a book twice her size to a willing reader’s lap, Gravy (yes, that is one of her nicknames…) has developed her own age-appropriate way of venting said frustration. She whines. Grunts. Throws the offending object, then sits down (or falls over) and cries.

I should probably be ashamed to admit that as her mother I find this slightly amusing. If you will allow me to brag for a moment, my daughter has a large vocabulary for her age and can communicate quite well using a few basic words. But she has not yet learned the lexicon of difficulty, not yet grasped how to tell us, “Hey! This is hard!” So back to my original statement – I do find this amusing, largely because she reminds me of the ninth graders I used to teach. At various points during the year (sometimes every other day), my students would throw up their hands, look me in the eye and say, “I don’t get it. It’s too hard.” In my early days fresh out of undergrad, I would screw up my sternest teacher face and ask, “Did you read it?” Yes, they would answer. “Did you try to understand it?” Yes, again. Doubting the veracity of those claims I would plunge them right into the lesson. My, but was I naïve.

No wonder so many college students hate their high school English classes (as Edith stated in last week’s discussion). Students are rarely taught to embrace difficulty, to look at the niggling complexities of a text with wonder and excitement. They are rarely told that it’s okay to struggle. To struggle is to be stupid. And to be stupid is to be worthless, especially in our society with its pressure to “succeed” at all costs. When a text is hard, a student’s first impulse is to find the easy way out: bluff his way through the discussion; check SparkNotes for a summary; ignore the assignment and “forget” to do her homework. The cycle continues, knowledge is lost, and the scaffolding necessary to take the student from novice to expert to virtuoso (Bransford et al) never materializes. The result? Annoyance at the teacher, hatred of the subject matter, and reinforcement of the sentiment “Why try? I’ll just fail anyway.”

The goal, then, becomes one which Salvatori and Donahue address in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (or as Karen refers to it, TEAPOD). We want to help our students accept that difficulty is a natural part of the learning process (Salvatori 44). That as readers, those moments bring us closer to critical creativity. We want students to “learn to trust the value of their explorations of difficulty, sustained in their efforts by the validation those explorations receive from their teachers and peers” (54).

The students in Elements who “get it” compartmentalize and categorize. According to Bransford and his colleagues (“How Experts Differ from Novices”), they are on the road to expert from novitiate, showing evidence of prior knowledge and experience building a framework to assist in tackling new problems. But ultimately we cannot stop there. We must lead our students to virtuoso status, help them become creative in their approaches to reading and writing. Schulman’s article suggests shifting away from teaching how we were taught, bringing project based assessments and fresh approaches to critical reading (like the difficulty paper) into the classroom. These tactics aid in metacognition (or thinking about thinking) and move the student closer to virtuosity in academia.

To close, I’d like to do a little exercise in metacognition myself (or meta-writing? Is that a word?) I thought this would take me a long time to write as it’s been a year and a half since my last graduate course. I found, though, that once I started, the ideas built one on top of the other. I don’t know if this makes me an expert. But I do know that at least I’m not whining, grunting, then tossing books, pens and balled pieces of paper out of my high chair.

I think that’s a good sign…

Ginny