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.

I had promised after reviewing my past blogs not to glow about our future readings, but in Textual Power I found a few things to put into my Future Lesson Plans file.  I also found myself reviewing every other paragraph and, like somebody else had mentioned, wanting to bang the text and my head against the wall.  The language Scholes uses left me wondering.  Gee, do I know enough to be an English teacher.  I mean, there were years of voracious reading for pleasure and then the transcribing volumes of text as a reporter, the vocabularies of scientists and business people, physicians and those who specialize in the production of time release capsules, the pouring of grout into cinder block walls, any variety of very specific language, and Scholes left me grasping for my dictionary.  Belletristic: writer of letters.  Peripatetic: itinerant.  reification: the process of regarding something abstract as material or concrete.  These are a few of the stumpers I encountered.  They would comprise the first paragraph of my difficulty paper, were I to write one connect with this book.

The lessons that I would include in my notebook for use later were mentioned in class, so I guess that they are not particularly innovative, or perhaps Scholes came up with them and they have become commonplace.  I thought the rewriting of the story from a different character’s point of view would be interesting.  It would require a close reading and an indepth understanding of that character’s motivations. 

The most interesting idea, and it appeared early on in the text, was the breaking down of the text.  How many of the sentences were required to create the story?  Again, this would require a close reading, it would focus the reader, help determine exactly what the story is. 

Scholes, I thought made what could have been an entirely pleasant read, annoyingly dense, and his insistance that Hemingway must be read along side a feminist work was insulting to me.  Hemingway is a masculine genre, but to assume that women cannot handle it without a counterpiece to “soften the blow” is politically correct and likewise, chauvanistic.

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.

When I was a high school student, my English teacher used Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” to illustrate the concept of irony. Now that I am also an English teacher, I can appreciate the complexity of teaching irony and my students’ subsequent misunderstanding of the literary element. As I reread “Story of an Hour,” I questioned whether a New Critical approach would have better helped me, as a high school student, understand irony and Chopin’s use of the element in Mrs. Mallard’s approach to the news of her husband’s death.

I remember feeling shocked that a wife, upon hearing of her husband’s brutal death, could have felt anything akin to freedom or relief. Would it have benefited my eventual understanding of irony if my teacher had front-loaded the class with information regarding the treatment of women in 19^th century America? Perhaps he assumed that teenagers would have intuitively understood a 19^th century woman’s desire for independence from a male-dominated society. But the central problem in understanding the irony at work in Chopin’s story, is that our 21^st century students do not have a cultural basis for understanding Mrs. Mallard’s situation. Our students, contrary to our graduate-schooled selves, do not understand Mrs. Mallard’s feminist desires. As a teacher, I now know that many of my students would view the “widow” as cruel and deserving of her untimely death. The element of irony that “Story of an Hour” clearly illustrates would seem overshadowed by my students’ negative contemporary judgments regarding Mrs. Mallard’s behavior.

I believe many students would benefit from a well-structured preamble to the teaching of canonized texts. Though I feel New Critical theory has its place in secondary education, a teacher should initially introduce the concept without his or her students’ conscious knowledge. As a student myself, I favor creative and innovative lesson planning over a front-loaded lecture any day. If I were teaching irony via “Story of an Hour,” I would prime my students’ contemporary sensibilities with 19^thcentury role playing. My female students could play the role of Mrs. Mallard-esque women and the males could adopt the privilege bestowed upon Mr. Mallard-esque men. After role-playing, we could discuss their character’s behavior in juxtaposition to how women and men behave in modern society.  Without explaining my New Critical approach, my students would become better able to analyze the 19^th century characters in Chopin’s ironic story.

Would my high school class have developed more empathy for Mrs. Mallard’s cloistered existence if my teacher had helped us develop a cultural basis for our understanding? Cultural compassion, at the very least, would result from a creative New Critical approach to the study of classic texts. Students would develop an appreciation for the literary skill Chopin exercises in her writing, whether or not they understand the complexity of irony. Perhaps teachers should help their students create cultural connections with century-old text before we ask them to analyze difficult literary concepts.

Scholes spends a good deal of time discussing how Mantegna’s disturbing depiction of the dead Christ (“Very bitter…lots of nail holes”) figures in Hemingway’s fiction. Since I imagine this specific image is not part of our daily cultural vocabulary–and Scholes suggests it ought to be in order to push through from interpretation to criticism–I submit for you here the painting (click on the thumbnail for a larger version).

Finished sometime around 1490, on the cusp of the Renaissance, “The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” now hangs at the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

So seeing Andrea Mantegna’s painting, does Scholes’ argument make more sense? Or do you, like myself, have some doubt about what Scholes’ particular critical move is in this chapter? How does familiarity with the image, or with the history of its genre (the dead Christ figure) help us adopt a critical stance toward Hemingway? If it does, how might this strategy (i.e. focusing upon a seemingly marginal cultural allusion, or a pattern of such allusions in a text) work with other texts, helping us help our students become more textually empowered?

In Textual Power, Robert Scholes spends a considerable amount of time discussing the power and relevance of the text. In particular, he decides to attack the idea that a text is nothing more than a result of the interpreter. He attributes this point of view and approach to Stanley Fish. In his argument, Scholes contends that the text’s contextual clues and its actual language serve to constrain meaning. Therefore, the free-for-all interpretations that have no basis in the text’s background and context can be judged as incorrect or invalid.

Scholes is advocating what most readers have done all along. My students and I use different contextual clues from within the text to derive meaning. It’s a constant struggle between our own experiences and the boundaries that the text presents. If we rely too heavily on one aspect, our view of the writing and its meaning becomes skewed. Like Scholes, most readers use more than a single approach to a given piece of writing. One of the major misconceptions in classes about literary theory is the tendency to isolate each school of thought. Naturally, a student leaves the classroom thinking that people read a text using a distinct literary theory such as New Criticism or New Historicism. This is rarely the case. While some readers advocate a particular theory, I have never met a fellow student or reader that completely adhered to a particular tract. The interaction between the text and the reader demands a number of different approaches. In some cases, a considerable amount of cultural knowledge is necessary. In other texts, a specific knowledge of a case or moment in time is helpful.

Shakespeare is a perfect example of a text that requires a little knowledge from a wide range of fields. The language requires the ability to appreciate rhyme schemes. Some of the references are based on historical events, so a cursory knowledge of “basic” history is equally helpful. Finally, a firm grounding in basic psychology or human nature can help illuminate some of the various motivations that each character brings to the action. Are all of these elements necessary? No. Are they extremely helpful to deciphering the text? Yes.

At some level, the text is communicating some essential message or truth. That explains the similar reactions that people have to an unknown text. While readers differ in their precise interpretations, the fact that most agree on a few basic concepts about a given text is an indicator of something within the text. To argue that interpretation is purely based on cultural influences is to deny the power and tools present in the text. Texts have meaning and value. Our view of the text may change, but some aspects and themes (good and evil) remain ever-present. I am reminded of that old saying about the journey being more important than the destination. In the case of literature, the process of discovery leads to critical thinking and deep learning. Losing site of that goal is a constant danger.

–Francois Guidry

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

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

The most obvious consistency of my posts, from week to week, is how reckless they are. Not in the sense that they’re the posts of a renegade bucking against the establishment; more in the sense that “this-is-barely-a-draft-and-I-haven’t-yet-come-to-a-conclusion.” It’s apparent that the posts were written in the last couple of hours before ten each Wednesday. It’s not that the writing is poor; it’s just that the phrasing is sometimes awkward, the examples can be unclear, and meaning is much less definitive than it seemed on first glance. These are the kind of things you can’t see until you put writing away—for a day at least—before looking at it again.

My weakness is also my code, however. I often exalt the act of eleventh-hour writing in my posts, either explicitly or implicitly. In “Simulated Bomb Defusal,” my post from week 3, I discussed Linkon’s idea of doing away with the final paper in research courses. I demurred because I thought it a better idea to combat the flaws of the research paper—painfully narrow focus, artificial use of sources, erroneous manipulation of theories—with unreasonable time constraints. Giving the student less than a week to write a first draft diminishes the possibility of being able to self-sabotage yourself. It was a dramatic retelling of the writer mythos, where the writer is less a scholar engaging in a methodical process than the hero of a contrived Hollywood blockbuster, finishing his or her work at the razor’s edge of world-threatening doom.

My tendency toward eleventh-hour exaltation can be found in week 4 as well, where I discussed Crosman’s “making meaning” dynamic. However, I began to care less about the possible evolution of specious interpretation and more about creating an amusing example of it (Wordsworth’s ode to zombies). The very thing I warned about in the post happened in the post: more thought was put into what the piece could mean than what it actually did mean. The same thing happens in the subsequent week when I discuss scenes from “The Simpsons” as a lens for the actions of Wilner’s resistant students. Not that the comparison isn’t arguably apt, but it’s trying to be self-consciously irreverent in a way that misses the point: meaning of the readings is understood, but not necessarily responded to.

The first post is somewhat different; it’s overly technical and formal, for a variety of reasons: I’m in my element (the teaching of athletics), and I’m assuming upon the reader’s understanding of certain aspects of swimming that are second nature to me but not necessarily to them; it’s the first post of the class and I’m unavoidably wary about what is expected; and also, it’s just not very good.

A specific conclusion I can come to is that these are perfectly viable rough drafts that require further revision. More often than not I discuss action–how one writes, how one swims, how one thinks— as opposed to theory. This is a side effect of the last-minute process; everything becomes less about constructing theoretically sound interpretations than about creating memorable ruminations upon how that theory is used. Memorable is good. Visceral examples are also useful. But, as the “Simulated Bomb Defusal” post intimated, they are useful more as starting points that undermine stiff writing. The ideas should be flexible and vivid, leading off in a number of directions; however, a variety of open paths leads to the same caveat inherent in reader-response theory: if any reading or interpretation is possible, then pretty soon none of them mean anything, since none of them carry any weight.

In short, I need to revise. This post too.

-Matt

I am reposting my essay from last week, the one that I did on the wrong readings. I figure that I wrote it so you can read it. If you read it last week despite my warning, thanks. If not, here it is to haunt you again.

Musings

For this week’s entry I will borrow Blau’s alternative assignment of “a collection of loosely connected notes or comments on a text or topic, each identified by a heading or number, requiring no transitions between them.” I choose to do this because I had disparate reactions to the readings and because I have never tried this type of writing. It is engrained in me that my writing must meet the standard criteria of academic texts: have one central point that is fully developed through a series of well organized and interconnected paragraphs. So in the spirit of exploration and taking risks, I will try something new.

1.         Elbow’s argument that writing should precede reading because filling student’s heads with the ideas of others stifles their own creativity sounds like the no-content curriculum that was popular in the 1990’s. As Elbow’s article was published in 1993, there is little wonder that there are similarities. The concept of a no-content curriculum was that the psyches of children would be damaged by telling them things, even things such as basic math facts and sentence structure (Breed). So teachers were expected to teach students how to do things without teaching them any facts. Imagine teaching a student to read without being able to assign them a text because it might inhibit the student’s development as an individual. Luckily, this theory of teaching fell out of favor and we moved on to other ideas.

            We also need to remember that students do not come to our classes as empty vessels that need only be filled with wisdom. Instead they come to our class rooms filled with their own ideas and experiences. Sometimes this is a good thing; other times it is not. Remember the film we watched the first night of class? Those students not only had mis-information, they refused to give up on the ideas they had. It is sometimes painful to read student essays in which students are assigned to argue their side of a belief. While I will readily defend a person’s right to his belief, I will also insist that person be able to defend that belief. Students often have firm beliefs. The believe things because it is what they have been taught, it is what they have heard, it is what they want to believe, or it is what is beneficial to them to believe. A little bit of reading often changes their minds.

            In an ideal world, emphasizing writing over reading would be marvelous. However, in the real world, how can we expect students to discuss something of which they are not even aware? If we assign readings to students to give them new view points, we will encourage them to examine their own beliefs along with the ideas in the reading.

2.         Blau mentions several assignments that sound like some of the things that I already do in other formats in my classes. He mentions others that I would like to try. (I wonder if I can change the assignments in the middle of the semester. Perhaps not) I am particularly interested in using technology to teach literature and composition. Some of Blau’s assignments could easily be transferred to on-line assignments that could be used in hybrid of DL classes to enhance either F2F meetings or discussion boards.

            For instance, I already assign reading journals in my classes. Students are to record first impressions, areas of interest, questions, or any comments they would like to make. These journal entries could be done as a class blog, allowing classmates the opportunity to share difficulties or perhaps offer answers in follow-up comments. This would also make grading easier because the students would never know which entries would be read by the teacher on a specific week. It is also easy to simply count the number of entries made by each member of the blog. This would not necessarily check for content, but it could certainly satisfy the collection portion of Blau’s portfolio assignment.

            We will return to the idea teaching literature with technology in my teaching presentation. I look forward to your comments on what I finally come up with. This is something that I probably can introduce into my current classes. Perhaps I should practice on them?

3.         Okay, so I wrote two completely unrelated sections in this paper. I edited the transition between them several times because I kept putting in a transition. Old habits are hard to break. If there is no connection between the sections of my paper, do I need a conclusion? I think not. BY!

Edith

            Works Cited

Breed, Jerry and Mary Breed. “No-Content Curriculum.” The Washington Post 1995,

            May 14. Retrieved February 16, 2008, from National Newspapers (9) database.

            (Document ID: 19564506).

I learned a long time ago that it was difficult to transition between creative and expository writing. If I had been concentrating on writing literary criticisms, the characters in my stories spoke in a very stilted fashion. There were no contractions in their speech and they never began a sentence with and or but. If I had been concentrating on creative writing, my expository essays were colorful but lacked cohesiveness. By reading through my blog posts I have discovered that it is also difficult to transition from teacher to student.

Though I believe that teachers are always students to some degree, we are not always aware of some of the struggles that our students undergo. We are certainly aware of the deadlines for papers and readings. We are equally aware that some texts are difficult to read. I can’t imagine assigning some of the essays that I have struggled through to my undergraduates, even though they may be highly applicable. For instance, in a recent composition class, I had assigned an article about critical thinking to my students. In class, we worked through pointing, writing about a line, sharing in groups, and reporting. During the reporting section, the conversation turned from thinking with concepts to signifiers. I have read Derrida and tried to simplify his idea for my freshman students, but I could not imagine assigning his texts for them to read. The point here is that I recognize that students have difficulties with texts because I also do.

What has become clearer to me from reading my posts is that as I have worked through the issue of being teacher to being student. This is not to imply that I came into this class with the thought of being the teacher here. I came to learn, to be a student. But my concept of student has changed. I find that I have unconsciously done what I really want my students to do. My first posts reflect a more scholarly approach to the theories we are considering in class. Though I had already overcome my reluctance to write in the first person through previous class room blogs, there was still a theoretical tome to my writing. As the blogs progressed, there was less theory and more application.

My first post was very much a teacher’s reaction to the reading. Even though I used Salvatori’s difficulty paper format, I was engaging her text from the standpoint of a teacher. I commented on the use of voice and writing style. I expressed and understanding of the content, but never really engaged deeply with it, despite the fact that I wrote a difficulty paper.

The readings for the second week elicited a similar response. I was concerned with the theory if how students learn. I did take a step away from theory, however, when I identified myself with one of the students in Linkon’s study. But this quickly reverted to the teacher mode when I commented on my own method of teaching research to my students. It is not my intention to say that concentrating on this information as a teacher is wrong. It is simply that in order to be effective, this knowledge needs to move beyond the theoretical. The act of employing these methods in my writing or in my classes isn’t even enough. They need to become more than concepts or signifiers.

In the third post I feel that I made a strong step in this direction. I was now taking the theories out of the text and applying them. My discussion of falling trees and conversations was an attempt to engage the content of the readings on a deeper level. There was also evidence that theories from previous readings in other classes was beginning to gel with the ideas I was facing in this class. They were becoming and integrated whole.

The titles of the last two entries is revealing of the direction my writing had taken: “Down Memory Lane” and “Musings.” My comments on the readings had taken on a much more personal tone. They were becoming a part of my thinking outside of the class room. My writing has also become less formal, and more conversational. Overall my writing/focus moved steadily away from theory and into internalization and application.

Basically, over the course of the weeks, my writing became less formal and more internally focused. From previous experience, I know this usually happens over the course of a semester that requires weekly blog posts. This leaves me with several questions.

• Is it that familiarity breeds contempt? As I write more and become familiar with my classmates and instructor, am I less interested in impressing them? Is this a good thing or not?

• Is this loss of formality good for me because the readings/writings become less theoretical? Am I using the knowledge instead of simply storing it away?

• Would it also be good for undergraduate students? Would they become more comfortable with the reading/writing process, or would they simply become sloppy?

My answer is maybe. I think the use of blogs can be very good. As I am interested in teaching with technology, this is part of my teaching and will probably become a larger part of it. I feel that the blogs lead to more discussion and hopefully a better understanding as participants share ideas. On the other hand, my experience has shown that some students abuse the idea of ungraded responses to the point that posts become almost undecipherable. If my writing has (in my opinion) degenerated over the semester (even in our short time), what will happen to undergraduate writing? Of course, that begs the question of does that matter?

While this reflection of my own writing has been revealing, it also raises many questions. These are answers that I will have to wait to discover.

Edith

For someone who thinks the discussion on meaning should be over, I sure do talk about it a lot. =) In the very first post, I state a conflict between the intended meaning of a sentence and what I want it to mean. (At least I’m holding true to the idea that both readers and authors have the right to make meaning.) Of course, I use the quote to support what I want it to mean, a meaning that matches my personal experiences with literature — which leads me to the biggest trend in my blog posts: an attempt to put a nugget from the reading into the framework of my experiences. Unfortunately, having no literature teaching experiences, the contexts I put my little nuggets into are my experiences as a writer, student, reader… and consumer of coffee.

Perhaps this is why my posts also tend to put me in the role of a student empathizer. I latch on to methods that address frustrations I have had as a student or that promote practices of teachers I have appreciated. I latch on to ideas that start with the individual students, that help validate student ideas, and that teach students that it’s okay not to understand everything.

As Jennifer writes, “I tend to blend the lines between the analysis of the text I read and the analysis of my life experiences.” Apparently I find interpreting the meaning in everyday life to be a difficult, yet worth while task, and I want to help students use literature as a means of accepting and confronting this difficulty. To this end, I am drawn towards methods and ideas of teaching that show students the complications in texts, that allow for different and even conflicting interpretations, and that focus on developing critical thinking skills that do in fact blur the lines between textual reality and actual reality. As a writer (back to that again), I have embraced the notion that the goal is to capture some element of the human condition. As a reader, I work to connect with the writer’s representation of that condition. And as a teacher, I would hope to help students in their search for that connection.

In looking at the structure of my posts and the construction of my ideas, it’s clear that my ideas tend to circle back on themselves in a sort of spiral. My writing circles around the same threads, pulling in ideas from past readings, classes, and others’ blog posts as it goes around. While I wish the loop were a bit wider than it is, that I had more experiences to draw on, and that I were incorporating a few more new ideas into the loop, I think this spiraling shows that, for me at least, the blog is a way of putting the reading into contexts that are meaningful to me and is, therefore, a useful way to build those mental connections that are essential to learning. And that is one reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about the egocentric nature of our posts.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in my blogging is that in reviewing these, I don’t see the ideas I missed. I stick so closely to my experiences and the ideas that I’m attached to that even in reflection I don’t see where my lack of experience has caused me to misunderstand or completely miss something. I can’t see where (as the TEAPOD discusses) what I know is actually the cause of my difficulty. But I guess that’s where reading the posts of others and classroom discussion comes in. And this is another reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about our egocentric posts: not only are we putting the ideas in meaningful contexts for ourselves, we are lending our contexts to each other. For those of us without teaching experience, this is tremendously valuable. Now that I have made myself aware of my biases, perhaps I can use the ideas and experiences of others not only to build my spiral, but also to knock it onto a different (faster, wider?) track from time to time.

Is it egotistical to say that I don’t think my posts are as stupid and clumsy as I thought I they were when I wrote them? I was procrastinating about this assignment because I dreaded going back to look at what I wrote. Before every post I try to figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be doing with my post. I try something different every week. Am I supposed to be writing about my experience? I’m not a teacher, so I’m not sure how to do that in relation to the majority of the readings, but I try to interject a little of my own experience because it allows me to internalize the readings, and, let’s face it, because it’s what it seems like I am supposed to be doing. In some cases I think it worked; in some it seems a stretch. Or, am I supposed to be using the blog as a way to review what I’ve read, write about it, and remember it better? The “use it in a sentence” form of learning. I try that too here and there, but at the time I’m always wondering if I’m using the information incorrectly. As I read back over it, it seemed to make sense to me. Of course, what do I know? Or am I supposed to be expounding on the theories? I’m not sure exactly what that would look like but I think I tried it a couple of times in my posts and quickly cut myself off leaving some brief, interjected sentences that didn’t really go anywhere. I liked the idea in Blau’s book about writing a series of comments and notes instead of one essay on one topic. Sometimes I feel like I have a few ideas but none that are worthy of too many words. Maybe I’ll try the notes idea next week…

Before my last post, I became concerned with whether my posts were thoughtful enough. I thought I should be focusing on one idea and fleshing it out more. In my last post, I tried to imitate more of what I thought I should be saying, and I hated it more than any of the others. It seemed the least thoughtful of them all. It didn’t sound like me. I was trying to apply theories about learning with my limited knowledge of them and doing it badly.

I know some people have expressed concern that they are talking about themselves in their posts, but that is the parts of my posts (and others’ posts) that I liked best. It is where honest self exploration and personal application are discussed. I like to read about humanity, both because I learn from examples more than theories and because, although I am here to learn something academic, without the human element I don’t really see the point in learning anything anymore.

I too recently had a birthday and the result is that I have reflected on what’s important to me in life, and although I felt I would be considered too hippy dippy to express this human based perspective on in my blog posts for a graduate English class, it’s the hippy dippy, self searching parts of my posts that I enjoyed reading the most. I am inexperienced and naïve when it comes to teaching, and so many other things in life. I do want to believe the best in learners and teachers. I want to believe that teaching and writing and learning and reading are about making connections between human beings. When I learn, I want to learn about myself more than anything else because I believe that’s what makes a good learner and a good teacher. So I guess, hippy dippy it is.

In  reviewing my previous blogs, I found three areas of repeated discussion. (As well as typos and thoughts/comments that could have been expanded on).

In three blogs I mentioned how I incorporated a method, learned from our readings, to strenghten my ability as a reader.  Even though I love reading, and consider myself an intermmediate reader, there has been many instances where I didn’t fully understand the meaning of certain passages or poems. I thought it was just me, and not something that is a common occurrence with students.  I’ve learned how I can expand my narrow, mostly literal, tunnel of thinking.  It started with accepting the difficulty and working through it instead of avoiding it.  The second step was to use annotations on the second read- through.  The third step was to make connections to either the “sketches,” other texts, or my cultural knowledge. I may have been already doing a bit of that on a superficial level, but now that I’m more aware, and therefore more focused, my reading process has been “fine tuned.”

I’ve also flipped-flopped between the roles of teacher and parent.  As a future teacher, I can envision my classroom environment as being more collaborative, and I know how I want to guide the students learning (to a degree), but as a parent I only have limited control over how my children, especially my son, is taught.  So, I put this out there, in part, because of my worry and because I thought that one teacher might have the ability/desire/courage to guide another teacher that either struggles or is uncomfortable with the labeled students. But I don’t know how realistic this possibilty is. (I did appreciate Ginny’s honesty in her one blog where she described that ADHD filled environment she taught in).

The last area covers attempts to discuss critical analysis/theory/concepts that are foreign to me.  Combined with the fact that I’m not currently teaching leaves me feeling that either my blogs are rather shallow compared to others or that I’m asking questions out loud because I don’t really have a feeling one way or the other yet. Much of our topics  has been new to me and that’s when I have to remind myself that this is the reason for my being here.      

I have received a few valuable comments that have provided professional insight or food for thought; thank you.

     Susan

I have been reading Peter Elbow’s work and commentaries since undergrad. I have always appreciated his candid and direct opinions. When reading “The War between Reading and Writing: And How to End it,” I really appreciated when he said, “most schools and colleges emphasize reading and neglect writing” (10). Ever since I started teaching I have always forcefully suggested to my English team that we lighten up on the novels and start really spending some time focused on writing. In the three schools I’ve taught in it’s been the same song and dance. Read a novel, write something. Something can mean a brochure, a paragraph or and forced five paragraph essay. What I find most disturbing about this continuous cycle is the fact that essays or paragraphs went through one quick draft and then we moved on to the next novel. No more growth-one, two drafts if we have time and then it’s on to the next novel. In college I always had amazing writing teachers who incorporated reading and writing nearly everyday-very different from the “write the essay or something at the end of the novel unit.” I wanted to do that same approach with my students, but with PLC (professional learning community) enforced at our school, all the 9^th grade teachers taught in step. That meant that even if my kid’s essays needed more than one draft, Dana and Evan’s classes were ready to go, so we moved on.

This year is the first year I finally put my foot down. As a writer, I am never content with one draft before I produce a final product. It just seems wrong. As my 9^th grade team mapped out the school year in September I took it upon myself to take out two novels. I simply told our team leader I just wasn’t going to teach them. To me, three or four novels, a handful of short stories, some nonfiction essays, and poetry were enough. Five or six novels were just too much. To be honest, I am only teaching two novels and one play this year. But the good news is that my students just spent nearly four weeks revising and editing one essay. Each kid went through at least four drafts and they learned the value of revising. When I had to teach six novels in addition to the other literature, I felt like I rushed through writing and to me, writing is an essential skill that students must have in order to be successful and functional adults. Elbow wrote, “we need to respect writing with similar flexibility-by also having low stakes, supplementary, and experimental writing instead of being so rigid and one dimensional about it” (19). My students weren’t graded on each draft, in fact, we conferenced so much that they were excited about writing more. Once we discussed a new possible angle, or idea, they felt more comfortable ditching their initial topic and moving on. I also gave them an open assignment that related to the novel we were reading. I was so impressed with what my students wrote and how much their thinking had evolved in one month. To this day I haven’t graded the final. In fact, the most valuable lesson I think they learned was when I asked them to attach all their drafts to the final. They were amazed at how much writing they had done. I also don’t feel the need to grade the final because we conferenced on each draft and by the end of the four weeks, I knew each word was well written, all the textual evidence was relevant and the ideas were original and well thought-out.

I am so glad that I let go of a novel for a month. It felt so good to let them know how much I valued writing in the classroom. It took about a week for them to stop saying, “all we’re doing is writing today,” but soon they were like busy little bees finding out ways to expand and explore topics they chose. In the past I was exhausted with reading. It seemed as soon as we finished one novel, we were rushing to start the next so we could meet the “novel quota” for the year. Bringing writing to the same level of importance as reading felt wonderful and I don’t think I can ever go back to an existence where I am cramming novels down their throats and assigning really thoughtless and short writing assignments that are abandoned as soon as the novel is through.

Right now my kids are writing slam poems and they spend and have spent at least an hour of class for the past two weeks just conferencing with me and writing their short poems. I thought it would be boring. I thought the kids would write crappy poems and waste the rest of the hour, but they didn’t. They really impressed me with their willingness to read out loud to the group and request suggestions and constructive criticism. They practice reading the poems out loud and listen to which words or phrases they need to emphasize and it amazes me! If a line doesn’t sound right, they revise and add. I credit their willingness to chuck portions of their writing because that’s what I encouraged them to do with our previous essay. For the first time in my teaching career I feel like a writing teacher-one who also teaches her love of reading.

Each human is his or her own favorite subject. And after reading several self-evaluations this week, it seems we routinely self-deprecate and feel guilty for this introspection. What else should we contemplate in our weekly blogs than our personal opinions and theories on the craft of teaching and understanding literature? Our experiences are our only vantage point unless we practice perfect empathy and martyrdom (which might seem like a prerequisite for teaching). We weigh ourselves against the texts and evaluate where we stand in relation to what we learn–these qualities make us lifelong students and worthy teachers. And as teachers, we rule our own domain; our students view us as the purveyors of content knowledge. It seems a natural progression (or pitfall) to start thinking or ourselves as the expert.

Looking over my previous blogs, I have noticed moments when I seem to flaunt my believed expert status (particularly in relation to my post concerning Wilner’s essay last week). Because I view my rapport with my students as primary and teaching literature and language as secondary, I could not condone Wilner’s treatment of her students. I felt perturbed enough about Wilner’s teaching style that I composed a blog for all of my classmates to read. What could anyone else learn from my rants? Was it narcissistic to post my opinion that suggested Wilner‘s style was flawed?  Perhaps. But because of my reflections on Wilner, I now reflect before criticizing (whether verbally or mentally) my students.

Not only do I rely on my teaching experiences as evidence of my growing “expert” status in my classroom, but I also incorporate knowledge from my life experiences unrelated to teaching. My first blog seemed to speak more to the pleasure of difficulty in life than the difficulty I have experienced as a reader.  I have noticed that I tend to blend the lines between the analysis of the text I read and the analysis of my life experiences. While reflecting on my blogs, I have recognized that my reading comprehension depends on my ability to mesh the textual information I consume with the prior knowledge I have harvested throughout my life. This mini-epiphany, common sense as it may seem, will allow me to relate to my students and better understand the value of this blended approach to learning and teaching. How can I expect my students to fully understand or value a text that does not correlate with their life experiences? How could Wilner have expected this? Why do teachers encourage and require students to read literature that they could not possibly understand without properly priming their minds with prior knowledge experiences? Through reading and reflecting, I have learned that good teaching requires good scaffolding practices. I have also realized that information gained through reading, without an emphasis on the application of this knowledge, makes learning a stagnant enterprise. 

Now, I find myself ranting again…. perhaps a shift from self-reflection to action will allow our cyber-ranting to bring about the change we seek.

-Jennifer Carter-Wharton

In going back and reading my posts, I had many of the same insights that have already been written. However, since I doubt any of you are psychic I’ll go ahead and write my post do that you don’t have to keep wondering about the commonalities . This brings me to the first commonality – narcissism in the same ways that Sara and Laurel have already mentioned. Most posts do indicate that I like to talk about myself and that I wrtie about what I like and that this is what the class must want to hear about.  My insights regarding this are:

1- Of course I’m going to write about myself because this is what I ‘know’ and I see the purpose of this class as giving me new information to think about and analyze with what I ‘know’ and then create deeper meanings and understandings thus altering what I ‘knew’ and creating a new personal knowledge. One of the ways the thinking and analyzing takes place is through these blog posts. As William Zinsser says (along with many others in different ways), “Writing is thinking on paper.” 

2- Going along with insight #1, without direction we all focus on what we like or find interesting or challenging. In fact, only in the very first post did I actually incorporate all of the readings and that was we were given the loose directions of commenting on the readings and looking for how they might intersect.

Another aspect that has received many mentions and comments is the ‘blogging voice’. For myself personally, I really haven’t had much problem just logging on and rambling on (I like the sound keystrokes make). I feel that this is due to my previous experience (talking about myself again). As a student I have often been required to take part in a weekly blog or discussion post type exercise therefore I do not find it new, nor do I fear not sounding too academic. This is because in none of the previous experiences has that been an expectation. I also require that my students reply to a weekly blog discussion; however, I do have an expectation that they use Standard Written English. Which I explain to them as meaning they should write in complete sentences and not use texting abbreviations when posting; however, I do tell them that I do not necessarily expect to see their ideas fully developed on the blog post as this is a place for them to get their thoughts out and hopefully get feedback from their classmates.

Continuing along with this ‘blogging as thinking’ idea, I also see some disjointedness about my posts when reading them as the non-author. I also experience this with my writing when I re-read 1st drafts. I realize that there are things that I’ve said that I understand the flow and how one idea follows another, but in re-reading I see how someone else may not be able to follow my train of thought. This is also something I see in my students’ writing. However, for many of them it continues through to the final draft because they cannot comprehend why someone couldn’t follow what they meant.

In addressing the final question of the reflecting on reflecting blog, I would have to say the thing that I value most about the weekly blogging is that it gives me that chance to reflect on what we’ve read/talked about in class and think about how it influences/affects my classroom practice. Sometimes I get inspired to try something new and other times I just get affirmation about what I’m already doing, but regardless, I get an excuse to take the time to just reflect. I also really enjoy reading what the rest of you have posted because I get ideas from your words and affirmation in your thoughts as well.

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 :-)