The Neverending Story

Late, I know, and I really am sorry, but @ddoucet,

So I wanted to get straight in my mind a “Reading Process,” preferably with a catchy acronym, one that I could set up next to the Writing Process in my class pantheon.

That was my project.

Pretty clear what I’m up against. Hugh McGuire sums up neurological research that suggests that our 140 Character Generation is physiologically addicted to reading in quick bursts of factoids and listicles, and lacks the attention span and mental discipline to read deeply:

“The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:

• New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
• The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.”

 

No reading process can ever give a dopamine rush. I mean, not that I know of. I really tried to think of one.

Lots of other research (Scheifele et al 2012, National Reading Panel 2000, Allington, Guthrie et al, Hiebert, and more that I didn’t have time to get to) all suggests that the more kids read (and specifically, the more they read independently and at school), the better they are at it. That simple. No reading process can make up for a lack of practice.

Mark Yakich argues that the key to experiencing literature deeply is a comfort with textual ambiguity: “Ambiguity is at the center of what is it to be a human being,” he says. But my students are completely uneasy. They want to know The Answer. What does Hemingway MEAN here? (They are unimpressed when I tell them I have no idea.) Robert Scholes argues that much of the blame for this must fall on English teachers (gulp), who “in our bumbling, well-meaning way, have done a lot of the damage” by insisting on particular interpretations in the development of reading. No reading process can make my upper year students more comfortable with uncertainty.

Still, though, I feel like none of these things is insurmountable. I CAN, and have begun to, and will continue to address these problems in my practice. Strangely enough (and shockingly enough to me), that part of this process all proved to be fairly straightforward, once I got to thinking about it in specific ways.

But here’s the thing with this project.

It started out with me just thinking about a way I could improve my own practice, to iron out some of the kinks that I think trip my kids up when they enter my classroom, and to try to articulate specific pedagogical goals I could establish to address them, and then some strategies to meet them.

It has become so much more than that, in ways that are really imposing, but also really exciting.

To talk about this, let me just re-publish my “benchmark” sentence:

 “At the gray tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low, sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.”

 

(I know, right?)

 

So, for instance, if I wanted to make sure that I was teaching my kids how to read this sentence, I would want them to be aware of the diction. Simple! There are plenty of interesting words here that they could notice: “throbbed” is evocative, “sweet” as a description of a fever lends valence to an already-sophisticated metaphor, “drifted” certainly implies a specific kind of movement that has thematic overtones, etc. Nothing to it. But let’s say that they were faced with Conrad’s classic

“It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

(I know, right?)

 

Of course they can just look these things up. But that only solves half the problem. There are subtleties of meaning, intricacies of connotation that no student is going to get from a quick look at dictionary.com. What they really need is better vocabularies, so that they can more powerfully contextualize the words that they find, and to make them more sensitive to the most delicate gradations of meanings, because it is in the space between these gradations that great writing lives. So: yes, of course I can (and have been, and will) teach my students to watch for particular words. But that’s a lot like trying to teach them about ecosystems by having them stare at the tree on the front lawn of our school.

 

Thomas Foster has written that the three tools most vital to profound and powerful reading are memory, symbol, and pattern. Powerful readers, he argues, remember texts, and automatically compare them to each other, placing them in dialogue. What’s that? The Things They Carried suggests that “story truth” is truer than “happening truth?” Didn’t Robertson Davies make the case for “psychological truth” over “police court facts” in Fifth Business? But didn’t Plato in his Republic banish the poets because they were little more than fancy-pants liars? Hasn’t Stephen King written that “Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie?” And that Wallace Stevens, I remember him saying that “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” And so on. Reading The Things They Carried (which my Grade 12s are in the middle of hating as we speak) and following a reading process would certainly be better than reading it without. But it’s still just a tree, and there’s an infinite ecosystem out there filled with myriad forms of life that would beggar the imagination, and they’ll never get to see it without being able to bring to bear a wealth of reading. Symbols and patterns, as well as their effects and purposes, are easy to recognize when you’ve seen them and thought about them for years. So are words.

So what I have discovered is that teaching powerful reading (at least as I understand it) is a lot bigger than just Room 237. To pull it off (at least as I understand it) would require a far more searching and fundamental shift in the way our department’s entire scope and sequence are laid out and interrelated. It would require the selection of texts with an eye to how they relate to what students have already read, and the instruction of those texts with an eye to what they are going to read in the future. It would require the institution of a vocabulary program that we do not currently offer. It would require the sweeping implementation of a curriculum of poetry that we do not currently emphasize. And so on.

(I know, right?)

So this is where I am. I have drawn some conclusions about how I want to teach reading in my class, and I’m continuing to deepen my thinking about those conclusions as I read more and more about it. And I have, in my most recent unit, begun to implement some of what I’ve been doing, and I’m pleased with the results (on a small, one-off scale, anyway). I want to hammer them home a little more, and then I will give my students the Fitzgerald sentence above, and see how much better (if any, he said, pessimistically) they do with it.

But ultimately, what I am working towards is a scope and sequence that would introduce, develop, and deploy in increasingly sophisticated ways not just a list of specific reading skills that could be ticked off a checklist (preferably one with a catchy acronym), but a powerful (and hopefully, eventually, ingrown) way of reading.

I feel more daunted by this than I did at our first meeting. But I also feel energized about it in a way that I haven’t felt for some time, like maybe I could actually articulate something real about how I feel about this. Maybe it will never leave my computer. I don’t care. “Humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” (Ellison!)

Do your worst, world.

 

Here’s an action plan!!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13e5uOwHfdJXxHIM2_VSGGaHmjmepXV9GjqaiiJljSOI/edit#slide=id.g12c37fd5e6_0_21