Students Can Read Anything: The Romeo and Juliet Anecdote

This is part 3 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.  So while I'm being held up by the ridiculous logistics of starting the year, I'm itching to get some more ideas out there.  This is just an anecdote, but it's relating one of the first times I can remember thinking about the problems with reading instruction specifically.
 

             I think I started to get the idea that students can read anything in my first year of teaching.  I was teaching 8^th grade in a small 7-12 school in the Bronx and the high school teachers said that they’d really like it if students knew some Shakespeare when they got to 9^th grade.  Wow, ok.  My classroom management wasn’t great.  My lesson plans were shaky at best.  My sleep was lacking.  The reading levels of my students, which I had assiduously measured and documented, were low.  But I went along with it, picking out Romeo and Juliet as the most obvious choice for the angst-ridden crowd in front of me. 

            To make a long story short, I taught the text.  We skipped a few scenes for time, watched clips from Zeffirelli and all of Baz Luhrmann’s films.  We acted a lot.  It took forever and students didn’t understand everything.  I came up with a speech that they really seemed to buy though.  I pointed out that, while reading, we sometimes don’t know what’s going on exactly, but we muscle through and then we get to something we do understand.  Part of the process of reading is stringing together these moments of clarity, making meaning that way.  When we reread the text at a later time, we’ll get more from it, but only because we had this initial reading in our young lives as a background.  You don’t get everything at first.  But you get something.  Reading Shakespeare, I joked honesty, is sometimes like being Tarzan – you grab a vine and swing on it, secure that you know it’s there but unsure of everything around you.  Grasping out wildly in front of you, suddenly another branch pops into your hand and you’re off swinging even further. 

Students seemed amazed by my willingness to admit that I didn’t always understand everything the first time (I was taking a class on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit around the same time and was more than happy to admit my initial impotence with regard to that text), but they also seemed empowered by the idea that they could read anything and that it was ok if they didn’t understand every word. 

Here’s the kicker though.  Once that strict demand for absolute understanding was removed, kids actually managed to understand quite a bit – most of the text, in many cases.  Of course, we went slowly and we had to piece together a lot of passages.  We needed dictionaries and Shakespearean glossaries.  And at first, honestly, I gave a lot of answers out.  But students learned to do it themselves, and by Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, students were happily reading along and getting the gist of things, concluding at the end that this guy was completely out of his mind because they didn't know what he was talking about and they suspected that it might be the point.  Students were well aware that there were things they were missing – some even looking forward to seeing what they would get out of the play next time they read it – but they certainly got more out of the experience than they would have if I’d given them a cheapened version. 

         It’s only an anecdote.  I wasn’t using the annotation method that I’m looking at here.  I was just trying to give students the idea that they can read difficult texts, despite what our culture of reading levels might suggest.  It wasn't perfect and certainly there were things that I would do differently now.  But it was a start.

The Method (A Basic Overview)

This is part 2 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

            So this is what I’ve been doing.  It’s what I’ll continue to do, obviously with some thoughtful alterations as necessary.  Although it contains a lot of standard practices, the systematic approach and the desired outcomes are a bit different – students using these practices to actually read difficult texts, while teachers use them to assess.  It’s important to note that this entry isn’t meant to be exhaustive and none of the posts on this site are meant to be particularly linear.  Questions raised here might be answered later.  Alternate examples or individual anecdotes are coming.

What do I actually do to teach students to read difficult texts?

             
          Basically, it’s a process of slowing down and annotating what students understand while reading.  Students are required to write summary annotations in the margins every time they complete a given section of a text.  This might be a paragraph, a page, or even just a line if a text is very complex.  The key is to have students recognize the difficulty of the text and adjust their annotations accordingly.  So, if a student is comfortable with the meaning of a text – perhaps it’s one of those terrible test prep packet readings – and needs to just focus on answering post-reading questions, she can annotate very lightly, perhaps just short phrases for every paragraph or two.  If a student is very challenged by a text, she can summarize what she understands about every line.  After several annotations have been written down, students look back over them, attempting to put the meaning of the text all back together in terms of their own words and understandings. 

But how does this help students understand the text?

            I came up with this method after the thousandth instance of a student reading a passage and then saying “I don’t understand any of that.”  My stock response for that was always “Of course you do.  Let’s look at it.”  Because students do understand things in even the most complicated texts – there are words, phrases, and whole ideas that are completely comprehensible, even comfortable.  The problem is that we’ve taught students to be caught up on what they don’t know.  So, having students read in terms of what they understand makes it possible to read more complex texts for some meaning, opening up the possibility for constructive re-readings that could then help students fill in gaps. 

            This is what we all do as competent adult readers.  I don’t always understand the finer points of the wonkish moments on Paul Krugman’s blog.  But I read it and I understand the text for the most part, often learning how to read the more specialist language of economics in the process.  Almost nobody understands the finer points of the instructions on tax return paperwork, but (unless we can afford to have somebody else file for us) we tend to trudge through and make sense of it, accumulating knowledge and the ability to read these types of texts in the meantime.  

            So, when students read a bit, take a couple seconds to think about what they just read, write a sentence or two in their own words to hit the high points, and then use these notes to make sense of the larger development of the text . . . they’re reading things that might have seemed unreadable to somebody just sitting down and reading from first to last word without any reflection in the middle.

How do I assess this in real time?

            The fantastic part about this method, from the standpoint of a teacher, is that any in-class readings are easy to assess.  A roving teacher can see the frequency of annotations, suggesting a student’s level of comfort with the text, as well as the accuracy of summaries.  Therefore, a teacher doesn’t have to wait until a student completes a text to individually assess whether or not a student is comprehending a text.  As a summative assessment, scanning a student’s annotations provides more information about his understanding of the entire text and its development throughout, since students are not as easily able to highlight portions of the text, to the exclusion of others. 

            During this process of assessment, it’s also very easy to quickly suggest ways that students could further their thinking, fill in gaps, look back at information they could fill in, and generally to show students how to get more from a text.  In my experience, this can informally take place by pointing at a particular annotation and asking things like “What do you mean here?” or “Is this all that’s going on?” or “What part of the text showed you this?”  When necessary, an important but un-annotated section of text can be pointed to and dissected with a few questions like “What’s happening here?” or “Can you tell me about this sentence/paragraph/section here?”  Generally, a student left this section un-annotated because it was confusing, so this gives the teacher another chance to walk through the process of taking apart a sentence to get what students do know from it.

So that’s the basic method? 

See, it’s pretty simple, right?  Tell students to read a bit and determine how difficult a text is (you have to teach kids to do this, or course), then slow down so they can very briefly summarize what they do understand as they’re going, then occasionally reread to put all the ideas together.  If the length of the text permits, have students go back over the text to fill in details once they understand the basics of the text.  It’s a scaffolding process really, and one that is certainly open to a continual reduction in the use of the tool as students develop their skills.  But let’s be honest.  This is a skill that lends itself to reading in graduate seminars.  The real trick is teaching students to determine exactly how much annotation is necessary for a particular text.  Yeah . . . that’s a challenge.  More on that later.  

The Problem

This is the introduction to my research project on actually teaching reading.

            I’m thinking about how to teach reading.  Of course, you’ll direct me to the gigantic industry of texts, methods, workshops, schools, and think tanks that have taken this up.  Yeah.  I’ve checked that out and it doesn’t teach people to read or teach people to teach reading.  I’m not saying it’s all bullshit exactly, but most of it is bullshit.  I don’t want to add to the pile, but I’m making the attempt to say something a little different about reading instruction.  There’ll be methodologies and assessments and tracking to come – I’m working on all of that – but for now I just want to think about a few things.

            We teach little kids to actually read.  Phonics or whole-word or a combination of the two, along with the more formal cognitive things – left to right and top to bottom and the like.  Stop to look at the pictures.  But then we quit doing all that and go right to comprehension and never really look back.  What is the main idea?  What are the supporting details?  What is the character motivation?  What kinds of inferences can you make?  Does this remind you of anything from your life?  Which of Freud’s main descriptions of condensation and displacement applies most directly to this text?

            But after about 4^th grade – even earlier if the Common Core push gets its way – there is almost no instruction in actual reading.  All of these questions are recall or reread questions.  They assume completion of the text and are testing the quality of the reading and the ability to interpret ideas.  None of this is about making knowledge out of the text.  Even meaning-making strategies like text to self readings create meaning by combining two ostensibly complete texts – personal experience and the thing being read.  I’ve got a less reductive analysis of self to text readings coming up, worked into the method I’m going to be talking about, but for the purpose of an introduction, it’s pretty clear that when teachers ask students to read Buried Onions and then do a project analyzing the similarities and differences between Eddie’s neighborhood and the student’s own neighborhood, it’s an after-reading strategy.  It assumes that students have apprehended the image of the neighborhood in the text and can hold it up against their own experience.  It’s a great thinking and writing assignment, but it isn’t instruction in actual reading.

            The closest thing I can find to actual reading instruction in higher grades is the good old use of context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word.  In some ways, my method is a mutation of this process, with a few important exceptions.  Mainly, my gripe with context clues is twofold, one on a very practical and one on a more theoretical level.  In the first instance, teaching students to use context clues only works if context clues exist.  Texts designed for teaching context clues, like the ones in this very useful worksheet from Read, Write, Think, often contain patterns like an internal definition, antonym or synonym markers, or clear material for inferences.  Real readings don’t generally follow these patterns, at least all the time.  So students can be aces with context clue worksheets but unable to use these strategies to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words when the clear scaffolds aren’t present. 

            Even more importantly for my project though, teaching students to read using context clues assumes that the sentence in question – or even the whole text – is already a comprehended whole, with a tiny piece or two missing.  This is based on an assumption that is . . . well, pretty abhorrent in my opinion.  I’m talking about the “five finger rule” or some variant of that idea.  You know, the one where you tell students that if they don’t know five or more words per page when they start a book, it’s too hard for them and they should pick a different book.  Let’s be clear.  I hate this idea – it’s bad teaching and general bad modeling for life.  This isn’t how the world works.  If you need to read a legal injunction against you, it will have words and ideas you don’t know.  If you want to understand the debate over a particular public policy, it will have words and ideas you don’t know.  If you want to read Goethe’s Faust while skipping 9^th grade English class in the library, it will have words and ideas you don’t know.  Reading all these texts anyway is not only necessary, it’s downright human.  It’s our job as teachers to give kids the tools to read all these texts.

            So that’s my problem.  I want to teach reading and I’m not happy with the methods out there.  I’m going to be further developing a method that I’ve been working on for a couple years.  The school year starts in a few days and I’m going to be teaching 9^th grade English and (as far as I know) one section of an Intro to Philosophy elective to 10^th-12^th grade students.  Let’s see how this goes . . .