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 . . .