Learning to Read Rousseau

This is part 9 of my literacy project, focusing on teaching kids to construct meaning by annotating and working with what they do know about the text instead of being paralyzed by what they don't. The first entry in this series - “The Problem” - was posted in early September.

Most of my time on this project has been spent on my English classes, mainly because they're the place where I spend the bulk of my time and energy. It's where my job is to teach kids to read and write. My Philosophy classes absolutely tear my heart up every day though. They're great. I love them because it gives me a chance to interact on a more intellectual level than I might otherwise with students, at least in terms of the content. But, if I'm being honest, it's also because a lot of my favorite students from the last few years fill these classes. It's a place for me to be nurturing and brutal and biased and demanding as the individual student requires. So . . . it's not the most objective classroom space.

Still, I like to try to measure success and growth in these classes as much as possible. Following an initiative my administration is pushing, I've been focusing on a sub-group of young men of a pretty wide range of academic tendencies. At the school where I'm teaching, we don't exactly do a great job of pushing young men into high intellectual practices, a trend that's pretty recurrent throughout the Bronx. So I figured that I would try to track the growth of 4 young men in my philosophy classes.

This is my first full reflection on that, although the focus has been pretty real for me since the early classes this September. For several weeks, students worked with the reading and annotation method I've been advocating – writing everything they know and ignoring or moving past what they don't until later. At the end of the unit, students got a choice of texts to read on their own, annotate, and explicate. This student chose to read and annotate a selection from Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. It's a fairly challenging text once you go below the surface level of the dichotomy between natural and social sources of inequality, and he follows Rousseau's nuance admirably. The really nice thing is that you can see the student learning to transfer Rousseau's language to his own over the course of the text; early on, it is largely a series of loosely-copied phrases and ideas, but by the end he is summarizing and explicating the text in completely new langauge.

The annotations start out simply, as he picks out the basic ideas that Rousseau is setting up, ignoring a lot of the finer details. This is about two types of inequality and it doesn't make any sense to talk about the source of natural inequality. You could do worse than to get this out of the first 2 paragraphs, I think. Going on, the annotations bear a pretty strong resemblance to Rousseau's own wording, as he teases out the meaning. However, by his notes on the bottom of the page, the language has shifted to his own. Similarly, on the 2^nd page he defaults to small revisions to Rousseau's phrases – clarifying them – but then summarizes in his own language at the bottom. He is picking out the connections between the pieces and finding a way to tell what he understands generally from the pieces he has translated.

 

The development gets clear on the third and final page of the excerpt. Almost all the language has shifted to his own. He has worked through translating the ideas and language of the text for long enough; now he can work with it more freely. Overall, this is the point of the kind of read-by-fire methodology I've been talking about. Working with what you can – swinging between one clear point and another – pays off as the student has clearly moved from low to higher text access and maneuverability.