A Note on Decoding

It's been the cold hard middle of the second semester - beware the Ides of March and all that.  But a good thought yesterday in class . . .

Most of my students decode fairly well.  They're non-readers: for the most part, students who cannot make meaning out of words strung together even if they know a large number of the words.  It reminds me of my early days of high school Spanish.  I had a bit of vocabulary but it took too much processing power to put it all together.

Yesterday, I listened to a student read and heard slow decoding though.  He could do it, but at a low level.  How is this student supposed to make meaning while working so hard to process individual words?  The answer is simple.  He has to take some strain off the processor to free up room for individual programs to run.  He can annotate just a phrase of a sentence, then move on.  He doesn't have to hold nearly as much meaning in his head while decoding the next set of words.

In math, this is a no-brainer, right?  We make students write down the steps of the problem so we can check their progress, but also so that they don't have to hold multiple computations in their heads at the same time.

Annotation isn't for writing in a case like this.  Annotation is a process related to reading - the actual comprehension of a text.

A Version of an Ignorant Schoolmaster?

This is a half-formed thought, really. The child of necessity. But it might be exciting. 

I got a new student yesterday, 3 days out of DR, with almost no English. It happens. But the question is how I work him in at all, given language obstacles and the fact that we're halfway through a unit. Oh, and I found out about him when he sat down in my class.  So I started with a bit of a cop-out.  I told him that I wanted to see his general reading abilities.  I handed him the text my other students had been working with, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some looseleaf.

I'm terrible.

So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time.  By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics.  I was floored.  I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish.  But it seems to me that I can work with this.

Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind.  I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit.  But still, the method might hold something here.  Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender.  (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).

Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language?  I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this.  How many students did Jacotot have?  Rancière never really mentions that, does he?  

I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).  

To Kill a Mockingbird and Annotating Whole Novels

This is an old image - back in the early winter, when we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Obviously, there's a lot of problems with annotating for comprehension when dealing with novels. On one hand, a lot of the language can be clear enough that line-by-line or even paragraph-by-paragraph annotating is unnecessary. On another, producing regular summary-based notes is even more important with novels because of the amount of info that needs to be accessibly held in some corner of active memory.

Oh yeah, and writing in school books is frowned upon but sticky notes suck.

This student just paid the 8 bucks for his own copy and we worked on a version of the annotation method that worked for him. Essentially, there are two things to focus on when annotating novels: clarifying and noting important info. In conferences, this student explained that his first note was there because the sentence threw him for a minute until he reread, and determined that the first word (Calpurnia) and the final word (smack) referred to the "me" of the narrator, Scout.  It was still early enough in the book for the narrator's "me" to be unclear for him, so "She hit Scout" was a useful way to clear up a confusing line.  It also served as a way to quickly reference this section in a Socratic Seminar later, when students discussed the characterization of Calpurnia and her relationship to the Finch family. 

The second note was probably inspired somewhat by the tone of this first note, although this student didn't say that explicitly.  However, in these early pages, a student could do much worse than to note that it is Calpurnia - a black housekeeper in the segregated South - who is at least partially responsible for teaching Scout to read and write.  The final section that is underlined illustrates the continual focus on this relationship, which was at least somewhat influenced by the method of stopping and annotating to make sense of the text.  Clearly, there are details that are glossed over on this page, but that's probably true of any individual reading led by the interest of a moment.  It's imperfect, but it's a way to begin to translate this method to the longer form of the novel.        

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: The Middle Chapters

I can only say, in the most ridiculously anti-intellectual parody possible, that I don't need this kind of mumbo jumbo.  It's one of those moments where you realize you're reading something great but the task at hand is almost completely utilitarian, so the gems slip by.  I don't have any use for 45 pages on proof of the equality of intelligence, both because I already believe in it and because my task is to encourage it, not convince others of its existence.  That sounds paradoxical, but I find that the first step should never be to tell a student that she already is smart.  Getting her to do something she thought she couldn't do and then pointing it out, that's a different story.  I'm getting bogged down in method and institutional teaching questions, but I still think there's a synthesis that can be cobbled together between Jacotot,  Rancière, and myself. 

I'm going to be teaching a course that contains a component of Latin at a brand new school in the Fall.  I have a lot of flexibility in my curriculum.  I'm looking at a literal word-for-word translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, imagining an Animus fert dicere formas mutatas moment, akin to the Calypso could not that Jacotot began with.  We'll see we'll see . . .     

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: Chapter 2

I have to stop for a note on Rancière's second chapter, “The Ignorant One's Lesson.” I probably should've written something about the first chapter – something about stultification or the first mention of universal teaching maybe – but I'm not being that rigorous here.

The thing about the second chapter is that it seems to touch on my sense of a reading methodology that asks students to just read by looking at what they do understand and building from there. So often, students read a passage (we've just been working on literacy skills for science passages on the Living Environment Regents) and get to the end and say “I don't get it.” I infuriate them constantly with my stock response “Of course you do – let's look at it.” I could just as easily be saying the more brusque “Don't say that you can't. You know how to see, how to speak, you know how to show, you can remember. What more is needed?” Jacotot and Rancière agree with me - to say what is on the page is to tell me you know what it says. Meaning is strung together later out of the things you recognize. The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The Red Death is wrecking the land. What the Red Death is and how it's wrecking the land and who the story's about and all the rest of it will come later.

Even better is the big realization for students. Rancière points out that “precisely what must be discovered is that there is nothing hidden, no words underneath words” and it is a fear of this master narrative that students must be taught to forget. Just read. It's here on the page. Of course, there's context and the call and response of text to text and polyphony and whatever other way you want to put it, but to read what's on the page is the thing in question. All the rest of that is discussion of what you could say about the text. Our goal is to read without resorting to condescension.

Is that the same sort of thing that Rancière detests? The constant holding off of more meaning from the student? Is it only in the presence of the Old Master that this unveiling of connection and context can happen? Or is there something more complicated going on here?

Probably the most relevant question I have at this point is whether or not Rancière's “Power of the Ignorant” is necessary as a condition or as a position. He claims that, for the ignorant schoolmaster, “there's no risk of this master sparing the child the time necessary to account for the word Calypso.” I fall into this sometimes – pestilence means sickness, let's move on – although I'm getting better bit by bit. But that doesn't mean that ignorance is a necessary condition, maybe. I can even imagine how a knowledgeable schoolmaster could play the role of the ignorant schoolmaster – I know it but what does that have to do with you? Or am I just justifying my position or, hell, my authority?

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: a First Thought from One Teacher

This is how things get messy just as Spring's turning into Summer. Months ago, a former professor read a couple of the first entries on my literacy pedagogy and suggested that I read Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster a discussion about emancipation and (sort of) pedagogy, based on the teaching of Joseph Jacotot. School years being what they are, I'm just getting around to it, but it's pretty clearly important stuff. After finishing the translator's introduction, I've got to get a little bit of this out.

The thing that struck me most tonight was the notion of story telling as an antithesis to explication. Because it presumes an equality of intelligence, story telling is egalitarian, while explication is (obviously) not. I'm trying to figure out how to get my head around this on a practical level. When I first started teaching middle school, I found myself telling a lot of stories – it actually was a source of guilt – as a means of helping my students to see connections. It was certainly explication in any real sense of the word, but in a textured narrative style. It took the form of the “so you see . . .” Besides creating a human connection between myself and my students, it gave me the chance to convey knowledge as an anecdote without the presumption that I was more intelligent – just more experienced in one particular instance. In hindsight, I had much better relationships over the long run with these students than I did with students from other periods where I was less narrative (and, to be honest, less egalitarian). So there's something to story telling, surprisingly enough.

This all comes in the context of my grappling with the deskilling of teachers that is at the forefront of the effort to destroy public education and one of the last (remotely) powerful sectors of organized labor in America. I know the danger of speaking of a teacher as an equal with students because the Common Core and Danielson frameworks are being used as a cudgel throughout New York City to beat all content specialty out of the profession. The New New Criticism's insistence that students need only to read and never to take in context or make crucial connections certainly makes it seem like there's no need to have any content knowledge, but of course that quickly devolves into something ridiculous and hollow. “A Modest Proposal” without context is satire without the sideways glance – a bare call for cannibalizing infants that is both confusing and uninteresting beyond its shock value.

I'm appealing to the canon though, and that's tantamount to elitist rearguard knee jerking, right? But how would Stephen Colbert be funny without context – the awareness of the satire, given the absence of a wink? For that matter, how would his show be remotely comprehensible on any level without knowledge of external specifics? Or, to hit at the heart of what matters most to the neo-liberal education “reformers,” are really all about, how would an instruction manual be comprehensible without contextual working knowledge? A lathe worker cannot simply be handed a machine and a manual, no matter how well trained in the ability to decipher texts. A farmer cannot be dumped on a tract of land with a Monsanto starter kit and expect results. Knowledge has to accompany texts or they are at best inefficient ways to convey information; at the worst, they are rendered useless. Of course, that's not really what neo-liberal education theorists are talking about though, is it?

So I'm interested in what Rancière will add to these ideas for me. Is it merely an esoteric summer musing that I only have time for because I'm wrapping up the year? Is it a guise for a process of deconstructing education without simultaneously doing anything real about context in which that system exists? Is it just an excuse for me to tell more stories in class?

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 . . .