Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, and the Hochman Expository Writing Method

My program's getting changed again.  It's the way things go.

Anyway, I've been learning about Judith Hochman and her Teaching Basic Writing Skills, along with the method that goes with it.  It's expository writing broken down to the sentence level in a way that makes a tremendous amount of sense.  So often - particularly given the NYC focus on Common Core Writing Standard #1 - we've got students writing arguments of one kind or another, going through revision processes, talking big talk, but without an understanding of what a sentence is.

That seems unbelievable, but stodgy old grammarians have been griping about it for years with a bit of sympathy from me.  Teaching students to correct - much less avoid - fragments and run-on sentences is a nightmare if they don't have words like dependent clause or even noun and verb in their active lexicons.

I'm not a disciple or anything - just doing some PD when I can - but it seems like Hochman's method for teaching writing lines up with my method of teaching students to break down and annotate texts for comprehension while reading.  The link between sentence-by-sentence comprehension of a text has always seemed glaringly related to the process of expository writing, which is how I got cover fire in the early days of the Common Core pre-rollout, using the writing standard #2 and the reading for information standard #2, which basically ask students to explain what a text means and how it conveys that meaning - lots of things about author's craft and rhetorical work.  It was good stuff before the hammer came down and everything was around the focus on a position (which used to be a claim, which used to be a thesis) . . .

So hopefully this is relevant and I can do something with it.  If any of you bare few out there reading this have any input or thoughts, it's been too long since I've heard from some of you.

My Literacy Project and the Common Core Standards

This is an old piece I never got around to finishing.  I just dusted up what I had because I don't mind pointing out that the things the CCSS supposedly focus on are things that are at the heart of my teaching method.  But seriously, this whole edu-industry is bullshit at least as far as actually teaching kids is concerned.  Also, John King is a tool.  In my professional opinion.

            So the looming beast in all of this is the Common Core literacy standards.  Let me be clear, I think the language of the Common Core is another in a long wave of edu-speak quick fix movements.  As a teacher in NYC, I’ve seen a lot of these already.  It’s not a paradigm so much as a product – a diversion of funds and attention toward think tanks and privateering as a response to the a crisis that is hardly ever discussed in anything even remotely resembling useful ways.  It’s a gift to the world of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capital” in The Shock Doctrine.  It’s a demand for more workshops and seminars to discuss not exactly how one might help students to become better educated, but something more along the lines of how we can understand what these standards want us to do in order to ostensibly educate students in the way we’re being asked to educate them.  It’s a demand, as Diane Ravitch points out, for schools to dump more money into edu-software and computer systems that don’t reduce class sizes or provide individualized learning experiences.  They provide data that can be further analyzed for additional fees.  So I’m not writing about the Common Core because I think it’s actually always good pedagogy.  I’m writing about it because it’s a material reality for educators in the same way that state exams and standardized tests are a material reality for our students.  Finding a way to appease (or fool) the beast while providing our kids with genuine educational opportunities – the original point of this blog anyway – is my focus.  

So with this caveat in mind, the video of Comissioner King and David Coleman chatting with another edu-speak talking head is really interesting and surprisingly - to be honest - a bit exciting.
 

I’m leaving aside my doubts about their claim that the solitary focus on the text “levels the playing field” as if socio-economic influences aren’t impacting the way students interact with texts.  Keep an eye out for my comments coming up on the Common Core as a New New Criticism.

With that said, there are some bullet points that directly relate to my project here and should be emphasized to shore up working room when administrators and school reviewers come around sniffing for proof of Common Core competency. 

1)  We need to correct the trend of giving students simpler materials and “translated” materials so that they can access texts.

That’s kind of the point here.  Students – not teachers – are translating difficult texts so that they can access the texts themselves.  If I want students to read Hegel, the judge’s sentences in the Scottsboro trials, or Dave Zirin’s polemic on race and freespeech for athletes, it’s because I want them to read these texts, not just receive their content. 

            2)  Students need to see access points to difficult texts, allowing them to move up in their ability to deal with more complex vocabulary, syntax, structure, and overall complexity. 

Again, that's kind of the point.  If we assume that students can find basic meaning in a text and then fill in details or just move on, then students can tackle pretty much anything.   

            3)  Students should read and re-read texts to enhance understanding, but also to look at craft and the way that authors lay out their arguments. 

Again, that’s kind of the point.  In my lesson on “Masque of theRed Death,” readers were able to make sense of the text by pushing forward and then revisiting things that didn’t make sense earlier.  When students realized that “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” were symptoms, they could go revisit pestilence and conclude that it’s a disease, but – even better – they could recognize all the foreshadowing that Poe laces through the early paragraphs.    

So let's just get the kids reading.  My annotation method works.

Good Luck on the Half Court Shot, Suckers

It seems like these ads just get more and more insulting (antagonistically so?) to students.

The Painkiller Before the Knock in the Jaw

Riding to work this morning, I saw this ad. Apparently, the DOE has been footing quite a bill to set parents up for the idea of their children bombing the State Exams this Spring. My camera on my phone is lousy, so it's hard to read, but it says:

"This spring, state exams for students in grades 3-8 will be different and more challenging. And test scores will reflect that at first ( . . . ) We're not satisfied with just teaching your children basic skills. We want them prepared for college and a career."

Does the expenditure suggest that the city is concerned about growing public dissatisfaction with the fetishization of standardized tests? About the growing number of parents who are opting their kids out of the tests?  Or is this just damage control, trying to seem benevolent in the face of ever-increasing separation of the public from any form of control over public education in a world where tests and corporate educational trade secrets are strictly protected while student and teacher information is constantly for sale?

Maybe it's just a warning shot fired across the bow of students, parents, teachers, and anyone else genuinely interested in this junk science profit glut.  It's going to be painful, that much is certain.  

A Serious Ommission in the Common Core Standards

In exactly the way that they do during the school year, things've gotten away from me.  I'm backlogged on great stuff I'd love to put up here.  Sample annotations and proof of development in a couple of really exciting case studies . . . thoughts on how to get this to work with novels . . . a bit on the Common Core in its full ridiculousness.  But after a harrowing month prepping for a quality review in my school and a jump directly into midyear final exams and scoring state tests, any time I have left isn't exactly spent thinking about the classroom.

One thought though - not sure what I make of it yet.  I was prepping a unit for my philosophy class and I was trying to align it to the common core standards so I didn't get stuck going back and doing it later; but I realized the standards are missing something really important.  As a preface to what I'm working on with respect to this pseudo-movement, I'll just say that I think the Common Core represents half of everything that's wrong with education, even while I look for ways to make it applicable to genuine learning in my class. 

But when I looked for a standard to match with my unit on applying Freudian language and thought to pop culture texts, there was nothing to be found.  None of the standards suggest that legitimate reading or writing can be done by bringing a particular critical view to a text.  Numerous texts can be used to discuss a topic, but the texts themselves remain dominant.  The assumption here is clear: that our students are blank recipients of texts they encounter. 

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.

Gathering Data

This is part 8 in my series on trying to teach students to use annotations to read. The first entry was posted back at the beginning of September, titled “The Problem.”

So, a discussion of tracking and data is probably long overdue. Stupid, meaningless words. “We’d like to see some data on your kids.” Measuring student development in something as complex as literacy is like living perpetually in late November or early December and trying always to make a definitive statement about whether or not it’s winter. Of course, there’s an objective marker on a calendar somewhere that tells you the answer flat out, but even in the face of that kind of absolute idea, day to day experience kind of contradicts it sometimes. You’re pretty sure you’re in a state of becoming winter though. Some days more than others. Measuring literacy is kind of like that, I guess.

With that in mind, I decided to try to track some target students using a more narrative style. It gave me a chance to reflect on what was really happening for each student, day to day, but also to look explicitly at whether or not it seemed like this reading and annotation method was helping.

I focus on three categories – frequency of annotations in general, the extent to which the student's notes are reflecting central ideas in the text, and the potential for moving these notes from a simple summary level to a more explicative level. It's just a basic Word document with some columns, but it's easy enough to quickly throw some thoughts into or to print off for the odd administrator request or student conference.

In my English classes, I've been tracking a handful of students – mostly students with IEPs or who are ELLs, but a couple who self-selected by coming for individual help with reading comprehension early in the year – and I've just been finishing up scanning in a bunch of their work. Unfortunately, there's going to be a big gap in work because we started reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe I'll get a chance to scan in some annotations or sticky notes from students later on. Maybe I'll sleep a little bit or finish another Game of Thrones book or something.

I've been trying to keep up with these narrative trackers on each of my target students. For the most part, I've been successful – it's not so much about taking the time to write in the 30-80 words per entry, which is pretty quick and painless. It's actually collecting the texts so that I can make copies. As I pointed out in the overall description of the method a while back, using student annotations the way we do is nice for real-time assessment as students are actually reading.

So, for instance, these annotations from early in the year might indicate that the student is able to decode the text on the most basic level, despite relatively high complexity. However, less central details – the description of the architecture, for instance – are left unmentioned. The student could use these annotations to summarize the story or talk about things like theme or characterization, but close-reading discussions like tone or author's craft would require a strategic rereading.

I'm sort of bragging now

This is part 7 of my project about teaching kids to actually read.  It's the first mention of my Philosophy elective, which is focused on the often unbearably-difficult process of reading philosophical texts.  The first part of the project was posted on 9/1/12, titled "The Problem."

I'm teaching Hegel's "Lord and Bondsman" to a bunch of 10th and 11th graders in my Intro to Philosophy Course.  We started out with a conversation about rearranging syntax, then spent the whole class on just the first 2 sentences.  I worked through the first sentence w/ them – modeling the process, asking questions, etc.  Students did things like circling awareness and drawing an arrow from it to self, crossed out in and for itself when, and by the fact that to substitute the word when, then summarizing in the margins.  So any philosophy PhD out there is perhaps raging now at the simplification that has undoubtedly ruined all of Hegel’s nuance.  But, with a little help, students were able to figure out how to make meaning out of this phrase:

         Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.

Then, students had to work in pairs to repeat the procedure with the next sentence I gave them – the final sentence in Hegel’s original paragraph, since I had edited this first paragraph for clarity (the rest of the text remained completely intact from the Miller translation).  In pairs, they made sense of

The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. 

And they did it.  It took some help in the form of reminding them to pay attention to what they did know and to translate words like Notion into Idea (again, Hegelians are aghast at the significance of this change) to keep themselves from getting stuck on it.  By the end of the day, in an informal “raise your hands if” assessment, students agreed at about a 70% rate that they couldn’t read Hegel, but felt like they were on their way. 

Since then, we’ve taken another class period to read about 4 more sentences and students are off reading and annotating 3 more for homework.  It’s slow going, but students are not only grasping Hegel’s concepts, but they’re getting used to the process of unraveling complex syntax, which is one of the key skills for reading higher-level texts. 

We’ll see how the homework looks, if this (seemingly imaginary from my current perspective) hurricane ever lets us get back to school. 

Teaching "Masque of the Red Death"

This is part 6 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post was "The Problem" back on 91/12.  The following lesson is simply an example of how I might introduce this method with a text that I'm absolutely certain will challenge my students.  See the previous 2 lessons for other fine-detail thoughts on how I ran this class.

Reading “Masque of the Red Death” day 1                

Aim:  How do I use annotation to read really difficult texts?
Obj:  SWBAT use elimination and annotation to read and summarize a text.

CC standard:  RI.9-10.5  Analyze in detail how an author's ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text. 

Do Now:  Read the following passage and use any knowledge you have to try to make sense of it.  If you can't figure out all of it together, pick out individual words and try to figure out what they might mean.

Peruse the language of this query to determine the relative meanings of the words vis a vis the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to associate local meaning with a sense of the global intentions of this statement, select individual signifiers and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

Work through the language with students –

Tricks for using annotation to understand texts
Look for words/phrases that you do know
Read those phrases together
Put together meaning that you can write/summarize in the margins

So let's look at a really tough story now. 

This next part here is key – it’s the good ole’ workshopy process of doing the first paragraph or two together, followed by paired work, then individual work – scaffolding down to students feeling ok about going into their heads and doing it themselves.

Read through the first paragraph of “Masque” - work through the tricks with students.

OK, so now with the person next to you, let's try to figure out what the next two paragraphs are about.  Use the 3 tricks for using annotation and we'll see if we can figure this text out.  [circulate to assess student progress – keep students moving despite frustration]

Share out – keep filling in annotations as students share them – possibility to massage their actual notes.

OK, so now your job is to finish reading this text.  Use all the tricks!  [circulate to assess]

Share out what we get in the last moments of class time.

Homework:  Finish annotating “Masque of the Red Death” (DUE TOMORROW) 

Introducing the method’s use with really hard texts

This is part 5 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

Early in the year, I teach the idea of summarizing the main ideas in the margins first, using simpler texts so that students can focus on the skill apart from struggling with content.  They get it, but honestly there’s not always a lot of buy in to that kind of idea because kids know that they can hold all the ideas in their head without annotating much.  The first chance they get to really see the value of annotating for comprehension is when we read Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” 

This is a hard text for students, as the numbers show on my previous post.  So I start out with an extreme version of the annotation method – getting kids to really see that they can read around unfamiliar words and make meaning out of very difficult texts.  It’s a bit gimmicky, but here’s what I do.  Students come in to a Do Now that says this:

Read the following passage and use any knowledge you have to try to make sense of it.  If you can't figure out all of it together, pick out individual words and try to figure out what they might mean.

Peruse the language of this query to determine the relative meanings of the words vis a vis the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to associate local meaning with a sense of the global intentions of this statement, select individual signifiers and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

            Predictably, most students don’t really write much of anything in the 3-4 minutes I give them.  They generally get stuck on peruse and if they remember to read through that, query and vis a vis usually seal the deal.  Then we get to work as a class.  I play a bit dumb and say that I don’t know all the words either, but can read around them – it’s important to make this very caricatured, I think.  Students have to know you know what you’re talking about and playing a part.  I highlight words I supposedly don’t know and turn them white, leaving them erased.  Usually we end up with the following.

              the language of this           to determine the            meanings of the words           the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to                          , select individual                and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

 From this, students are able to read that the passage says:

“Do something . . . the language of this to determine the meanings of the words.”  Then, a more advanced student rearranges “knowledge . . . already possessed” to “knowledge you already have – something you already know” and this set of ideas, along with “how their meanings might add up” leaves the final blank as having something to do with words.  Students have made meaning out of a seemingly impenetrable passage, largely by simply removing 4 words and 2 unclear phrases. 

            They are ready to move on to “Masque of the Red Death” which will require them to use this skill continuously throughout.  I’ll post that lesson separately. 

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 . . .