New Post for 2010

I'm teaching ENGL 104 again this summer and think I will allow my 2009 archives to provide examples of class posts. If anyone wants to see them, click on 2009.

What I'd like to write about instead is some of the thinking I've been doing about reading over the last year. As I have posted earlier on this blog, I have been reading off and on Robert Jordan's fantasy novels from the Wheel of Time series, and in the spring I did an inquiry project for my ENGL 339 course thinking about the question, "Why do I like Robert Jordan?"

I came up with three answers: 1) I enjoy the complex world and characters he creates because readers can kind of live there, which is like a vacation.

2) I think my reading may be influenced by my personality type (since it is all about me!). I'm more of a shy person than a talker, and I like to think through things first before talking about them. My guess is that people like me might like this kind of in-depth world-creation fantasy. I can fit all the details in my head and come back to them during the day to wonder about what will happen next.

3) I keep coming back to the idea that having an emotional connection to reading is really important. When we do all this school reading on subjects we don't care about, it's hard to know that some reading can be fun, that we might find a kind of reading suited to us out there in the world. I think I experience an emotional connection to fantasy because I like the heroic good vs. evil struggles that occur there. I have friends who think fantasy is kind of silly, but I do think, despite its escapist quality, it gets at some important value issues that are relevant to the real world. Nancy

Blog Party Inquiry Post

According to the National Endowment for the Arts Reading at Risk report from 2004, the number of American adults reading literature has dropped 14% from 1992 to 2002 (ix). As a lover of and teacher of literature, this decrease saddens me. What saddens me further is that literature instruction cannot seem to halt this decline. Kids seem to be hardwired to rebel against authority as part of their growth into adults, including against reading as a required educational activity.

So, my inquiry question is, how is it possible to teach reading without killing the love of reading? Since we probably need to continue requiring literature, my current conclusion is that instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests and learning styles and to the outside world.

1. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their learning styles. I have known about learning styles for many years, but a turning point for me occurred in 2007 while I was researching student engagement. In a source I can’t find now, I read that 95% of learners prefer styles other than “linguistic intelligence” (PBS) or processing by reading and writing. This shocked me! I prefer reading and writing, but my students probably don’t, and there I was using reading and writing to teach reading and writing to students who don’t prefer reading and writing!! This sounded like a recipe for failure.

Due to this revelation, I’ve begun to build opportunities for students to use different learning styles to understand literature: music, art, comic strips, Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, tableaus, personal experiences, collaboration, and connections to larger life questions through opinionaires, an idea I got from Jeffrey Wilhelm’s 2007 book on inquiry. These strategies use learning styles that may be more accessible for that 95% of students so that they can access literature through them.

2. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to their interests. The use of personal interests and experience in teaching motivates learning. It is even more important in literature because literary interpretation relies on personal experience to make meaning.

As an example of this, I’ll share that I had a very sheltered childhood. My parents and teachers were kind. I always had food, housing, clothing, and money to spend on occasional extras. This background caused me to read Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” as a fun romp in the kitchen. It sounded fun that the father and son were causing “the pans/[to] Slid[e] from the kitchen shelf” in their enthusiasm, and the cute “unfrown” suggested that the mother was just pretending to disapprove. It was not until I read this poem with students who had other life experiences that I realized the poem could also represent abuse. Because our life experiences inspire a wide variety of interpretations, life experience should be central to literature instruction.

3. Instructors of literature need to help students connect literature to the outside world. All I need is a good book or classroom discussion to make me happy. Unlike me, my students need to know the value of literature in relation to the outside world. I believe that literature study teaches many real-world skills: Through reading, we learn to think outside the confines of our own lived experience, to understand other people and cultures, to make meaning from stories and think critically and artistically, to value individual and ordinary experience, to address future challenges, to long for justice (Pontuso and Thornton 65), and to better understand ourselves (Felski 7). These skills are vitally important to ensuring our culture moves in a constructive direction whether it be in business, politics, health care, or parenting.

To help students see the value of literature, I tried two new strategies this term:

a) Our first week’s readings and our first paper demonstrated that people care and talk about reading outside school and that reading connects to our real-world lives.

b) My on-campus students presented a Town Hall meeting on reading, and my online students will host a Blog Party on reading. In each case, students developed inquiry projects on topics related to reading and/or literature and presented or will present their results in public forums. These efforts represent an attempt to demonstrate to students that discussions of reading are an important part of our culture, not just academic work shut away in classrooms.

Because I am still in the process of this experiment, I don’t know whether these efforts will result in greater learning and engagement among my students. My on-campus students seem to like to come to class and don’t resort too frequently to texting under the desks. My online students seem overwhelmed. I think all the little activities might be easier to keep in perspective if we were working in person, so I’ll need to fine-tune the balance.

To conclude, I would be interested in discussing the following questions: Should we stop teaching literature to encourage reading? If not, how can we change reading education to avoid killing the pleasure of reading?

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. “Remember the Reader.” Chronicle Review 55.7 (19 Dec. 2008): 7.

National Endowment for the Arts. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004. 26 Sept. 2009. < http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf>.

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2007. 438-39.

Pontuso, James F. and Saranna R. Thornton. “Is Outcomes Assessment Hurting Higher Education?” Thought & Action (Fall 2008): 61-69.

Public Broadcasting System. “Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory.” Great Performances. 11 Nov. 2009, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. Scholastic, 2007.

Blog 22: Freestyle

I'm going to go back to the idea of "ocular proof" in Othello (III.iii.376). Based on Iago's clever suggestions, Othello moves from fully trusting Desdemona to seeking "ocular proof" or visual evidence that he should not trust her. In this movement, he seems to go from loving on faith in his own heart to loving based on evidence of reciprocity; he moves from what I consider to be true love to love that exists only if returned and demands evidence from the beloved. In this sense, he has already fallen out of love with Desdemona, at Iago's mere suggestion that she has been cheating on him. Maybe he is as pitiful as Iago.

The fact that he identifies visual evidence as the way he will decide plays right into Iago's hands because Iago can set him up by encouraging Desdemona to speak on Casio's behalf and by stealing the strawberry handkerchief and setting it up as evidence against her. If instead, Othello had loved Desdemona enough to just talke with her about Iago's comments, he could have cleared things up right away. But, then there would be no play!

Blog 21: Scene Response

I enjoyed watching the scene from Act III in the three different productions of Othello. I like the Fishburne version most because I like the imagery of the armory and Othello's handling of weapons during the dialogue. However, what I think impressed me most about the Welles and Fishburne versions was the way they move from sunny, outdoor settings to dark interior settings. It's almost as if we move from pleasant, transparent, truthful conversation to the darkness of lies, insecurity, and cruelty. I think the use of the mirror in the Welles version is very effective because it indicates that Othello is questioning himself.

Blog Entry 20: Othello Acts III-V

It's kind of sad that Iago encourages Othello's jealousy by telling him the truth about jealousy: "It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on" (III.iii.179-80). Iago's words mean that jealousy feeds on love and mocks it as it does. This means that jealousy in love should be avoided at all costs because it will destroy love. Instead of hearing this truth, Othello hears only the suggestion that he should be jealous. Rather than setting that suggestion aside and trusting to the fact that Desdemona "had eyes, and chose [him]" (III.iii.203), he says, "I'll see before I doubt" (III.iii.204), which sets him up to find all of the clues Iago sets up.

Blog 18: Quote-Response Othello I and II

I like the earnestness with which Othello and Desdemona love one another in Shakespeare's play. At the end of his life story, he says simply that "She loved me for the dangers I had passed,/And I loved her that she did pity them" (I.iii.169-70). What interests me about this line is that he appreciates her pity, not her admiration. He does not need excessive attention or praise. Instead, he needs someone who understands that his life, though brave, has been difficult and whose heart reaches out to solace him for those difficulties.

This simplicity and lack of arrogance contrasts with Iago's spite. At the end of Act II, Iago indicates that his plan against Othello arises from gossip: "it is thought aborad that twixt my sheets/He's done my office" (II.i.366-67). Iago thinks Othello has slept with his wife, and it doesn't matter to him that he "know[s] not if 't be true" (II.i.367). He is so wound up in his appearance and what people think of him that he will take any pretext to plot. Perhaps the difference between Iago's pride and Othello's simple humility and trust is illustrated by fact that Othello waits the whole length of the play and collects plenty of "evidence" left by Iago against Desdemona before he succumbs to jealousy, unlike Iago who uses the briefest suspicion to fuel his deadly plot.

Blog 19: Freestyle

In addition to reading literature for class and for fun, I also read many student papers. I'm heading into scoring Paper 2 for my on-campus English 104 class today, so I thought I'd write a bit about why I assign papers the way I do and what happens when I read them.

Academic writing is an important skill for college students because they are asked to use that form frequently in their classes to show what they know. Even though most students will write different kinds of documents in their work after college, the form is also helpful to learn because it is set up to make one's thinking clear. Having a thesis at the beginning provides the reader with a good understanding of the writer's overall conclusions without mystery. Body paragraphs then each make a supporting point, and their separation allows the reader to move easily through the writer's reasoning, in a sense following the steps in the thought process that brought the writer to the thesis conclusions. The details in the paragraphs and analysis of them indicate how the writer is processing ideas so that the reader again has a window into the writer's thinking. For me, academic paper format provides the best way to pin down students' thinking so that I can tell whether they've learned the knowledge and skills the course provides. Once students have graduated and moved into the working world, the skill of making their thinking clear to a reader is useful in other kinds of writing they may pursue, such as letters to the editor, legal briefs, or proposals.

When I read student writing, I catch the thesis and tuck it into the back of my mind. When each paragraph connects to the thesis and helps demonstrate why the writer believes what he or she does about the thesis, I think, "Yes!" Good transitions at the beginnings of paragraphs help me follow those connections in easy steps so that I understand why the information is being presented in the order it appears. The examples provide sensory experiences that help me picture why the writer believes what he or she does, but I can't process them in connection with the thesis unless the reader follows them with analysis. In the analysis, the writer explains the connection for me so that I don't have to try to make it up in my head. For this reason, analysis is one of the most important parts of academic writing and makes the difference between good and excellent in my scoring.

I really love reading student writing, and I love trying to help students make their ideas as clear as possible. I think that being a good reader of student writing involves listening carefully for what students want to say and not imposing my own ideas on their writing. It also means encouraging students to use the tools of academic writing to clarify their thinking both in their heads and on paper. To respond effectively, I need to remind writers to use those tools.