03: The Magic of Books; Iteration > Revision; Guiding Students
If you have any suggestions, I'm all ears (not literally).
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Teaching Novels is Tricky
I generally advocate for students to read whatever they want. That said, I think it is important to engage in a common text once in a while. Here are two reasons why:
Reading a novel as a class allows me to expose students to a more challenging text because I’m there to guide them.
The unique circumstance of school is that 30+ teenagers are in the room together. Not collectively engaging on a topic/book would be a missed opportunity.
I do feel, however, that I don’t do a good job at teaching novels to the class. Frankly, I’m not sure I even know what I mean by “teach a novel.” It seems that many teachers “teach novels” by supplementing the reading with additional worksheets or projects. This feels like a mistake, both because it sours the joy of reading, but it also displaces reading from the center of our purposes. Suddenly the text becomes a means to an end (be it summarizing, analyzing, improving vocabulary, etc.) rather than an end in itself. In reality, reading is the end, and these other skills are what make the reading possible and richer—they are the means. In the classroom, it’s easy to conflate these things.
The joy of reading comes from the ideas the text conveys as well as the words in which they’re clothed. It’s edifying to read a well-worded sentiment that enlightens your mind even by the slightest degree.
Teenagers (not all of them) are unfamiliar with the magic of books, so unacquainted that they feel alienated.
What feels difficult:
Projects. I feel like there’s a “schoolish pressure/expectation” that students must do something with what they’ve read. I’ve already had students ask me what the book project will be. They’ve been trained to expect it. If I choose to assign one, how do I ensure it adds value or insight rather than squelch the magic of the book?
Momentum. The magic of books seems most potent when the book is read in an uninterrupted or un-prolonged manner. Spread the book over many days, interrupt it with other things, and suddenly it loses power. Should I split the reading of a class novel into two sections? Section 1 = read through it; section 2 = reengage with it via class conversations or having students write?
Variance. Some students love the book, some are bored by it. Some comprehend it, some are confused. Not every student will be satisfied, so how does one determine who and what to focus on?
Replacing Revision with Iteration
There’s an oft quoted study/anecdote (I first read it in Art & Fear) of a pottery teacher who split his class into two groups. The grades for those in the first group were determined by one pot (the better the pot, the better the grade); the second group would be graded on weight (the more they made, the better the grade they’d receive).
The second group (judged by quantity) ended with better grades. They also ended with better pots.
Iteration is the path to expertise.
I’ve wanted to integrate iteration into my classroom, but I seem to have allowed revision to take its place. Revising one thing many times is not the same as iterating upon a skill.
I want to have students review their work, make note of things they could improve upon, and apply those principles on a new work rather than the original. Thus, we’d have iteration, and thus (hopefully) we’d have growth.
From Arbitrator to Guide
I don’t want my class to be a class where students view me as the arbitrator of their learning. I don’t want students to think, “Mr. Merrill is the gatekeeper of my grade, so I must figure out what he wants in order to get the grade I want.” I want students to practice and improve at setting goals, working towards them, and assessing if they’ve done what they hoped to do. I want to be their guide in this process.
Some of my students are working on writing summaries, and I’ve been giving them feedback. I wonder if my feedback accidentally reinforces me as the person they must obtain approval from in order to feel like something is finished. It seems like some may view my feedback as, “you haven’t met the requirements for this thing and you must make the changes I suggest in order to do so.”
I want my feedback to push them back into their own thinking. I want my feedback to give them questions to answer and the confidence that they can figure it out.
Reading Notes
On Reading Comprehension, from
:“The link between decoding ability and comprehension has to do with limits on the mind’s ability to take in new information. If students are expending too much cognitive effort on decoding words, they don’t have enough capacity left for comprehending the text. In cognitive science terms, they’re experiencing too much ‘cognitive load.’ Decoding needs to become more or less automatic for students to be able to focus on meaning.”
Be Ocular Athletes, from G. K. Chesterton,
“But don’t let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud.”
Thank you for reading!! If you have insights to share related to the topics I’ve discussed, I’d love to hear from you.
📼 My collection of videos to start class.
🖋️ Poems I share with my students.
🎹 My playlist of gentle music.
📚 What I’m reading/highlighting.
How about reading the text aloud in class?
I'd suggest @michael Strong's book on doing socratic seminars on the text- either post-reading or reading together
As a teacher of juniors and seniors, I'm in near-total agreement with all of this--though afraid I probably err on the side of 'hard' assigning too many works and not offering my students their own choices often enough. I tell my students we're working for an 80% understanding of each work we read, and I usually have three or four 'big' goals for each book. I agree that "supplementing the reading with additional worksheets or projects...feels like a mistake, both because it sours the joy of reading, but it also displaces reading from the center of our purposes."
When we finished reading The Great Gatsby recently, my students were mystified when I told them we weren't taking a test on it -or- writing a paper. "What are we going to do?" they asked. "Read another book!" I told them.