subtext

“Invisible substrate for the constitution of the visible.”

“Irradiances that imperceptibly illuminate.”

-Luce Irigaray

For years I have wondered what it is I actually accomplish at my job. The state and district mandates a series of increasingly higher stakes tests, where the students by the time they come into my classroom are forced to pass the test or fail to receive the holy grail of basic education: a high school diploma. A couple of days ago one of my female students was informed that she still had not passed the science or math sections of the TAKS and as a result would not graduate high school. “My life is a failure,” she moaned, “I’m not going to college, I’m going to have crappy jobs my entire life.” She, of course, blamed her former math and science teachers, and to her credit her inability to remember anything. She wanted to know how she could be classified special-ed so she didn’t have to pass TAKS (a mistaken belief on her part), as if she simply had to fill out a form to declare herself learning disabled. If she acted in her previous math and science classes in the manner in which she did in my class: staring into space, not very subtly texting behind her purse, whispering loudly to anyone who was in proximity to her, skipping class; then it would not surprise me if she could not remember the Pythagorean theorem or the difference between a base and an acid.
Reading and writing are, of course, different. They are processes rather than a constellation of facts and formulas, which to the students seem random and disconnected to anything. They do read and write however, no matter how poorly, constantly in their daily lives. Their level of literacy, and their kinds of literacies are often disconnected from the kinds of literacy we often demand of them in the high school English class, but they do read and write a plethora of different texts through out their day: ranging from text messages, e-mails, video games, to simple to do lists and instructions from their managers at their part time jobs. Once they have moved beyond decoding sounds from letters and have begun, no matter how hesitantly, to flow with the written text, the process of reading becomes more and more a matter of doing it: read to read better.
Which brings me by a rather rambling path back to my original sentence and the two extractions from Luce Irigaray: I think much of what my students learn they learn through the process of doing what I have them do. I question the validity of the test results my students receive, at least as a measure of what they learned in my class. English is a recursive process where something they might have first encountered many years ago finally comes to fruition in my class, not because of anything I directly taught them, but because I created a space where they had the time to work with texts. They were able to embody the “invisible substrate” and bring it into the visible world, not that they could or even should be able to articulate what it is they did; but that they were able to do it should be enough. It is the way the students come to use language as a result of being exposed to literature and through their own encounters with language which lead them to “Irradiances that imperceptibly illuminate.”