subtext

My Poetry and Commentary on Life

Designed with WordPress

Category: doc stuff

  • Sustained Silent Reading Why and How: Common Sense, Not Common Practice

    by

    , , , , ,

    We keep saying that Johnny can’t read because he’s deprived, because he’s hungry, because he’s discriminated against. We say that Johnny can’t read because his daddy is not in the home. Well, Johnny learns to play basketball without daddy. We do best what we do most, and for many of our children that is playing ball. One of the reasons Johnny does not read well is that Johnny doesn’t practice reading (Reverend Jesse Jackson quoted in Raspberry, 1976 as cited in Thurlow 1984 p.267)

    I used to feel that I had to explain the way I teach to people. Sometimes I still feel that way. Fellow teachers in the copy room will ask by way of making conversation, “So, what book are your students reading now?” I used to try to explain how all my students were reading different books; so I really couldn’t tell them off the top of my head why my students were reading. Then because of the way they would look at me, I would feel like I was an incompetent teacher. I could see the thoughts running through their heads: he doesn’t know what they are doing in his class; or worse, he doesn’t do anything in his class. So I felt the need to explain in detail how all of my students chose the books they read, that those books then became the “text” book from which they worked out the reading skills required by the TEKS, that I really did keep track of every book the kids were reading, all 150, and yes, I could tell if they were actually reading the book without giving them a scantron test. And best of all, the students read two books each six weeks. Eventually I just settled on saying, “No, we aren’t reading anything together right now.” Which was true in a way.

    We read together all the time, just not the same book. One day a couple of months into the first year I moved to high school after teaching for 15 years in the middle school, my students were reading their books silently. Some were sitting at their desks, others were lying on bean bags, and about four of them were encamped in the hall on the floor. I sat in the doorway on the floor, so I could see both the kids in the hall and the ones in my room. I was reading whatever I was reading at the time. The students knew if they had a question that I would see them and come to them, or they would just come over to where I was reading and talk quietly to me. A history teacher on conference period walked down the hall, saw my students reading in the hall, saw me reading in the doorway and said, “I wish I could just sit and read during class and do nothing.” She walked on, my students erupted, indignation flowing from them like lava roiling across Pompeii. It took me several minutes and a cooling smart-assed comment directed by me toward the history teacher to return my students to a more stable state of being. They were pissed because she assumed we were doing nothing, because they were reading silently to themselves. Reading is one of the two main purposes in my class, the other is writing. They were doing something. For some of them it was one of the hardest things they had ever done in English class: read a book.

    At that point in the year, and still around the end of the first six weeks every year, a student, sometimes more than one, will end their first book talk with me by confessing that the book they had just finished was the first book they had read since middle school or the first book they had ever finished. They tell me this with pride. Not that they had managed to pull the wool over their former teacher’s eyes, but with pride that they had finished a book, and they liked it. There is something wrong with that picture. Seniors in high school, all seniors in high school, should have finished a book, and what’s more, one that they enjoyed reading. I am not blaming the students for this lack, but the way we teach reading.

    It all seems so simple, in a head-slapping-duh simplicity. In order to read better one must read; it is an activity that improves with the doing. For years I have been instinctively following this guideline in my classroom without any documented research to prove what I was doing had any validity. It just made sense to me. Yet, the teacher down the hall had the same gut feeling that what she was doing was just as correct. For years I had followed the same kind of teaching. I had built elaborate units with interconnected writing assignments and projects; however, it did not seem right to me to say my students were reading when what they were doing was listening to me read to them and mechanically constructing essays that I had come up with for them to formulaically follow.

    Most of the “reading” time in my class, now, is spent in Sustained Silent Reading, where the students read from self-selected texts. I have been frowned upon for wasting time in class instead of teaching. So being fairly pig-headed about most things, a few years ago, I did a bit of reading on the effects of reading silently in class from self-selected texts for a literature review for a doctoral class on the teaching of reading. I found quite a lot to show that my gut feeling was not just my nervousness about not doing what everyone else was doing down the hall. It was the right thing to do.

    Bibliography for Lit Review

    Armbruster, Bonnie B., Wilkinson, Ian, A.G. Silent Reading, Oral Reading, and Learning From Text, The Reading teacher vol. 45, no. 2 October 1991.

    Cunningham, Ann E., and Stanovich, Keith E., What Reading Does for the Mind, American Educator, Spring/Summer 1998 pp.1-8.

    Fisher, Douglas. Setting the “opportunity to read” Standard: Resuscitation the SSR program in an Urban High School, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 48:2 October 2004 pp. 138-150.

    Hunt, Lyman C., The Effect of Self-Selection, interest, and motivation upon independent, instructional, and Frustrational Levels, The Reading Teacher, Vol. 50, No.4 December 1996/January 1997 pp.278-282.

    Parr, Judy M. and Maguiness, Colleen. Removing the silent form SSR:Voluntary reading as Social Practice, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 48:2, October 2005 pp.98-107.

    McCallum, R. Steve, Sharp, Shannon, Bell, Sherry Mee, and George, Thomas. Silent Versus Oral Reading Comprehension and Efficiency, Psychology in the Schools, Vol.41 (2), 2004.

    Methe, Scott A., and Hintze, John M., Evaluating Teacher Modeling as a Strategy to Increase Student Reading Behavior, School Psychology Review, 2003, volume 32, No. 4 pp. 617-623.

    Olen, S.I.I., Machet, M.P Research Project to Determine the Effect of Free Voluntary Reading on Comprehension, South African Journal of Library & Information Science, 02568861, Jun97, Vol. 65, Issue 2.

    Swalm, James E., A Comparison of Oral Reading, silent Reading and Listening comprehension, Education p.111-115.

    Thurlow, Martha, Graden, Janet, Ysseldyke, James E., Algozzine, Robert. Student Reading During Reading Class: The Lost Activity in Reading Instruction, Journal of Educational Research, May/June 1984 (Vol. 77 (no.5) pp267-272.

    (August 2011)

  • "Save the First for another Day"

    by

    , ,

    I withdrew from the Graduate school at UT Friday. I had been debating whether or not to continue for at least a year now, coming to a decision then changing my mind repeatedly. Thursday my ninety year old mother went into the hospital after she fell. I left her with my sister in the emergency room so I could go to my Thursday night class. I sat there listening to the prof explain his class in Enlightenment Rhetoric, watching the graduate English majors being urbane, and I felt the onset of the stress I have lived with since I started this program. As I walked back to my car I decided that perhaps I should refocus what I wanted to do with my life, and being a grad student was not one of the things that came up. I will miss it. I truely enjoyed the readings, and the discusssions that grew out of the readings with my classmates and professors. I have grown as a teacher and as a human as a result of my classwork. But I have to move on, look more at he “res” of the world rather than the “verba.”

    I was consumed by the amount of time I was devoting to everything for “just the course work.” I cannot stop working in the public schools to gain “academic experience,” because of the economic realities of having three children and living in the suburbs in a fairly secure middle class life. I cannot, being a slave to my responsibilities, choose to be poor again in order to become an academic. My oldest child starts college next year. The colleges he will get into are not cheap. I have two more following quickly on his heels.

    I think I overestimated my abilities to do it all (work, school, family, health) and underestimated what was involved. I think I have been selfish in my desires and ambitions. I think I should accept where I am and use that position to make a space for myself for where I want to be: old, fat and happy.

    Over the last semester, and through many of the other classes, I have just become more frustrated and angry about the current state and direction of public education. While I enjoyed and have gained much through the classes, I don’t want to be angry all the time. I have felt a tremendous sense of relief after I decided to stop my pursuit of another advanced degree. It might not be forever, but “knowing how way leads onto way . . .”

    I have started reading poetry again, which is always a good thing.

    Thursday
    by William Carlos Williams

    I have had my dream – – like others–
    and it has come to nothing, so that
    I remain now carelessly
    with feet planted on the ground
    and look up at the sky–
    feeling my clothes about me,
    the weight of my body in my shoes,
    the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
    at my nose – – and decide to dream no more.

  • Pickles

    by

    , ,

    I am adventurous, I eat pickles on my hamburgers now,” my oldest son bragged this morning. He was being sarcastic, albeit honest, about his eating habits. His comment made me think about the importance of taking risks, unsettling the normative patterns of my life. A few weeks ago I bemoaned in this space about why I couldn’t make up my mind whether to continue in my Doc program or not. I am going to continue in the program; I will probably continue to whine and worry about it nonetheless. However, I do enjoy thinking about all the stuff that makes up my field. I also enjoy thinking about how all of the stuff that is tangential to Language and Literacy influences all the stuff that makes up Language and Literacy. In a recent article in the newspaper, the influence of friends on each other’s habits and life, ranging from smoking to depression to obesity to autism was recounted. It is not a surprise that we are influenced by those around us. I think everything and everyone we come in contact with, to a greater or lesser degree, influences us. This is not a one way shaping, we in turn influence everyone else. It is not a compromise, nor a consensus: “Superior learning lies in knowledge more widely distributed across units, with common rather than disparate interpretations. Huber, following Morgan and Ramirez, (1983), writes of such knowledge as “holographic” in that each unit carries at least a rough picture of the whole” (p. 13 Salomon and Perkins). I think it is more of a genetic metaphor rather than a holographic one, where the DNA for the whole is contained in each cell. The knowledge of the culture as a whole is determined by the mass of individuals acting together. It is not just individuals acting alone (as the Romantics were wont to say), but individuals acting in and as groups. In my class, again and again, a theme that comes up, in the literature we read, is the balance between being a part of the whole and apart from the whole. I don’t think it is an either/or binary, but rather an ongoing dance where the two parts merge and reemerge, changing and changed. “As pointed out by Damon (1991): Even when learning is fostered through processes of social communication, individual activity and reflection still play a critical role. Sometimes . . . individual activity may build on collective questions and insights. Other times, however, individual activity may need to resist the collective illusions created by a group . . any paradigm that assumes a one-way, deterministic relation between the collective and individual knowledge construction is over simplistic (Damon as cited in Salomon and Perkins, p. 17). My classes combined with all of the education books I have read, the literary-crit theory, the philosophy, and poetry, all combine to create how I have come to think about what it means to learn, teach and live. They are like the pickles on my son’s hamburger, perhaps leading to a larger view of what there is to be a part of in the world.

  • Get Your Story Staight, part II

    by

    The real battle is not about the facts, facts as the band Talking Heads sang, “all come with points of view, facts won’t do what you want them to.” The real struggle is which story will become the one through which we see our world. “What I have to say does not answer the question, ‘This is how things are,’ but rather, ‘ This is how they are to be understood,” wrote Leo Frobenius.
    Which story line we come to believe is not merely a difference of opinion. The centuries of religious wars sparked by the Reformation, as well as the philosophical and very real blood letting between various religious sects from the Shia and Sunni in the Middle East, to the more benign Baptist and Episcopalian squabbles here at home, have hinged on which version should win out of the same story one group espouses over another. My mother and oldest sister have not spoken to one another for twenty years because of differing versions of the same story: their life and relationship together. Neither one will surrender control of their version of the narrative to the other, nor accept the difference. Another sister and I argued several years ago over how we treated each other. “Then there was that time you… and then you. . .” Followed quickly with, “No, that is when you did. . .” We have not gotten along since then. No one likes an editor.
    When my students spin their stories off of each others stories and the stories we read, they bring a divergent set of tales and beliefs. Rather than relying on their own narrative to determine the meaning of a text they begin to welcome the deepening of their own stories brought by others in the class telling their tales. The divergent personal narratives bring a universality to the common text; while the “canonized” text gives a significance in return to their personal stories which the students did not recognize before. When something one has to say is similiar to what one finds in Shakespeare more than a boost to one’s self-esteem occurs, one takes part in a conversation, as Mortimer Adler remarks, that has been going on for centuries.
    In a graduate class, which ostensively was a survey course of Medieval English Literature, called English Identity and Cultural Formation, the professor tried to make us ask the question: Why these texts? What did the canonization of these texts create? Being a simplistic person I said they are the stories we tell each other. They are the stories we share. I once heard a story about the philospher, George Santayana. At the turn of the last century, Harvard was re-evaluating the literature they were having the boys of the American elite read. They came to Santayana and asked him what the students should read. He told them it didn’t matter as long as they all read the same books. By reading the same texts, no matter what they were studying or what they went on to accomplish in their later lives the students would have a base from which to conduct the conversation required of a democracy. Daphne Key quotes Robert Scholes, “What students need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in some appropriate manner.” The skills they learn from making connections between the stories the students read and the stories the students tell are a means to this end. The students own stories allow them access to the techniques and manipulations which authors use to tell their tales. Or as Richard Rorty writes, “ What a human being is . . is largely a matter of how he or she describes himself or herself. We have to take seriously the idea that what you experience yourself to be is largely a function of what it makes sense to describe yourself as in the languages you are able to use.”

  • Notes on Semiotic Mediation, Inner Speech and the Formation of Intimate Aspects of Identity

    by

    ,

    Figured Worlds are the cultural spaces in which we as individuals participate. Through our participation, we begin to define ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Upon entering the world, and overtime, we learn the rules of the “game” ala Vygotsky, eventually internalizing the rules well enough to improvise our moves within the allowed parameters of the world. Eventually we have inculcated the figured world to such an extent that we no longer think about the game, but have become the game.
    I wonder at what point we stop being thinking agents in the figured world and when do we become so enmeshed in the culture of the figured world that we are controlled more by the unspoken aspects of the world than we are improvising agents in that world? Much of the concept of figured worlds reminds me of James Gee’s view of tacit and implicit ideologies. Everyone functions with/in an ideology, it is either an unacknowledged ideology (tacit), or acknowledged ideology (implicit). But no matter which one is in place, the ideology determines the kind of discourse that can take place. The same is true for figured worlds. We define ourselves, and are defined by, the worlds we have entered, or where we have been placed, either as an active participant, as the older members of the AA meetings discussed in Holland, or as hesitant/resistant members as some of the girls in the chapter on romance in Holland. Of course, we create our inner selves with the socially allowed discourses. As Mead wrote, “The mechanism of introspetion is therefore give in the social attitude which man necessarily assumes toward himself, and the mechanism of thought, in so far as thought uses symbols which are used in social intercourse, is but an inner conversation” (Mead 1913, p.377).
    I do wonder how consciously the members of the AA group refigured their narratives to better fit the normative/normalizing narrative to better follow the palimpsest laid down originally in “The Big Book.” Does a person change to enter into a figured world or is he absorbed into the collective, changed by the figured world he is entering? Or perhaps both at the same time; the changer and the change shifting positions in an on going reciprocal relationship.
    Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the waiter as only being the waiter when he is in the act of waiting on tables, or Martin Heidegger’s hammer is only a hammer when it is being used as a hammer comes to mind, as well, when I read about figured worlds. A person’s existence is made manifest through her action in the world from an existential viewpoint; whereas, the identity of the individual manifests itself through active participation in the norms of the figured world. The participants in the AA meetings became alcoholics only when they accepted the narrative structures of the group. The Chicana/o activists through their similar experiences leading toward a “raised consciousness” (or culturally defined way of knowing), saw themselves and the larger figured world of whitestream society in a new light, thus defining themselves simultaneously in a new figured world, that of the Chicana/o activist, and as an agent in resistance to the oppressive hegemonic whitestream world.