Slow learner...

I'm referring to myself in the title of today's post. How many years have I been teaching, and for how many of those have I been using reading journals? (Answer: "many.") And it just today struck me that I need to be even more specific with students about the purpose of reading journals. Yes, the journals help lead students to a deeper understanding of the literature, and yes, they are useful in helping students write their papers--but the key information is, whatever the student selects to ask about or comment on should be directly useful in a potential paper. Of course, right at the moment they may not understand what will (or won't) be useful, but if they're thinking, "How can I use this quotation to say something important about this reading?" then their thinking is moving in the right direction. I'm getting far too many responses like the "this is very descriptive" thing I ranted about yesterday, or in which a student asks a question about something in one paragraph and then finds the answer as he or she continues to read, or the "I know this is true because something like this happened to me" response, or or or....

So, I realize that I need to rework the instructions--again. They should be simplified anyway (my instructions illustrate the meaning of "verbose" and "prolix"), but now I have a better idea what the simplification needs to stress. I also realize that, in some previous reworking of instructions, I dropped the directive to read the entire work first, then do the journal from the passages one has highlighted--and I need to reinstate it. But when I do, I also need to explain "active reading." And still keep it brief and simple. Not my strong suit.

In any event, I'm allowing students to rework their second journals before they hand them in, now that they've gotten feedback--and a scary grade--on their first submissions. Some of them may still find the task beyond them, but I want to give them every chance to improve.

I do have journals yet to mark for tomorrow's 102, too, but I'm going to be hanging out here even after I finish blogging, making use of the time before dance class, so I'll get back to marking later--and can, if need be, finish up in the morning.

Oh, and as a follow-up to last night's postscript: the student I thought was being passive-aggressive was not, and I have issued him an apology for the harsh tone of my e-mail. He'd misunderstood when I said he should e-mail to be sure I got his journal. I meant he should drop it off in print and then e-mail to confirm I found it where he left it. He thought I meant he should e-mail it to be sure I got it. Simple miscommunication, now (I hope) resolved. He did write a very respectful response to my e-mail, so he's no longer in the dog house.

Today's class went beautifully. The students were making strong connections between the two stories they've read, had latched on to one of the main themes (the reason I paired the stories), were doing a wonderful job of bringing up evidence to support varying interpretations. Excessively cool. I was proud of myself that I found a way to encourage them away from "should" statements or "why" questions ("the boy's uncle should tell him not to smoke" or "why didn't the boy argue with the kids who wanted to rob him?"): I reminded them, repeatedly, to "reframe" those responses into ways of looking at what did happen to figure out what's important. So instead of what the uncle "should" do, let's figure out what his behavior shows us about the kind of man and uncle he is--and what the character's significance is to the overall story. And instead of asking why the kid did or didn't behave in a certain way, let's figure out the significance of how he behaves: why are his actions significant to the story as a whole?

I also realize that the focusing on the story as a whole also needs to be emphasized, and therefore that they need to read the entire story before they do their journals. For instance, one student did an amazingly beautiful, in-depth musing about a detail that is of only marginal significance--and lost the main thread of the story as a consequence. That's the other issue I keep looking to resolve: how to get students to have a sense of what matters and what doesn't. They'll focus on a dropped paper cup beside the road and miss the parade of elephants going by....

Well, but they're students, and they are here to learn, to be changed. As I keep telling them. And really, they did a beautiful job in class discussion. I was very happy that some of the more quiet students are already feeling free to jump into the discussion: more students contributed to the class conversation than not, which is unusual. The typical scenario (as we all know) is that several students dominate the conversation and the rest are mostly silent. There certainly were the dominant speakers--four of them--but even so, the majority of the others had plenty to say.

Getting back to individual students, there is one young man in today's 102 who is going to be a treat. He is a little older than the average (in fact, in general there are more "adult" students in my classes than usual: a sign of the economic hard times), and he is infinitely more adept as a reader. (I'm going to have to work with him on writing more clearly and simply: he's been trained in the Periphrastic School.) As he was leaving today, he talked about how both stories we've read reminded him of Faulkner (which I hadn't thought of before, but he's right), and he talked briefly, intelligently (and honestly), about reading The Sound and the Fury--then contrasted it with the relative ease of reading War and Peace (which isn't exactly Robert B. Parker but--at least in good translation--lacks the tangles of dependent clauses Faulkner employs). I know in part he was showing off for Teacher, but he didn't have the cocky, "look how smart I am" vibe that some students do when they engage in that kind of conversation with me. His main motivation seemed to be the desire to talk books with someone who also "gets" books. I don't need rooms full of students like that (though I wouldn't object, either), but having one now and then is sure nice.

Shifting back to pedagogy: One other thing I'm test-driving. I've decided to hand out the assignment sheet for the first big paper and let the students read over it on their own. They then will come to class with their own questions and requests for clarification, rather than my spending a lot of time reading and explaining the sheet to them. The Monday-Wednesday 102 students are more under the gun than the Tuesday-Thursday mob, because the M/W bunch had to read two stories for this week, and the T/Th students read one last week and one this. So the T/Th group got the assignment sheet today and we'll go over it on Thursday. The M/W won't get it until tomorrow, and we'll have to go over it, PLUS go over a whole new story on Monday. Crunch, but it's the only way I could get both classes on track to be ready to write at the same time. Well, we'll see how it all flies.

And that makes me realize that I have to spend some time this weekend getting the materials ready for the subs who will cover my classes while I'm in Montana at the beginning of October. And there's also that whole writing the paper I'm going to present thing, but I'm not panic-stricken enough yet to be impelled to do it. That will hit soon, but until it does, the back-burner is certainly busy.

Speaking of busy, I see that (weirdly enough) those reading journals for tomorrow have not marked themselves as I've been writing, so off I go....