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reading workshop
What did you learn about reading today?
What did you learn about yourself as a reader?
I spent two hours Googling "Reading Workshop" and "Writing Workshop" this weekend. I don't know why.
The amazing sameness of it all (assist - enhance - reflect) got me to thinking.....is public education a cult?
A half-trillion dollar a year, taxpayer funded, government monopoly cult?
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9 comments:
[smile]
On the other hand, when a system is found that "works" there is a tendency to stick with it. But... yes, there is some "cultish" aspects sometimes [smile].
~Luke
I've had a couple of conversations with friends now - one a parent, one a teacher - and: yikes.
All 3 of us are seeing kids who think prose says whatever you think it says.
That is: your thoughts about what a text says are valid because they're your thoughts, apparently.
What a nightmare.
That's because each person 'constructs their own meaning from the text.' I know this because I've been taught it in almost every reading class I've taken on my way to a reading specialist credential.
Hi K9 -- can you tell us more about Reading Workshop if you have time?
In your classes, what does the phrase "constructs their own meaning from the text" mean, exactly?
Does it mean that each child constructs a different meaning?
And if so, how different?
I had a conversation about this recently with the owner/operator of my local auto repair shop. He's an immigrant who never went past fourth grade because he had to quit school and support his family. But he reads and "reflects" more than most people I know with advanced university degrees.
Discussing "readers workshop" and the craze for "constructing meaning," he sniffed and had this to say:
"When I employ people, and they see a sign that says EXPLOSIVE- Contents Under Pressure - Do Not Open, I {bleep bleep} don't want them 'constructing their own meaning.'"
I wonder if the IRS lets people construct their own meaning? Hmmm, tell it to da judge.
Catherine, I don't know how k9Sasha's teachers define "construct your own meaning", but I do think that the phrase in itself is a reasonable description of what is actually going on whenever anyone reads a text. We all bring our own individual backgrounds to our reading and our backgrounds affect the meaning. Some examples:
The movie "Free Willy" in New Zealand prompted a lot of joking, as to Kiwis the word "willy" can refer to a specifically male piece of anatomy. The one joke I can specifically recall was "It's a movie about boxer shorts". I doubt this meaning was intended or even known about by the American producers of the movie, instead we constructed a meaning. Of course in this case, everyone I know also knew what the movie title was meant to mean. But if a reader has a very different understanding of what a word means to the author's understanding then grand confusion can result. A common example of this is authors who don't anticipate how a chunk of their eventual audience understand the word "literally". Or to be non-pc, authors who don't know the true meaning of the word "literally". http://literally.barelyfitz.com/
A reader can draw particular meaning from a work based on their own background. Take the famous poem "The Road Less-Travelled" by Robert Frost. A lot of commentators appear to find the most meaning in the lines "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." But to me the most poignant line is "And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveller,..." For me, I do feel some serious regrets that I can't pursue every possibility in life.
A reader can also draw conclusions about a work that the author did not intend. For example I recall once as a teenager reading a book of literary criticism from my parents' collection. It was written by a committed Freudian, who consistently related every piece of work from every author he discussed to a symbol of sex. I decided the writer was far more obsessed with sex than any of the authors he was discussing. Another example would be if you read an evidence-free rant about a politician that you yourself actually quite admire, you might well be convinced that the writer of the rant is a dork, or an idiot, or evil, not the politician.
I don't know, however, how these ways in which we construct our own meanings should get translated into reading lessons - although the first set of examples implies to me that teaching vocabulary is important. It is quite possible to construct your own meaning while being well aware of what the author's intention was, and sometimes, as in palisadesk's example, being able to accurately identify the author's intention can be literally a matter of life-or-death.
Part of the problem that I see emerging with my middle-schooler is that he doesn't really analyze the text in front of him.
For instance, I asked him to outline a short article. Of course, he hasn't been taught to outline so he really didn't know how to take a short piece and put the basic points in outline form. It took me showing him a couple of times how to read closely enough so that he could then step back and rank the points as the author has written them, not as he thinks they should be ranked. I really thought this would be easy for him since he is a voracious reader.
When he finally got the hang of what I was asking him to do, I noticed that he would leave off parts and put more frivolous ideas under main point headings. Secondary points would become main points. Frivolous details could end up anywhere.
When I asked him about it he just said that the parts he left off weren't interesting to him. The one he highlighted as a main point was interesting to him. I told him that he had to outline the author's text as he has written it, not simply outline the points that he thinks are important. We can analyze it only after we actually outline the text itself.
This has been a challenge since they are taught from grade school to value what they think is interesting or important to them personally. It's almost a reflexive response to everything he is asked to read in grade and middle school. It makes the teaching of summaries rather tricky since an interesting tidbit might not be worth including in a summary.
Summarizing and outlining are really important skills, especially for the kid who has difficulty writing. Practicing these skills also has shown me that my kid is not really looking closely at a text. He's not considering the author's point of view because his personal point of view is always "on" to make his teachers happy.
SusanS
Some of my pronoun usage is a little confusing. Hopefully, you can understand my, uh, implied antecedents.
SusanS
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