Close Reading Study Guides: Of What Use Are They?

    Either we teach basic facts or we teach skills. We're required to teach both, but it's nearly impossible to teach them both at once. Facts can be delivered quickly and efficiently. But skills - oh, skills we must guide and practice many times over! When we have the opportunity, it is well to teach facts and skills simultaneously, but our teaching of skills is far more important. Absolutely without exception, in my judgment, we must at times choose to teach skills over facts

    My judgment has not always dwelt at its current residence, incidentally. In the English/Language Arts classroom, it's not hard to kill off skills (execute them! hang them! electrocute them! guillotine them!) or at least bypass them, and instead, chop up all the information students need and hand it to them so they can pass tests. Instead of requiring them to read the substance of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, it is much easier to provide summaries, hold classroom discussions, watch a video, and occasionally, read a passage or two aloud.
    We may claim that we don’t want to harm our students' respect for the great writers by dwelling too long on the cumbersome language of their stories; yet, the great stories are great precisely because of their language. So we distribute vocabulary lists and force them to look up words. That becomes the pitiful substance of our language instruction.
    A Tale of Two Cities, in my opinion, is among the finest examples of 19th Century English Literature. In all honesty, however, it is already a daunting task for me to understand Dickens myself, let alone impress him upon my students. We all know that "getting" Dickens isn't just about vocabulary words. It's about waking up to his clever way of diverging from a story and rejoining it, dropping in little flashbacks that never slow down the telling but always enhance it and always reward the reader's efforts, and his lovely, endearing way of walking with us through the whole of it, never quite fading into the background, always holding our hand with every fascinating step through.
    But alas, we hesitate to spend too much time reading again what we had to read in college. After all, we need to get on with Shaw next, and it's nearly impossible to instill in our students true respect for an author's art and craftsmanship in the little time available.
    To beat an excuse into absolute submission, we certainly don’t want to “turn the kids off” by getting them too bogged down in all of that! So we “cut to the chase,” to the substance, the delicious substance of the story, and we deliver it: Sidney let them chop off his head because he loved a woman more than anyone else in the world. He loved her so much that he decided to die for the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
    The chase has been cut to; the heart of the story has been cut out; Sidney's head has been cut off. We hand it all over to our kids. There. They now have all the bloody facts. Test time.
    The bigger entity, the thing that lived in the hearts of all the strange and wonderful characters of that story, the thing that gathers life and meaning from every wrinkle of every event of that whole narrative and places it all into Sidney's final sacrifice, the thing that grows to live in the heart of a reader for the rest of his or her life, that thing we have aborted. It has died before it has lived. It has had as quick a death as poor Sidney himself. It lies twitching, just as heartless as a guillotined body is headless.
    Hail to the educational revolution! The kids have got it now. Take a test. On to Pygmalion!

    It's unbelievable, but it's understandable. We teachers live it every day. But from the outside looking in, some of our methods of instruction today seem just as chaotic and senseless as does the French Revolution from the perspective of history.
    I’ve been there - not at the French Revolution, no - I've lived as a citizen of the chaos of modern education. I've witnessed its descent into further chaos. I did all the same stuff. I assigned reading, then I quizzed students on that first reading, but that was it. Their reading was exercised no further until they’d been exposed to at least one retelling. Most of the time, their first reading was their only reading; I would give kids the story in about two or three different forms afterward. I would kill off the story, chop it up, and hand over all the dead, cold "facts" in exhaustive reviews, and only after we'd studied the parts would I test them. 

    I neatly guided students past the difficulties; I skirted the instruction of skills. I aborted it, delivering facts to kids in English classes from seventh through twelfth grades, classes from which many of them emerged boasting that they had not actually read a single word of great literature all year. Usually, their grades were nothing to boast of - a portion of my students’ grades leaned significantly on reading quizzes - but they could fail reading quizzes, listen in class, and pass tests without too much strain. If they worked hard at writing, they could earn "B's" in my class without ever exercising their reading skills.

    Those were fun years, though. I did a lot of acting for my kids. I became an Anglo-Saxon scop! Like the teller of Beowulf, I dramatized the major events of stories. I engraved those events into my students' memories!
    Then I prepared them to watch with care as those same events were dramatized in the video versions of the stories. When we finished viewing, we invariably discussed liberties taken by the actors, directors, and producers. Most of my kids could  tell you where a movie delivered accurate representations of an author's intentions and where it failed. When we studied a story, my kids knew it and loved it.
     That didn’t mean they’d read it; it didn't mean the story really lived in them;  their skills for reading more stories like it went woefully lacking. Nevertheless, that’s the way I taught it.

    Those methods are not out of date. They continue in use to this day. And yes, I still use them; I still dramatize. I still provide interpretive insights for the delicious substance of stories.
    But now I also require students to complete in-class reading, a second reading, after they've taken their first quiz on the material. They must complete that second reading, along with the corresponding study guide work, for some portion of the great literature. I decide what portion. I make my determinations based on how much work they prove capable of doing (and yes, based also on how much time we have before we need to start on Shaw). I start with small amounts of work and build to larger amounts. As dearly as I love telling them what I think of the great classics, I have learned to hold back and insist that they first tell me what they think. I design the course so that they must engage in that activity in order to pass.

    We are not doing our kids any favors “sparing them the pain” of reading. We English teachers should love and respect the pains Shakespeare, Spenser, and Dickens took to turn a phrase. That's why close reading study guides became useful to me, and since I was unable to locate the sort of close reading study guides I needed, I began creating them myself.

    Now you know. I hope you have read closely. I hope your reading has been rewarded. I realize I'm no great writer, but I hope I have told the facts well enough so that you not only know, but also appreciate them.
    So, "Vive la Revolution!"
    But enough with the guillotine. Let's support the lives of the great works. Let's stop hacking them to pieces. Let's get back to teaching our kids the whole skill of reading.