What I Teach, Why I Teach, How I Teach

I often compare a first trip through a piece of writing with a walk through my own classroom. I’m carrying stuff and I’m looking for a document that I know I left someplace. I have my hands full, but I’m only partially aware of what’s in them. I have my glasses and a board marker in one hand, and a fistful of papers in the other. I get down on a knee to open a bottom drawer of a file cabinet, putting my glasses on top of the file cabinet and dropping the board marker on the floor next to the drawer. I don’t find what I need inside the drawer, so I get off my knee and walk to my desk, where I know I’ve looked before.

Suddenly, I catch sight of the paper I’ve been seeking. It’s in my left hand! I’ve been carrying it all along. There’s some information on it that I need to write on the board, so now I walk over there, but I need my glasses to read the paper. I fumble in my shirt pocket for them, and then I realize that I’ve left glasses and board marker someplace while searching for the paper, but I don’t have any idea where they could be.

I usually illustrate casual, “not-close” reading for my students by dramatizing the above experience or one like it. I bumble about the classroom acting out the part, narrating as I go. They get a good laugh or two of course, and at the end of it I ask, “Does this ever happen to you?”

Heads nod; smiles abound. “All the time,” they say.

Then I tell them, “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you and I were trained to read. We are taught to dash through, reading and interpreting words – not forming visualizations, not considering ideas. We encounter the words as we encounter life’s little tasks, but we are not conscious of them. We have not been taught to be conscious of them! We don’t pause for anything. We don’t think about what we are doing. At the end of it, we retain nothing.”

Then I show them how to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. I review the dramatization; I kneel at the file drawer again, and as I do, I consciously utter the words, “I am now placing my glasses on top of the file cabinet and my marker on the floor, here by the drawer.”

I proceed through the rest of it and illustrate how much easier it is for me to find those items when I need them, simply because I took a moment to pay attention by making an observation in the form of a very brief, verbal proclamation.

Close reading is the skill of interaction with a written passage, literary or otherwise, followed by careful introspection. For the most part, we are taught that effective analysis takes place after a first reading and during a careful re-examination of text.

Now you know what I teach with my close reading study guides. You have a very good idea how I teach it, and you should understand why I choose to do so. Have a great spring and summer!