“CLOSE-READING STUDY GUIDES” - What’s Up with That? 10/29/2017

If you’re a teacher, you may well be brilliant. That’s not true of all teachers, of course, but for many of you, brilliance during your learning years gave you an easy career path to teaching, and you took it.

You brilliant teachers appreciate brilliant kids who learn as you did; you have a tendency to teach to the brilliant, and you’re superb at it.

Now then, some of us who are not quite brilliant ended up as teachers also, but we have different feelings and thoughts about learning, reading, and in particular, learning reading. We feel, deeply and sharply, that your methods did not serve us well.

Some of us are a bit resentful about it. I’m not resentful, by the way. I’d love to be brilliant! However, I could not, and still cannot, read as I was taught to read. I had to teach myself another way.

Brilliant kids are taught to decode language, and that’s about where the teaching of reading ends. Non-brilliant kids who don’t catch on right away are retaught decoding methods. Then they’re retaught the same methods again and again. The assumption is that it’s all about understanding words.

Most teachers appear to make further assumptions and presumptions about what happens “naturally” once a reader achieves a certain level of decoding mastery. Here they are:

1. Through language, readers naturally perceive and translate reading passages into images, much as they are perceived on a television or movie screen.
2. At appropriate times, immersed readers naturally identify with the narrator, or certain characters, through whose imaginary senses they observe the events and impressions presented in text.
3. At the end of reading, events and impressions can be recalled, naturally.
4. The time to draw connections and derive meaning is after the reading is finished.

Standardized tests of reading and comprehension are catered to this reading process. Most analysis begins after the reading of a significantly lengthy passage. There appears to be little perceived need for students to learn how to derive meaning or discern connections while in the process of decoding language and endeavoring to experience the essay or story. If this were not true, you’d see a much heavier focus upon breaking up reading passages in standardized tests, and you’d see many more questions presented, much as they are presented in my study guides, directing attention to unexpected but critically important details.

I learned to accept the fact that I’m not brilliant. I’m a deliberate thinker; not slow, just deliberate. There’s a difference between “slow” and “deliberate.” It involves making a choice. I choose to take a careful approach to most aspects of life, reading among them, because that approach serves me best. Otherwise, my mind goes everywhere all the time. Now, maybe a scatterbrain is brilliant in some “special” way, or maybe it lacks self-discipline, or maybe it’s a disability. Whatever it is, my brain hardly ever remains long buried in an author’s narrative. I engage for a period, and then disengage. Questions pop into my mind constantly.

Teachers of reading don’t want you wandering off on tangents. They want you to remain focused, to practice self-discipline, to bury yourself in the narrative, to stay “in the moment.” The ability to do so certainly has its advantages, but my mind refuses to allow that most of the time.

Don’t worry; I get by just fine.

Many of us deliberate thinkers have learned to get by. But no one taught us how. We had to teach ourselves. While we were urged to build faster decoding skills, we’ve had to teach ourselves to accommodate our habits of mind. Those habits required a high level of attention to details. We engaged by allowing ourselves to carry on a silent conversation with the author while reading:

“Why did you [the author] say it like that? What sort of thinking would cause your character to draw these conclusions about what’s happening around her? When did this character begin to believe that certain others in the story have an unusual perspective about him? I see you’ve provided a contradiction! Why did you do that?”

I could not stop asking questions. It’s the way I’m put together, I guess. Even if I couldn’t arrive at answers, I found myself constantly carrying on this dialogue.

For people like me, reading is not in the least like movie watching. We can’t flawlessly recall the details of a reading passage unless we’re thinking about those details as we encounter them. Delaying questions and interpretation doesn’t work for us; we can’t help ourselves. It is a successful endeavor only if we engage the author. “What are you talking about?” we ask. “Why did you have to put it like that?”

The same habit of mind reaches into the way we conduct our very lives. We live deliberately, too.

We recognize a value in this approach, to life as we live it, and to our reading as we read it. By habit, and because we must do so, we slow down just enough to participate in it, practically all the time. It helps us to stay, “in our moment,” if you will. And we’ve become so good at it that we can read almost as fast as brilliant readers, not quite as fast, no, but pretty fast, and with a very strong perception of an author’s depth. At times, we score almost as high on those standardized tests as some of the brilliant people.

(At times, we score a bit higher.)

All people’s powers of recall, with the exception of a tiny segment of our population perhaps, are subject to limitations and consequent misinterpretation if people never learn how to think about their experiences while they’re having them.

Yes, I know, sometimes you don’t have time to think deliberately. Sometimes you must react, and quickly. I suppose we could now engage in a political discussion about how scatterbrains like me don’t survive, and how the most brilliant people in any society emerge as deeply flawed leaders who miss some of the most important aspects of reading and living.

But setting that aside for now, I think we can agree that close reading is at the very least a valuable skill, and maybe even an essential one. It may be brilliant to become immersed and then interpret later, but it may be wiser, at times, to surface and reflect long enough upon what you’re doing, and then to plunge back in and seek a depth of understanding you might otherwise overlook. I’ve caught a great many brilliant young students failing to do so.

That’s what’s up with that.