Welcome to the rebirth of Paragraph Six, now under a new name: “A Voice from the Classroom.” The spirit is the same, and its mission to nurture the joy of teaching by freely exploring its human dimensions also remains unchanged. So why the new moniker? My supportive and professional sponsor Gina Scala requested that I change it to something that identified the post more accurately with educational themes. I agreed this might be a good idea.
So what might be an educational theme of interest this Fall? Unless you just arrived from Mars, or any country on Earth outside the United States, you know that this nation is now obsessed with the new Common Core State Standards and their elaborate appendices, including Appendix A of the ELA (and “Literacy in History/Social Studies. Science and Technical Subjects”), which begins with a heartfelt dissertation on “text complexity.”
For my part, I have marched head-on into text complexity in two ways. First, I’m on an AUSSIE team doing research on the issue for the NYC Department of Education. Second, I’m watching my 10th grade daughter grapple with it in the trenches of classroom reading.
The two ways actually converge. But first, let’s talk about my daughter’s reading. This summer she was assigned Michael Pollan’s delicious (to me) book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Where I salivated at the idea of digging into it, she responded to the assignment as if it were a wedge of stinky cheese left out on the counter a few days too long. “Why should I want to read this book? It’s all about corn,” she said.
Beyond the book’s unappetizing topic, the (to her) aimless sentences and impossible vocabulary were formidable. It might as well have had the subtitle Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here. She was fully ready to skip the assignment and face the consequences back at school. Whatever they might be, they surely couldn’t be worse than burning in the fires of this literary inferno.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, she is the daughter of a literacy coach. Failure to read was unacceptable on my watch. She was not only going to comprehend the book. I intended to go for the gold and have her enjoy it.
It was going to be a journey. When you stop and think about it, every reading experience is a kind of journey. Some may be quick sallies to the local junk food restaurant, others are mountain climbing expeditions on Mount Everest, but each has a beginning, middle and end. For my child, I envisioned one beginning in dread, continuing in curiosity, and ending in joyous triumph with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” for the final soundtrack.
Only fools go on expeditions ill equipped, however. For tools, I chose two variations on the strategy of “quote analysis” that I have found useful for handling difficult texts: the Tarzan Method and the Oyster Knife Method. Don’t bother to look them up (although when I googled them to be sure they weren’t already claimed, I did find the Tarzan Method listed as a strategy for bridge construction – not a bad association with reading, when you think of it). This is their debut in, and perhaps simultaneous exit from, the literature. They both rely on the principal of the “golden line” discussed in earlier posts.
The Tarzan Method was invented by my upstairs neighbor Jeff Schneider, who is a New York City Public High School history teacher. In it, you take a scary text, say the Treaty of Versailles, and you swing along through the incomprehensible foliage until you find a sentence you can understand, and you grab onto it for dear life. You underline it and maybe write a little something that you think about it. Then you swing along to another branch and do the same. You come back to class with your collection of branches, share them with others, and pretty soon, by discussing the various sentences, you build an understanding of the text. You exit courageous, as would anyone who’d just dared so many lions and tigers and bears.
The Oyster Knife Method is similar. Visualize a hard text – The Omnivore’s Dilemma being a perfect example – as an oyster in its crusty, impenetrable shell. Try to read it without a point of entry, and you break your teeth and get sand in your mouth. Not a pleasant way to develop either your reading skills or your content knowledge. You need a way in to get to the sweet stuff. So find the crack in the shell, anything you understand, insert the knife of comprehension and shuck it with your mind: record the sentence you understand, write about it, have a friend write about it, and another friend after that. Here is a graphic organizer I used in a school where a sociology teacher, whose students attended his class because he was entertaining, but failed it because they couldn’t read the texts, found a measure of success:
There are plenty of good reasons for students to comprehend and appreciate every subtle nuance of well-crafted texts. Accused of evading those reasons, I proudly say I’m guilty as charged when it comes to these methods. Before convicting me, though, consider that students are beginning to appreciate a few of the orchids in a lush forest they would otherwise avoid entirely (or, to keep my metaphors consistent, tasting delicacies they would never have savored before). See it as the first step of their life-long reading journey.
What about my safari with my daughter through the forbidding landscape of The Omnivore’s Dilemma? As with last year’s blog posts, I am hewing to Gina’s advice to stay under a thousand words. So please tune in in couple of weeks, and the story will be told. In the meantime, enjoy your literary – and culinary – travels.
