Metacognition seems to me the key to being a teacher. A teacher is always in her head, thinking through how she works out a problem or navigates through a project or the steps she takes in starting a paper.
I have been in my head this week, especially when reading through Newkirk's Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. For the most part, I write to get it done. When I have to read something, like Newkirk's book, and then prepare a piece of writing, I think towards that: making notes in the margins, underlining, dog-earing. Yet, Newkirk does not think of this as pure reading, and it's not. I am not reading to learn, I am reading to write.
In a sense, how I read is a good thing, the perfect demonstration of the reading strategies I learned in elementary and middle and high school. (My English teachers would be proud.) But can I read in a different way? Sure, I do when I read for me, which I tend to do less and less of these days. (The only time I am jealous of my roommate's Business major, is when I see her lounging in one of our armchairs with a novel...one she doesn't have to read for class.)
Writing for me then becomes about time, about proving a point, about filling the page requirement. Of course, there are times when I allow the words to find their own way on the page but this does not happen frequently. There's no time.
I feel like in one way or another, I have worked through this problem again and again in class, on this blog, and in my memoir. But I feel that it's a very real concern. Essentially, what I've learned this week is to get students writing. I am excited to try some of Newkirk's exercises, or the ones he's borrowed from other educators: the one-sentence story, the multigenre paper, etc. I am excited because just like pure reading can get bogged down by the weight of the hero's journey, writing can get bogged down by structure. Reading strategies and paper structures should be taught, to be sure, but not exclusively. Pleasure--the pleasure of reading to read, writing to write--and thinking are not mutually exclusive.
I agree that so much of the joy of reading is gone, especially for students who must read constantly for classes. I got really fed up with it last semester and wrote a paper about why a book was an absolute pleasure to read. I wrote about my favorite parts of the book and the suspense and curiosity I felt reading it and got an A. It was the most fun I've had writing a paper because I wasn't spending so much time analyzing the text that I abandoned the joy of reading.
ReplyDeleteReading to write sometimes strikes me as such an unnatural thing. It can be hard to immerse yourself in a novel if you have to swim back up to the surface to jot a few notes every couple of minutes. It can turn reading into such a chore, but at the same time it seems so necessary for really analyzing a text.
ReplyDeleteReading for fun is difficult to do when you have a million things to do at a certain time. But when I get the chance to read for myself, I realize why I'm an English Education major in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI too feel like I've worked through that problem again and again - it just shows that we're actually thinking through it and wrestling it, which is awesome.
ReplyDeleteThis is a part of the struggle of a literacy teacher--how much of it is aesthetically pleasing and how much is required? I try to keep reading for fun as a balance, and also write in a journal as a private reflection on my days. It can be hard to do both with so much classwork, but even once every two weeks can be a great reward and release. I think it is important for students to know that we read and write, not for assignments, but to explore the world around us.
ReplyDelete