Week 7: Class and Reading Reflection

So, I admit I am a little skeptical about the Socratic Seminar process. I'm all for Socratic Method in pedagogy--but I'm always hesitant to buy into a teaching method that has this many rules involved. Good teaching is about flexibility and responding to the class--this method seems more like winding a key and letting the class go. It is open-ended, which I like, and relies on the students' responses--but still seems weirdly claustrophobic to me.

I also think that the point of a teacher in a seminar of any sort is to give input and act as a leader in a discussion, so stepping out of it entirely seems counter-intuitive. If the author of the article (whose name I cannot, unfortunately, remember) was asked to step out of the discussion by her students, maybe she just wasn't that good at teaching? Or, at least, choosing the wrong questions? I got the impression she was sticking to a list rather than responding to her students' discussion. But maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this style of discussion today, since it's totally new to me.

On the books: Almost every single story in my book club is about death. And every one of them is hilarious, charming, sweet, or thought-provoking on the subject. Not one (in my opinion) is morbid or unnecessarily depressing. I started reading them on the way home from ASB, immediately after finishing a big fat book of Victorian Things... and at first it was so nice just to be reading fiction again that I was overcome with delight. And then the delight changed, and was actually at the stories themselves, rather than their genre. And then the headache from reading on a tiny screen in a dark car started, and I kept reading.

Note: This was written before the Book Club class, but is being posted afterwards.

Week 6: Reading Reflection

The two Library Journal articles assigned this week, by Barbara Hoffert and Beth Dempsey, both focus on the new types of book club culture that center around libraries. One of the key ideas is that libraries do well to provide some sort of book club kit, or being able to provide a selection of thematically/topically related books for a club that does not all want to read the same thing. The Ann Arbor District Library provides Book Club to Go kits, which include ten copies of a book, a copy of the DVD (if available), and some supplementary materials in relation to the author and material. They also include evaluation forms, which allow readers to give the library feedback on the kit. I haven't looked into these kits very closely, but now I'm intrigued--I haven't seen them circulate very much, but I bet they do, since Ann Arbor is exactly the sort of community the Dempsey article mentions as being enthusiastic about book clubs (educated, well-off, et cetera). The titles are predictable, Water for Elephants, The Kite Runner, and easy classics like The Great Gatsby. Good books, but ones that people are likely to have read before, either in school or picked up off a bestseller list. Most of the books mentioned in the two articles are more ambitious, or more obscure. I imagine this works best when there's one person, a librarian or other type of leader, selecting the material and giving a rationale for that selection.

I'm not particularly familiar with book clubs, but I imagine them (at their best) to be pretty much like all the literature classes I took in college. Without anyone actually trying to teach anything directly--since literature classes are always a combined effort to situate the historical fact of a given writer/text and further the critical reading and writing skills of students (literature studies is all about transfer)--but with pretty much the same result. At their worst, they would probably make me tear my hair out--but I've had classes like that too. It's all about the people who are there. I'm up for trying one.

Metzger, Margaret. "Teaching reading: beyond the plot." Phi Delta Kappan 80.3 (1998): 240. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Jan. 2011.

"Reading is invisible," writes Metzger. There aren't drafts to check, and no ability to command a student, "show your work," like in a math class. As soon as I read that statement, I thought, "that's what's wrong with reading education! That's why it doesn't work!" 
 

To bring in our discussions about data-retention and test-based teaching (and employ some of Metzger's conclusions along with my own speculation): those "bad" methods aren't the greatest way to teach most things, but they're also better than nothing. When it comes to reading, though... reading is purely skill, not factual knowledge (you can argue that knowing the alphabet and having some command of phonetics works this way, but knowing those things doesn't necessarily mean you can read in a meaningful sense). The institution of reading comprehension tests is a way to gauge whether people can read, but they don't (unless they're really, really craftily written) reveal anything about how they read--so unless a teacher is particularly intuitive, how are they supposed to know where things have gone wrong?

The description of the Socratic Seminar seems clever to me, and like something that would work really well to engage a group of non-proficient readers... but like something that would have people already comfortable with literature chomping at the bit (well, that's my feeling, anyway), and so should be not be used as a panacea teaching method. So I'll leave this article with one hysterically true fact: "Cinderella is not about foot fetishes or love throughout the universe."
 

The other article on Socratic Seminars, by Lynda Tredway, seems to focus on using them to compare different texts, rather than to excavate a single excerpt (Can I add here that I hate when teachers use excerpts instead of whole novels or stories? Sure, you can learn analytic skills from them, but you're cheating the text out of true criticism and the students out of a comprehensive understanding of what they're reading. What works for nonfiction does not always apply to fiction.), which starts off in a good place by assuming that making connections between two texts is the point of the lesson, rather than something to be done later once one has honed one's skills on a single piece of writing. I'm not sure that being able to solve ethical quandaries is what I'd list as the main goal of education, but I'm willing to consider it as a serious aim.

Last but not least... Mark Prensky's proposition that a school lead the wave of the future by getting rid of all its paper books, and forcing students to do likewise. This is the third or fourth time I've read it, and it still makes me want to laugh myself sick. Not just because he very deliberately misunderstands both the idea of hypertext and the complications of producing digital texts, but because he is just so. darn. proud. of. himself. So I'll save my snark for class.