Blog Post 5, Dylan Nice

The most common problem with my students' reading is covered by Bean under the heading "Difficulty Seeing Themselves in Conversation with the Author." I like his assessment that unskilled readers see the text as "inert" and without relevance to themselves, their ideas, and their beliefs. Often, I'll assign what I consider to be an inflammatory text, like Eula Biss' "Is This Kansas" in which she derides undergraduate party culture as byproduct of White Privilege and even White Supremacy. I encourage a deep reading of the text by having students respond to an analytical prompt on the discussion board, but am often surprised to read student responses in which her core criticisms seemingly went unnoticed or were noted and quickly disregarded by the student falling back on the familiar myths of the "college experience" which the text is challenging. 

After engaging with the Bean text, I think I could counteract this by reviewing the prompt before they begin the reading (not after) and emphasizing the questions they should be asking of the text as they engage with it. I've also experienced issues with "cultural literary" and unfamiliarity with a work's context as a driving force of misreading. For instance, this student was asked to analyze the preface of Art Spiegleman's Maus via the lens of its heavy foreshadowing. The preface is titled "Rego Park, 1958" which is simply the place and time that the sequence occurs, so I was surprised when the student provided this reading: 

 I believe Spiegelman chose this sequence to begin the graphic memoir because the father of Artie knows about the concentration camps where the German people are holding all of the Jewish people. Artie's roller skate breaks while racing his friends and they leave him behind. He comes home crying to his father and his father asks why he is crying. Artie says something about his friends. The father says, "If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week...THEN you could see what it is, friend!..." (Spiegelman 6). This explains that the father has information on the concentration camps and what the German people are doing to the Jewish people. Based on what Vladek says in the brief portion of the graphic memoir, the relationship he has with his son is almost non-existent, but he still shows he somewhat cares. Vladek bosses Artie around by demanding him to hold the wood and saying "hold better on the wood." Vladek is not listening to what happened to Artie, and his mind automatically goes to how potentially Artie's friends could be put into concentration camps. In the future of the story I see Vladek being part of the German people who do the selections for the concentration camps. Based on the little portion he speaks, I think there's a great chance that he is associated with the camps and all of the selections.

A couple of things might have happened here. The most simple explanation is that the student did not notice or consider the title of the preface, which clearly indicates that the sequence takes place in the suburbs of NYC in the late 1950s. Or, the student is understandably unfamiliar with Rego Park as a location and the WWII/Holocaust timeline. Still, even without this information, context clues within the sequence should nudge even an unfamiliar reader away from this interpretation. Perhaps this evidences another problem: Students are pleased to just have a reading of a text and therefore sometimes refrain from interrogating it. 

And, this student reading isn't all inaccurate. His observations about Artie and Vladek's relationship is admirably insightful. While I would contend there relationship "exists," he's correct to point out it is strained and that Vladek is not listening to or responding to the emotions of his young son. However, the misunderstanding about the time and distance between these events and the holocaust are so distracting I ended up focusing more on them in my response than what the student got right. I guess this is to say that the problems often result in even more problems! 

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