Carey - Week 6

 I was very interested in the distinction Bean makes between “surface readers” and “deep readers”. My GEL students are currently reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which has an intentionally complex and somewhat confusing structure that requires a lot of “deep reading" to understand. Morrison alludes to various incidents in the plot rather than explicitly explaining what happened, which is leaving a lot of students frustrated and convinced the book is “too hard” for them. Another problem students seem to be having with Beloved, which ties into Bean’s point about students lacking the “cultural literacy” assumed by the text’s author, is that many of them lack sufficient knowledge of the novel’s historical context, namely the history of slavery and Reconstruction in the US. I’ve assigned them several supplemental texts (podcasts, videos, essays) intended to provide overviews of this context, but I can’t help but feel like their ignorance of this history is the fault of the broken American public school system. It's been frustrating and disheartening to see. Bean’s text offered some very useful tips for dealing with these various issues -- I had been debating giving my students a sort of abbreviated plot summary of the novel to make their reading easier, but Bean’s suggestion to not “lecture over the reading” convinced me not to. Instead, I now plan to ask them to come up with plot summaries in teams on their own as a way to help them practice deep reading.

Bean's text relates to an essay I always assign my GEL students -- Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers". Students always seem surprised by Nabokov's argument that you haven't really read a text until you've reread it. Many of them seemed to think, as Bean discussed, that if they aren't grasping the reading immediately on the first try, then they're not a "good reader". They tend to find the idea that "good readers" are those who reread, and read slowly and carefully rather than quickly, comforting and empowering. 

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