Robert Taylor - Week 6

While I was a practicum student several years ago, I observed a classroom discussion over “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. It was a bizarre experience for me. The instructor obviously had a good grasp of the story and its deeper conversations. The students did not. Having just read the story myself, I did not have the slightest idea of how to begin interpreting--much less discussing--the story, and I sympathized more with the students than the teacher. Seeing the discussion was falling flat, the instructor proceeded to lecture on the meaning of the text.

This experience came to mind as I was reading Bean’s piece on “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts” because it demonstrates some key concepts Bean was attempting to show about the difficulties students face when reading out of their comfort zone. The students, having been in this situation before, more than likely expected their teacher would lecture the text if they simply embraced their confusion. These students had learned to avoid the deeper reading of texts by growing to expect the expert in the room to tell them what it meant. To their credit, they did ask some meaningful questions once the teacher started lecturing about the story.

Another reason this experience stands out to me is because of the lack of cultural literacy or context they had for the story. None of the students were married (I assume). None of them were alive in the 1890s when the story was written. Certainly, none of them had any frame of reference for why an author would write such a story. The list could go on, but these points demonstrate how students would be blindsided by a first reading of “The Story of an Hour.” The instructor I observed would have benefitted if he would have made the students responsible for some readings outside of what was covered in the class, ideally ones that would give some psychological and historical context, and he might have given students more time with the text, encouraging them to slow their reading down rather than plowing through. As for the lessons I learned from this experience, I have not once considered teaching “The Story of an Hour” to a group of high school students.


Comments

  1. ConorOctober 5, 2020 at 3:05 PM

    Definitely relate to the experience of assigning texts and then having the students not get them (and also reading assigned texts and not having any idea what to do with them). There's just so much to cover! It seems to me that we are almost guaranteed to emphasize 'surface reading' with our current education system that has *absurd* amounts of content to cover for almost every course (at least that involves the type of reading that could/should be 'deep reading'). And, even in my grad coursework, which *should* be all about deep reading, there is often so much material assigned that it is impossible to read deeply (and it's like an open secret that it's impossible, viewed as training for navigating a world where you'll only be able to skim a book to see if it's valuable or something).

    Anyway, I wonder what a curriculum that really believed in deep reading and was designed to allow for it, would look like. How much material can reasonably be covered deeply?

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  2. Dylan NiceOctober 6, 2020 at 1:50 PM

    I, too, think the amount of reading students are given (both graduate and undergraduate) essentially requires them to do "surface reading." When I was in graduate school, I was often tasked with reading an essay collection/memoir/novel a week, sometimes paired with supplemental readings. I recall saying to a friend "I just let the text wash over me."

    Perhaps at the graduate level, there is a benefit to building breadth instead of depth of reading, since you should have acquired some deep reading skills as an undergraduate and in your own reading life. But for undergraduates, the problem of reading load seems more significant. I know that I try to limit them to one reading a class and require a interpretive response to nearly every reading, but I'm confident that other instructors are also assigning large, competing reading loads.

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