Tatiana Week 6

When teaching online, I try to give reading quizzes that require deeper, more thoughtful answers in order to steer my students away from "surface reading." For example, my reading quiz question for the first hundred pages of McCarthy's The Road is "Why did the mother leave and what happened to her?" The students who are close reading give the correct answer, which is that she couldn't handle the apocalypse anymore and then killed herself using a shard of obsidian. This detail is embedded in one of the scenes, and it's implied that this is what she did. I don't have the book on me right now, but the line is something like, "She walked off into the night with a shard of obsidian and that was that." So yes, if the student gives me the aforementioned answer, I figure they must be reading closely. There's always a few students who simply say "she left" or just "she died I don't know how."

Overall, I found the article enlightening and wish I'd had teachers who'd done some of these practices. In my GEL class, I teach fairly accessible texts. I don't have a literature background myself and so I only teach things that I think are easy to read, and largely the students have always been able to digest them easily as well, so I haven't had many issues of texts being too dense/complicated. I remember a high school English class in which I had to slog through Ayn Rand and no amount of highlighting would help.  

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