An Invitation to Reconnect to What You Know by Heart

Wednesday, March 7, is World Read Aloud Day. Sponsored by LitWorld, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering literacy worldwide, the day aims to celebrate the power of words and to promote global literacy. As a warm-up to that event, I’d like to offer what I’ll call a Read Along: an opportunity for us to connect with the power of words by reading and sharing our thoughts about a short short story by author Allen Woodman in order to reconnect to ourselves as readers and re-experience the process of meaning making in ways that can inform our practice and our lives.

In addition to wanting to support a great cause, I do this because I deeply believe that every teacher who is a reader has within him or herself what it takes to be a great teacher of reading, without the aid of scripts or programs or packaged Teacher’s Guides—provided we take the time to peer into our minds and hearts to notice and name what it is we do to make meaning as we read. The idea that our experience can be the wellspring of our teaching is precisely what informs Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman‘s now classic book Mosaic of Thought, and it lies at the heart of What Readers Really Do. It’s also the foundation of Katie Wood Ray‘s marvelous book on writing What You Know by Heart: How to Develop Curriculum for Your Writing Workshop, whose title I’ve borrowed for this week’s post in the hopes that we can transfer and apply her thinking from writing to reading.

To that end, I invite you to read Woodman’s story, which he’s generously allowed me to reprint, paying close attention to the work that you usually do invisibly to comprehend, understand and evaluate. In this way, I believe, this reading experience can become, as Katie Wood Ray says, “something larger than the moment.” It can transcend your experience with this particular text to become something you more deeply understand about the work of reading that you then can carry within you to your classroom, your next book, your life and the world.

Should you need any further instructions or guidance, consider the following questions:

• Are you aware of anything you had to do to literally or inferentially comprehend the story on a line-by-line basis?
• What do you make of it as a whole—that is, what do you think it’s really about. And what did you do and/or draw on to arrive at that understanding?
• What value, if any, does it hold for you? Did it affirm, expand, refute or challenge anything you thought about people or life? Did it delight, perplex, or even annoy you? If so, how and why?
• And if you used any of the standard reading strategies (infer, connect, predict, etc), when and why did you use them and what did they yield for you?

In the spirit of collaborative learning and community, I’m hoping you’ll share your experience and whatever meaning you made of the text, by either clicking on the speech bubble at the right of the post’s title or on the word ‘reply’ at the bottom of the post, right after the list of tag words. (And email subscribers can use the comment link at the end of the email.)

And now, without further ado, here is Wallet by Allen Woodman:

© Copyright by Allen Woodman. Reprinted with permission of the author. Allen Woodman is Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Arizona University. He has published six books of fiction, including Saved by Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection of humorous stories for adults, and The Cows Are Going to Paris, a children’s picture book with David Kirby. He has also published scores of short stories in magazines and anthologies, including Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction, Sudden Fiction Continued, Mirabella, Washington Post, and Story.

Please click on the reply link to leave some thoughts about your reading experience. And remember to celebrate World Read Aloud Day—and change the world story by story.

The Messy Work of Reading

Here’s a question I found myself thinking about as I prepared for a presentation that I thought could use some visuals. What does reading look like? Not the act of opening the covers of a book and scanning the lines with your eyes, but the path a mind takes as it tries to make meaning of both the words on a single page and the pages of an entire book? And what does the teaching of that journey look like?

I decided that too often our vision of reading looks like this: a straight road that leads over time and many pages to a particular meaning we want our students to ‘get’ that we, as teachers, have gotten from our repeated reading and teaching of a book or from a teacher’s guide.

Of course, we don’t simply set our students on the road and expect them to arrive there without support. We ask them questions. We direct them to passages we know are important from our own prior reading or the teacher’s guide. We invite them to make predictions and connections, latching on to those we think will help nudge them down that predetermined road so that ultimately they ‘see’ what we saw in the text and ‘get’ whatever we got.

Whether we do this explicitly or not, you could say we offer students a route map, like the highway sign below, with page numbers posted instead of mileage and literary features as destinations. Foreshadowing, we convey through our questions and prompts, coming up on page 23. Significant scene on page 57. Important image on page 104.

              These practices might help some students read more closely, as the Common Core Standards ask them to, but I’m not sure how it helps them reach the Standards’ overarching goals as captured in the “Students Who are College and Career Ready” descriptors−particularly the goal of demonstrating independence “without significant scaffolding.” That’s because I believe that the road of meaning making is only straight when we’ve already read a text before and can see retroactively how the pieces fit together to form a meaningful whole−and even then there’s usually no single road, since whatever meaning we’ve made of the whole is open to interpretation, which depends on who we are, what we’ve noticed, and how we fit that together.

Instead, when we enter a text for the first time, we often have no idea where it’s going nor what the writer might be exploring. If we did, there would be no point in reading on; we’d know everything right from the start. But not knowing means that, on a first read, we can’t know which passages are significant. We can’t know which scenes are pivotal, which details will reverberate later, beyond a general understanding and awareness that everything we encounter in a text−from the tiniest detail to the overall structure−potentially carries meaning and has been deliberately chosen by the author for some purpose that will eventually become clearer as we keep on reading.

In this way, I think the path of meaning making as we make our way the first time through a text actually looks like this: a messy tangle of highways and side roads, with on-ramps and off-ramps, dead-ends and detours, and lanes that merge or diverge and divide or sometimes go round in circles−all of which we must navigate on our own by paying attention to the details we encounter and considering what they might mean, while remaining open and flexible enough to revise our understanding as we go.

My co-author Dorothy Barnhouse and I explore what it means to teach with this vision of reading in our new book, What Readers Really Do, which will come out next year. I’ll be sharing out-takes and ideas from it here. But for now I think it’s important to consider that if we want to support and nurture readers who are able to enter a text knowing nothing and emerge pages later with a deep understanding of a text’s ideas and themes, we need to let them know that this is what reading looks like. It’s not a beeline to a given, accepted meaning that either you get or you don’t. It’s a messy, complicated and confusing process that’s filled with wrong turns, false starts and uncertainty. And I believe we serve our students better if we acknowledge and honor that messiness and confusion as the place from which learning and understanding starts.