English 323: Exploring Teaching Strategies

I am one of those unintentionally arrogant people who has given very little thought about how to help others read, but has sneered in noticeable derision when faced with someone whose reading skills are not up to par.  I imagine that if I were not privileged to have the instruction I have embarked on these past few months, I would have entered my first classroom in a manner extremely similar to that of Kylene Beers.  Because reading has always come naturally to me, my immediate reflex is to encourage students to “read it” and “read it again” when problems with comprehension arise. 

However, after reading Beers’ compelling introductory chapters to her book When Kids Can’t Read What Teachers Can Do, I feel properly chastised and emboldened to try new strategies to reach the dependent readers I will meet in my future of teaching. Beers mentioned wanting to equip her students with the tools necessary to “struggle” with a text.  I think this simple statement is incredibly poignant.  I don’t want to push information on my students. In the long run this will help them very little, but if I can provide them with some new options when reading becomes an impenetrable task—then I will have succeeded in encouraging them to continue pursuing reading and learning even outside of my classroom. 

One activity I particularly loved and can see myself using was Beers’ “Syntax Surgery”.  Poetry can prove particularly challenging to many students.  Often they view it as something that was designed to resist their attempts to understand it.  As a large, looming conglomeration of text whose structure often defies logic in pursuit of rhyme, I can understand their opinions.  Syntax Surgery visualizes the discussion of a passage or poem’s language, and it requires a group investigation of the individual elements that form a larger body of text.  Freire mentioned learning as a cooperative process between humans, and activities like Syntax Surgery allow students to communicate with their instructor on a level of inquiry and equality under the umbrella of learning.  The first step of understanding often involves taking something apart and analyzing it in a manageable way.  For students and reading, this means paring down assignments to a level that largely eliminates the intimidation factor.  A struggling reader would view even a four page single-spaced document as a daunting task.  Rather than leaving them to struggle on their own, I now have some implementable ways of breaking down a text for my students in a way that does not stress how much I know and how little they do.

As we use this semester to refine our teaching philosophies, I have uncovered a new element that will be inherent to mine.  I hope to promote a learning environment where my students enter the classroom with an excitement to explore rather than dreading English class because of the constant reminders of what they do not know.  Either way they come in with a knowledge deficit, but only one will result in positive results in the classroom.