We have all recently become familiar with the idea of “close reading,” which is highly recommended by David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core standards and now the president of the College Board. Simply, this means that the students should be able to interpret the text without reference to prior knowledge or context. The meaning is on the page and no background knowledge is necessary. On its face, this seems odd. How would a student understand the Gettysburg Address without prior knowledge of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, “our forefathers,” slavery, and the nature of a democratic government (“of the people, by the people, for the people”)?
Reader Eric Brandon comments on the origins of “close reading”:
Close reading was definitely intended for fiction. The close reading that David Coleman espouses comes out of the New Criticism literary tradition, and it was definitely meant for poetry. The idea is that the meaning of the text is the words. As such, background knowledge, context, authorial intent, and so on just don’t matter much if at all.
Also, this type of close reading, since it instructs the reader to ignore context, history, etc. is not good for nonfiction either. Imagine students trying to make sense of the 3/5’s compromise while reading the US Constitution without references to history.
Textual analysis is very important, but it cannot be done in a vacuum. This is a huge problem with New Criticism. David Coleman has simply transported this problem right into the heart of the Common Core standards. What a monstrosity he hath wrought.
Finally, I disagree with the idea that the study of fiction and literature are extras that can be dispensed with because parents can fix this at home. If one of the goals of education is to give students the knowledge and tools to understand their own lives and cultures, then the study of fiction and literature should have a central, not marginal, place in education.
I would go further and advocate that students be exposed to film studies as a discipline before leaving the K-12 system. Just imagine all the videos and movies that students are watching, but no one is really giving them the sort of education that would help them truly understand what they are watching and how the creators of what they are watching are trying to affect and manipulate them.
There would be plenty of time to add this sort of content to the K-12 curriculum if we would just stop wasting so much time on excessive standardized testing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you Eric Brandon, many strong points. Yet, US Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, writes about the over analysis of poetry in the poem below. Clearly David Coleman knows not what he is doing. He wants American students to beat literature, books and poetry with a hose to find out what it really means, which is exactly what the writers do not want.
Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
If someone conflates “finding out what [any artwork] REALLY means” with New Criticism, s/he’s missed the boat. That sounds more like E.D. Hirsch, who thinks that there’s a single correct meaning of a text and that the author’s intent is our best guide to that, where available. That isn’t critical analysis, and it surely isn’t New Criticism.
New Criticism is exactly not about what a text “really means”. Given this fundamental misunderstanding, I question the judgment that Coleman knows “not” what he’s doing.
Thanks, @freevariation: sometimes I feel like I’m out here by myself, having lived in a completely different universe from many commenters here. I’m surprised that Diane re-posted the Collins poem (and closed comments) as if that poem somehow shuts the door on close reading of texts. It doesn’t. In fact, what it shuts the door on is E.D. Hirsch’s take on criticism. There were others before Hirsch and will be others long after who agree with the notion that a work of art, including but not restricted to poems, has “a meaning,” and that the best authority on that “meaning” is to be found in the artist’s take on the matter. This notion is wrong-headed in so many ways that it’s stunning to think any educated modern reader would fall for such nonsense.
As always, I’ll add that the opposite of Hirsch’s error is the error that “anything goes,” that “all interpretations are equally valid,” and other “fuzzy” notions of critical reading. No reasonable person I know teaching English would subscribe to that extreme and foolish view either. For a helpful perspective, I suggest reading just about anything by the late American philosopher, Richard Rorty, on the difference between believing in a theory of “truth as correspondence” [to reality] and seeing some ideas as more useful and some as less useful in helping us make sense of things. Hirsch and many other critics seem to believe that there is an objective real world about which there is some single truth which we arrive at (and then have some absolute way of knowing that we’ve arrived!) The other extreme view suggests that there’s no truth at all, but merely an infinite number of equally good viewpoints.
Rorty’s critics falsely try to place him in the latter camp, suggesting that he and his like-minded allies are (hopeless) relativists. I disagree with such critics and suggest that the ground he carves out in explorations of “useful” and “less useful” ideas about the world (not about “reality” in some absolute sense) leaves plenty of room for choosing among notions (or in the case of art, interpretations). There is no obligation to accept every viewpoint. There is certainly freedom to pick and choose what is useful. I’ve yet to read a worthwhile fictional or poetic or dramatic text that is reducible to a single “true” interpretation, and that goes for any “explanation” an author might offer for her/his work.
Now, whether any of this conversation matters for K-12 education is another matter. But bringing a “less useful” take on close reading to the table as if it were Hirsch’s ideal “true” one seems like a very doubtful place to start exploring any implications for K-12.
My suggestion is to stop trying to demonize close reading because David Coleman thinks he has the first idea what it means to do anything of the kind; instead, look for what’s valuable in the notion of close reading and ask how that might helpfully inform what we would like high school graduates to be able to do with texts. I would assume “enjoy them” is on that list, but that it isn’t the only thing on the list, any more than my single goal for mathematics teaching and learning is that students leave high school able to calculate by hand. Nice if they can, but nowhere near the goal of mathematics education, on my view.
Of course, we’re free to continue to line everything up into Good (not in the Common Core) and Evil (in the Common Core), as if all ideas in K-12 curriculum can be accurately categorized as in or not in the Common Core and hence as having been INVENTED by the authors of the Common Core. If it were that simplistic, then all we’d need to do is decide whether the Common Core were Good or Evil (writ large). Sorry, but the world just doesn’t seem to want to reduce to that sort of puerile thinking. But that doesn’t stop folks from trying to make that “less useful” notion be the “truth.”
MPG,
Comments on Billy Collins’s poem are NOT closed. I posted it because I liked the poem, not for polemical reasons.
Maybe I’m living in an alternative universe version of your blog, Diane, but here’s what I’m finding: a post dated Jan. 5, 2015 with the poem and the comments are definitely closed: https://dianeravitch.net/2015/01/05/on-close-reading-and-what-not-to-do-to-a-poem/
Michael, wait for January 5, 2016. That is when the poem was supposed to appear. And it will.
“The idea that the study of fiction and literature are extras that can be dispensed with because parents can fix this at home.” Eric Brandon is right. This is wrongheaded thinking, and there is proof. Back in the 1980s in California (I don’t know about the other states), teachers were forced to stop teaching grammar, spelling and mechanics because the Whole Language approach to teaching English was based on the faulty premise and boasted promises—-sounds familiar doesn’t it—that all children had to do was read 30 minutes or more for pleasure outside of school hours and they would automatically absorb proper grammar, spelling and mechanics without the need to be taught.
To push the Whole Language approach to teaching English, administrators in the district where I taught bullied teachers to stop doing things the old way. We were ORDERED to throw out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of grammar books—but many of us didn’t. We hid class sets and the school librarians hid the rest in storage in the school libraries. We had school libraries back then with real librarians—no wonder the corporate public education demolition derby wants to get rid of librarians and libraries. After all libraries are often places where children go to learn on their own and end up in debates about what is wrong and right. In libraries children learn to think for themselves and develop critic thinking and problems solving skills while enjoying themselves. In proper;y funded public schools with high ratios of children living in poverty, libraries often stay open as late as 5 p.m. and offer a safe haven for children who don’t want to go home to an empty house because their parents are working one or more jobs for poverty wages struggling to keep the family together with shelter and food. But to the profit worshiping corproae Charters properly staffed and supported school libraries are a burden that doesn’t raise test scores or boost profits. In fact, public school libraries cost money and cut into profits.
Back to the Whole Language insanity of the 1980s. Teachers were threatened. Teachers were spied on—administrators recruited students to do this for them and report back if their teachers dared to disobey the edict that we stop teaching these vital literacy skills. Teachers had to turn in lesson plans each Friday for the following week so the administrators could check and make sure were weren’t planning any lessons that were forbidden. There was an exodus of teachers out of that district that year. At the middle school where I was teaching then, we lost half of our veteran staff who retired early, left education or found jobs in other districts that weren’t so top-down autocratic about the Whole Language approach to teaching English.
A decade later, the results were in and California had fallen from near the top of the pack when compared to the other states to near the bottom in literacy skills. Without much fanfare, the district bought new grammar books, sent newer teachers to workshops to learn how to teach what had been forbidden, and as quietly as possible without any admission of guilt encouraged teachers to return to the old ways of teaching grammar, mechanics and spelling. Oh, and the librarians let the English teachers know we had class sets available of those old Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition books we had been ordered to recycle. They had been hidden in mislabeled cardboard boxes in library storage for a decade.
We simply cannot depend on every parent making sure children do what a faulty theory says they will do because many parents don’t. It’s hard enough to get parents to make sure their children eat a healthy breakfast that feeds the brain, to do homework and support teachers in class by making sure their children are not disruptive and disrespectful. Heck, according to studies that have nothing to do with education, the average child in the United States doesn’t even get enough sleep for their brain to function properly to learn because parents do not make sure their children sleep eight hours or more every day. Instead, children are allowed to stay up until as late as 2 or 3 AM watching TV, texting their friends or playing video games to pass the time—-while not studding, reading or doing homework.
As with lots of ideas, California demanded a really warped way of looking at Whole Language. Here is a good description: https://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/08894/08894f6.html
Key to understanding it is recognizing it as a philosophy rather than as a program with rigidly defined parameters. California apparently chose a very rigid route to implementation. I worked in a K-8 district that favors a whole language approach. It has been very successful probably because their approach is not dogmatic. How each teacher interprets its tools is unique to that teacher although skills training is generally associated with a project. Understanding and using different phrases and clauses would be associated with how professional writers have used them in the reading done in class. Basically, the idea is that people learn and retain learning through real life applications. It does not preclude practicing skills to refine learning.
The district where I taught was micromanaged by the hired district administration at the top. Even though they held mock meetings where they asked what us teachers thought, what we thought wasn’t important. It was obvious from the start that the decisions were always made before the meetings. The meetings were just window dressing to make it look like we were all cooperating.
“The district where I taught was micromanaged by the hired district administration at the top.”
I suspect that micromanagement by an incompetent district administration was more the problem than whole language. It sounds like you might, too.
Yes, S was incompetent as an administrator but he was great at fooling the school board who thought the words flowing from his lips were solid gold and he thought highly of himself and poorly of everyone else but those who bent over to kiss his rear end. His initials were TS. I called him Sauron but his last name started with an S too. Maybe they were twins. I’ve read “The Lord of the Rings” three times.
Please use lower case when discussing LAUSD’s whole language interpretation, a convenient one given the district’s need to hire untrained teachers because of a teacher shortage. Many principals went crazy basically throwing books at the new recruits and saying, Go, Teach.
I attended many Whole Language conferences during this time period and so understood that what LAUSD did was the antithesis of this philosophy.
Again publishers were the promoters, just as Pearson is now. At a textbook exhibit, I witnessed Ken Goodman shaking his head after meeting with a publisher’s rep and commenting how the publisher had it all wrong, and later at a conference in San Jose predicting LAUSD’s coming failure.
I taught hi-sch French in the early ’70’s for a couple of years to a mixed group, 1/2 of whom (grads of a private country-day-sch-elementary) had already been reared on the bastardized method you describe. These poor kids– 9th-gr Fr beginners– tho as smart as the next one, floundered whenever I attempted to give background grammatical explanation of conversational usage. ‘But what IS a pronoun, Mme?’
As a high school student, the best instruction I had in grammar was in Spanish class. It really plays a major role in learning the language especially now when I am taking it as an adult. In English it was really not part of the reading and writing we did but a separate task to be mastered. It was never integrated or at least I was not aware of such attempts. As a special education teacher, I spent a lot of time supporting special education students in general education language arts classes at the middle school level. The approach owed a lot to whole language philosophy; the grammar was integrated into literature studies and student writing. The students studied grammatical devices in writers’ works and practiced these devices in their own writing. Some of the older teachers still tended to isolate grammar instruction into their own units, and it was harder to get my students to stick with it. The context from literature and the practice with real writing tasks really was helpful.
2oldtoteach: if philosophical movements such as whole language were uniformly passed on to teachers as ideas, & discussed openly, with all their latent possibilities as enhancements to pedagogy– we could assimilate what these ideas have to offer. Too often we see that such potentially enhancing ideas are pre-digested & transmogrified into mandated pedagogy before they hit the ground..
I agree with you totally. Unfortunately, too often someone half digests some cool sounding ideas and it morphs into the next great fix.
And the Whole Language approach unfortunately still is the norm today, which explains why we still have such an issue with continuous poor statistics in regards to ELA/literacy/ reading & writing. Most children do not learn to read by looking at words.
Most children and illiterate adults learn how to read by learning how to DECODE EACH LETTER and being AWARE of the SOUNDS ASSOCIATED with the individual letter, followed by the combinations of letters that make up words.
I am so tired of teachers that TEACH students to GUESS at words and READING FOR CONTEXT! That is a dis-service to students and ingrains a bad coping skill that is hard to unlearn once it has become ingrained year after year after year.
Reading for context might work for fictional stories or short text passages when you have picture books. But it does not work for technical and scientific and upper level readings that are long, and detailed.
And, if a student can not read fluently, their chances of reading for comprehension is impaired as well, because so much of their “RAM and processing power” is being maxed out by the act of decoding, and it leaves little left over for comprehension.
Please start teaching your students to be proficiently LITERATE no matter what age they are, because ALL students are ENTITLED to learn how to read and write proficiently in alignment with their cognitive ability to benefit from effective instruction.
I am sure that many will still dispute that Dyslexia even exists, and is documented by scientific ressearch, MRI’s and other neurological evidence.
But it does exist and “whole language” will rarely work in teaching Dyslexic spectrum students how to read. Which is why WL needs to be put onto a back burner, at least until students have mastered the foundational skills of reading and accuracy of reading with proficiency and comprehension, at which point, WL and leveled reading, may then be utilized, but not before students have mastered the building blocks of the English language.
And the following are some sites that those that don’t dispute the existence of Dyslexia might be interested in. The existence of Dyslexia has been backed scientifically for decades, as the one article from 1996 demonstrates.:
http://www.dys-add.com/dyslexia.html#anchorDefinition
http://www.yalescientific.org/2011/04/the-paradox-of-dyslexia-slow-reading-fast-thinking/
Click to access Scientific_American_1996.pdf
Yet schools CHOOSE to use the Whole Language approach that works for a minority of students, over the Orton Gillingham based and similar methodologies that work for MOST of the students, why is that?
Oh, joy! Let’s start Christmas with another round of the Reading Wars.
I can’t claim to know nearly as many K-5 teachers as I do secondary teachers, nor do I spend tons of time discussing literacy with the K-5 teachers I do know. But over the last 25 years, the ones I know well have to the last one asserted that they and the majority of their competent colleagues teach a balanced approach to literacy. The contention that there is a Whole Language Mafia that controls things so that we’re raising generations of illiterates is as believable as the arguments made in the Math Wars that there is a “fuzzy/whole/constructivist” Math Mafia handing calculators to kids in their cribs, telling them never to learn their facts, ignoring computation, and forcing kids to “discover” and “invent” all mathematics from scratch. Both these straw-person arguments are hyperbolic and false.
Chances are that if one finds someone teaching math or reading from a single perspective, regardless of what the district, state, or Common Core says, it’s a traditionalist who adheres to phonics and math facts über alles. Trying to develop reflective, reasonable balanced instruction in either area is a very challenging task for those of us trying to work with teachers. And Whole Language has no more dominated US K-5 teaching than has what I would call progressive math teaching. Most solid teachers look for balance. And those of us trying to help teachers who are entrenched in the “traditional” methods to offer a more balanced approach are generally deeply frustrated by how difficult that is, even on an incremental, year-by-year basis.
I’m sure that some people are 100% certain that the sky has fallen, the Whole Language and Math folks have destroyed everything, and in another few years we’ll have a population that cannot read, write, or compute. A more important question is: when did we have a population that for the most part did any of those things well and was well-positioned to take mathematics past basic arithmetic or perhaps beginning algebra on a wide basis? I’ve asked this question in various forms for 25 years. I’m still waiting for an answer, along with some documentation. Back in the ’50s, when I was an elementary student, the accepted wisdom was that there was one right way to teach everything to everyone. But there were no field tests to support the methods or the texts. Now that we have a push to try more diverse methods to attempt to do better, we’re told that we need extensive field testing (generally with assessments that are heavily biased towards procedures rather than concepts), and that we’re all mad scientists performing immoral experiments on innocent children. The “traditional” methods were ‘grandfathered in,’ never having passed similarly stringent evaluations, and despite their failings, are still touted as the ONLY way to do things.
I’m not buying it.
Mary,
Most schools and teachers use the materiel and methods they are told to use, because the U.S. is primarily a top down distrusting puritanical culture. If teachers were in charge like they are in Finland, then it would be different, very different.
Do not blame this on the teachers. Do not support the corpaote pbulic education demolition derby, because they are worse then the public school system we’ve had for a long time.
The explanation of “close reading” is confounding to me. “Common sense” ( a term that itself can have multiple meanings on a close reading) dictates otherwise. Vocabulary and grammatical structure knowledge are both necessary to comprehension. An assertion that a completely correct understanding of text denies the multiplicity of word meanings and the twists and turns of grammatical structures. In fact, a close reading can elicit more than one meaning and be correct. That is the nature of communication. And it makes writing and giving instructions difficult.
What I believe readers must do when reading is “read closely,” holding meaning at bay until the full context is as clear as possible. The reader must be aware of their own biases and utilize a mental filter, focusing on context.
The more broadly and deeply a reader accesses a variety of texts, the better s/he communicates with the author, one reason students who read for pleasure score higher than those who do not on reading tests.
I suppose one of the positive side-effects of being inundated with so many “decrees” about what I should and shouldn’t be doing in my classroom, is that I never “closely read” the details of “close reading instruction.”
As an intermediate elementary teacher, I’ve taught my students to read challenging text several times in order to gain meaning. They read for the gist, for important vocabulary words, and to annotate for important points that they can refer to later. Using background information is always a critical component to reading for meaning.
It seems I missed the detail that I was supposed to actively exclude prior knowledge from the equation… (???!)
A perfect example of how important it is to ALWAYS include common sense in everything we do as teachers.
There is no hope for our kids, for ourselves, and the future of education if we don’t remember the importance of common sense.
It is perhaps our greatest “weapon” against the tyranny of corporate ed reform.
(again, imho)
🙂
In previous entry I meant Goodman, not Goldman. Sorry.
Certainly, Coleman likes it because it is how the tests are. A short paragraph or two, and then choose the correct answer, of which there may be 2, and a trick, and the other 2 perhaps are just as ambiguous. Good stuff from Colemen; always thinking of ways to make money off the taxpayers, and for his good friends, Pearson.
Coleman and his benefactors are also thinking about what workers will need to know to work in one of Amazon’s ‘fulfillment’ centers, or other such places of emplyoment. You don’t need to think, just follow the instructions of the microchip implanted in your hand to lead you to the correct aisle.
Coleman sees Pearson as the problem. He is pushing to change the tests — see how he’s been changing the SAT, now that he runs the college board.
This excerpt from the EngageNY 7th grade ELA curriculum gives the flavor of the David Coleman approach to (death march through?) a piece of fiction:
“Mid-Unit 2 Assessment (20 minutes)
• Tell students that today they get to demonstrate their progress on the learning targets:
* “I can cite specific text-based evidence to analyze a scene in Pygmalion.”
* “I can determine the interaction of setting and character in a scene in Pygmalion.”
* “I can use a variety of strategies to determine the meaning of unknown words in Pygmalion.”
• Assure students that there are no tricks to this assessment; it really is the exact process they’ve been practicing in class. Tell students that the assessment focuses on Section 6 of Pygmalion, which follows directly after the read-aloud in Work Time A. This section is copied into the assessment, but students are also welcome to use their Pygmalion texts to find the section they need.
• Tell students that everyone needs to remain silent until the entire class is finished, that this commitment is how they show respect for one another and is non-negotiable. Write on the board: “If you finish early, you can …” and include suggestions they made in Module 1, Unit 1 (Lesson 14).
• Distribute the Reader’s Dictionary: Pygmalion, Section 6 and display a copy via a document camera. Explain that these are words in the assessment that students might not understand; because they are not being assessed on these words, you are providing the definitions for them. Review the definitions.
• Distribute the Mid-Unit 2 Assessment: Using Evidence, Theme, and Inference to Analyze an Unseen Passage in Pygmalion. Remind students that they can and should refer to their books and reread as they complete the assessment. Tell them that you will be concerned if you do not see them rereading as they complete the assessment.
• Invite students to begin.
• When time is up, collect students’ assessments. When they are done, they should begin Work Time C.”
I think George Bernard Shaw would laugh heartily at this approach to his work –an approach that reduces it to a mere pretext for mental exercises. God help the child who has to “determine (???) interaction of setting and character in a scene”. What does this even mean? Is this the best approach to studying literature? What does a student gain from this?
“Tell students that everyone needs to remain silent until the entire class is finished”
This by itself reveals David Coleman’s total ignorance to teaching, learning and children.
This was a standard classroom rule for the thirty years I taught and any fool who expects 100% of children to cooperate and comply with this simple request is an idealistic idiot. It’s easy to tell a child what you want them to do, but it is impossible to get every child to do what you want them to do.
For instance, simply telling children to write their first and last name on a piece of paper before they start working on an assessment. There is almost always a student or more than one student who doesn’t write their name, and then there are the students that only write their name leaving the rest of the paper blank no matter how easy the assignment was. I haven’t forgotten the one student that I spent 30 minutes reminding to write their name and then get started. It was a simple assignment. I didn’t stand there. I kept moving around the room making sure students were on task and answering questions when asked. Every time I walked past this one students desk, the paper was still blank.
The assignment: copy the ten sentences from the grammar book and then place the commas where they should go (the lesson about this one comma rule had been taught the day before with board work to demonstrate how the rule worked.
At the end of class, we corrected those ten sentences and students saw if they were right or not before turning the completed work in—an assignment that earned full credit by just doing it and making corrections for any errors found during the interactive participation stage at the end where the students went to the board and provided their answers for the class to agree with or not. After students took sides: correct or not correct, then I revealed the correct answer and many times the two matched. If they didn’t, the student who volunteered to write the sentence on the board wasn’t alone because they always got votes that they were right.
My third grade son comes home with homework essay assignments that ask him questions like, “What strategies do you employ before you begin to read a non-fiction text?” He asked me for help. I asked him what he did before he started reading “a non-fiction text.” He thought and said, “nothing, I just start reading it.” I told him to write that down, then. He did. Got the assignment back the following week. Turns out, no surprise, the teacher just wanted him to regurgitate an asinine list of things like “I look at the title of the text” and “I ask myself whether there are things I already know about the topic.” I assume at some point he’ll get an assignment asking for what strategies he employs before he begins walking.
🙂
Having taught efficient reading classes for about 15 years, I’d say you’re leading your son astray out of what I assume is antipathy towards anything and everything labeled “Common Core,” even if it’s something that has been around long before there was a “Common Core” and will remain a sound principle of learning long after Common Core has faded into the dust.
Why WOULDN’T it be a good idea to consider the title of anything you were going to read, from a poem to an argumentative essay to a novel to what-have-you? before reading it? Give me one sound reason other than “It appears in the Common Core so that suffices to dismiss it” or “Isn’t my clever son clever because he can come up with something to confound those fools who I’m interested in mocking?”
And while there’s no need to write these things down, activating prior knowledge is considered by many people in the time before Common Core to be a reasonable study strategy. So is asking questions of yourself either before or after skimming the text. I realize that you and I are unlikely to see eye to eye on much, but is it actually necessary for you to hamstring your son via your biases and misconceptions? Prereading is a sophisticated study skill that promotes efficient reading. I was an avid reader, scored nearly perfect on the Verbal SAT in high school and scored a perfect 800 on the Verbal GRE. I nonetheless wish I’d known some of the things in K-12 that I learned via self-teaching myself the materials in that efficient reading course (and related study skills course) when I was in K-16. If some of that has made its way into the Common Core Literacy Standards, that’s a good thing. And if you’re going to trash them for no better reason than your naive belief that everything in those standards must be wrong-headed, I think you’ll only further demonstrate the shallowness of your thinking.
I know that the majority here on Diane’s blog are fierce opponents of the Common Core. I was an opponent well before Diane made up her mind and announced her views on CCSSI and was blogging against many things to do with Common Core when most charter school advocates were focused on other issues (the Tea Party had not yet been informed by Rush and Glenn that CCSS contained a host of Communist/Islamic inspired mind control techniques and texts that would “dumb down” America’s youth (AGAIN!)
So now I find myself arguing with boneheaded Tea drinkers and like-minded people who think that mocking something is all it takes to make something that thing a bad idea. Strangely, though, when some of us progressive educators make fun of things like ‘drill-and-kill’ mathematics, we’re decried as horrid iconoclasts with no respect for time-honored traditions. Go know.
Do your son a favor: tell him it wouldn’t kill him to spend 30 seconds thinking before, during, and after he reads something. Trust me: he won’t turn into a Gates-loving, Obama-voting, Islamic drone. Really. Thinking actually is for SMART people!
“Why WOULDN’T it be a good idea to consider the title of anything you were going to read, from a poem to an argumentative essay to a novel to what-have-you? before reading it?”
He’s already doing that as part of the process that he considers “reading.” He doesn’t understand the reading process as ticking off series of strategies.
Also, consider relaxing a bit.
Ah, yes. Relaxing. That’s the ticket.
By the way, what is an “efficient reading” class?
It’s what the authors of the course I taught chose to call what we were teaching rather than the rather deceptive “speed reading” that they could have opted for. I agree with their distinction: speed was more of a by-product than a main goal of what we taught.
“Do your son a favor: tell him it wouldn’t kill him to spend 30 seconds thinking before, during, and after he reads something.”
Easy does it man. The kid is only 8 years old! And seriously, non-fiction, informational text? At age 8?
Right. My goal is to ramp up the rigor for kiddies. Pull the other leg, RAge.
But if he’s being asked to read non-fiction text, you figure it’s just absurd to ask him to read the title and wonder what it means and keep a question or two like that somewhere in the general vicinity before, during, or after reading?
I’m not interested in having 8-year-olds do calculus, but I am not averse to asking them or kids within a year or two of that asking “Why is division by 0 undefined?” Or perhaps that’s “too rigorous” as well. Let’s keep doing what we’ve done for a couple of centuries: just tell kids to memorize the fact that “You can’t divide by 0” without giving a single consideration as to why not (and many K-5 teachers couldn’t tell you; I would hate to tell you how many actually think that 6/0 = 0 or 6 or some real number, rather than that it is not defined; the number that would know that 0/0 is indeterminate, perhaps not a particularly crucial distinction, is probably non-existent for all intents and purposes. Finding a K-5 teacher who can articulate even a sketch of an argument for why it makes sense for n/0 to be undefined for all non-zero real numbers, n, borders on the miraculous). If kids are thinking about arithmetic more than procedurally and haven’t been crushed by school to the point where asking a question like the one above (not in so many words, of course) is unthinkably risky, then they definitely want to know the answer to that and many like it. I have seen 6th graders ask about division by zero and receive completely incorrect answers. I’ve heard middle and high school students give a wrong answer to that question and swear that they were taught that wrong answer in elementary school. I used to be skeptical. I am no longer so.
Let’s not turn little children into little adults with b.s. notions of “rigor,” but let’s not turn young children into infants and soon-to-be intellectually-crippled adults by underestimating what sorts of things they want to know or would benefit enormously from learning. Asking intelligent questions – be it of a teacher, their peers, themselves, a text, etc. – is the soul of learning. Why is the response of so many Americans to that notion so passionately negative?
Eww! But you said EngageNY, so maybe I’m not supposed to blame this lesson module on Coleman? (Tho I think he would approve!). It reminds me of something I read recently, analogising ccss-math pedagogy to analyzing/ commenting on a golf swing at multiple points of the swing, thus distracting the self-conscious golfer from any innate & intuitive understanding of how to approach the task.
As an AP English Language and Composition teacher for many years, I had to “train” my students in close reading. For those unfamiliar with this course, students get to interpret meaning from often-times obscure texts, some of which are centuries old. One technique used in annotation–marking the text to identify concepts, allusions, pronoun antecedents, etc. Annotation is valuable–most good readers use it to help understanding. But AP carries these ideas to the extreme.
Because the AP program was so entrenched in New Criticism and my own background, such as it was, included Feminism, Marxism, and Deconstructionism, I made it a point to find out more about criticism. Eric Brandon is correct about the New Critics, but there is more to understand about this movement that was initially a reaction to English Criticism. One interesting aspect (and if you’ve ever been around teachers who teach AP English Literature, you know what I’m talking about) is that the New Critics placed a very high value on literature and believed that reading Literature (with a capital “L”) could improve you as a human being, and that it (find the antecedent!) could be a replacement for religion!
But New Criticism is only one way to read texts and marginalizes other ways of reading. Marxist readings show how existing powers keep the lower classes subservient–think Dickens. Feminist readings show how women are marginalized. And Reader Response Theory shows how readers make meaning from text, based upon personal experience–how many book club conversations begin with, “this book reminds me of . . “?
If you want to “know thine enemy,” I recommend a little book put out by the NCTE (if it’s still in print) called, “Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary.” It summarizes the various critical literary schools.
I used to feel bad that I could not understand Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Then I realized that the Cantos are not an intelligence test; that I was not lacking in some poetry reading “skill” that I failed to pick up along the way, or to practice sufficiently. What I lacked was knowledge of the many obscure things he alluded to. Lots of poetry operates on the assumption that the reader’s brain has been well-stocked with a library of general knowledge e.g. The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Bible. If you aren’t very familiar with such things, reading becomes a dismal slog at best; impossible at worst. If you DO have this knowledge, then the poem becomes an occasion for amazing mental stimulation, because the allusions are like hyperlinks to erstwhile dormant sections of the brain that cause them to light up in a fireworks display. If you have to look up the allusions, or rely heavily on footnotes, you just get sporadic glowworm illuminations. Thus the best reading program, in my opinion, is a brain-stocking program. This is what liberal arts education used to provide. This is the necessary groundwork for high-level literature enjoyment. Unfortunately, most modern reading gurus want to take a short cut. They claim that close reading techniques are an effective substitute for this brain-stocking. But it’s not true.
ponderosa,
“. . . you just get sporadic glowworm illuminations.”
Hopefully at least the glowworm gets laid from those sporadic illuminations.
Thank you for your point, which if I understand it correctly, is my main issue w/CCSS-ELA. I have no issue w/ New Criticism, it’s fine as a movement against prior beyond-the-pale-tangential methods of lit-crit- — but it is just 1 of many such movements in the 20thC. CCSS-ELA seems to focus unnecessarily on ‘close reading’– I have seen it used in 4th-gr assnts regarding MLK’s Ltr to Birmingham! And thanks to your input, when in the context of AP LA, could we please bring in some other modes such as Marxist, Feminist- no doubt there are others.
But what bothers me most is that this narrow, restricted method of analyzing text has been backed down into primary school, resulting in malaprop application to even K!- where strict, age-inappropriate interotetation has kids reqd to substantiate their emotional reactions to picture-books w/cited chapter & verse!
Close reading makes scoring easier, the low-paid Pearson temp laborer or computer program just scans for keywords repeated from the text in the student’s response. When the test writers are allowed to dictate curriculum, all student work is designed to be easily scored.
Excellent point! We are discussing this topic as if it had any potential intellectual value, but the entire purpose is economic! Bravo! (and, that’s not ‘snark’. I think you have put your finger on the problem).
In the visual arts, new criticism was known as formalism, promoted first by Clive Bell and Roger Fry, with elaborations in the 1950s by NYC art critic Clement Greenberg, regular contributor to small circulation journals and The Nation. Greenberg’s archenemy and contemporary in art criticism, Harold Rosenberg, contributed to the New Yorker.
Both critics were caught up in the problem of viewing and interpreting abstract expressionism, a very narrow slice of the art world. Both competed for prestige and promoted specific artists in the New York avant-garde, in some cases intervening in the work of the artist to make it more saleable.
Clement Greenberg was a “formalist,” Harold Rosenberg was not. http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm
At a conference of visual arts educators in 1965, funded by the Office of Education, Harold Rosenberg was an invited speaker, along with an art historian, aesthetician, and a practicing artist. They were invited to discuss the then-popular idea of discipline-based art education—popularized by Jerome Bruner’s little book, “The Process of Education.”
In principle, these speakers were experts working at the “frontiers of knowledge” in the various disciplines relevant to visual art education. As such, they were supposed to be the gurus needed to advise educators on content for instruction and “methods of inquiry” in the disciplines…per Jerome Bruner’s recommendations in the Process of Education.
Harold Rosenberg offered a conference paper titled “Criticism and its Premises.” He demolished the idea that any single critic or theory of criticism should be relied upon as if the “best” for education, or for the critic’s work of communicating with the public.
My favorite line from the conference paper, and in retrospect, an apt criticism of David Coleman’s pompous ridiculousness:
“The critic who resorts to formulas does so out of laziness, haste, or uneasiness about making himself understood.”
David Coleman’s formula for close reading in the visual arts is just as deadly and formulaic as it is for reading. He is wrong about almost everything that he promotes as if perfected wisdom. His recommendations for creative work? Copy, copy, copy, copy the techniques of the great masters…your own ideas are not important. In fact, if you look at the CCSS you will find the arts classified as a “Technical Subject” suitable for attention in grades 6-8. A technical subject is defined as ”A course devoted to a practical study, such as engineering, technology, design, business, or other workforce-related subjects; a technical aspect of a wider field of study, such as art or music (CCSS ELA Standards, Appendix A, Glossary, p. 43).
It is not great news that Colemen is CEO of the College Board and that the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) tests are en route to being infected with the Common Core as if perfected standards and wisdom…aided by David Coleman’s longtime business partner, Susan Pimentel who is now Vice Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board. http://www.air.org/…/new-study-examines-alignment-between-naep-and-common- core-state-standards-4th-8th
Corrrection My favorite line from the conference paper, and in retrospect, an apt criticism of David Coleman’s pompous ridiculousness:
Close reading goes hand in hand with technology driven “instruction”. You don’t need a teacher to teach you anything. Here’s a text. You figure it out. That’s the magic of binary code. Tap tap swipe your troubles away!
Yep. I almost want to ‘cut ‘n post’ my comment to ‘another former teacher’ (above). We are discussing this as if it had some pedagogic merit, however the entire purpose is economic. The sociopathic salesman has simply clothed the pitch (very cleverly).
During WWII, many very, very intelligent people were duped into producing a weapon that killed hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions). They thought they were too smart to be played, but they were. This happened because they bought the ‘framing’ at the time, but had to live with their shame ever after.
Many teachers have bought into the framing of this issue, and even cooperate with the development of a ‘better test’. Those who are ignorant of history (or choose to look the other way) are doomed to repeat it.
This approach may eliminate students from thinking, but is detrimental to quality learning. I knew things had changed drastically since I taught elementary school, but didn’t know about this. Outrageous!
I don’t know how teachers were able to comply. I know all about job security, but this is so horrible.
I agree with this whole post, and especially these two paragraphs. My agreement comes from years of teach and learning with and from middle school students. These days, the fact that teachers actually monitor and adjust and learn from their actual students and actual experiences — this is devalued, as such reflection is considered worthless in the face of drive-by “evaluations” by “experts” (ie, administrators). In today’s world, how critically important it thus becomes for us to keep our balance by sharing insights and questions with teaching colleagues, it is in that sporit that I share this.
the two paragraphs:
“Finally, I disagree with the idea that the study of fiction and literature are extras that can be dispensed with because parents can fix this at home. If one of the goals of education is to give students the knowledge and tools to understand their own lives and cultures, then the study of fiction and literature should have a central, not marginal, place in education.
“I would go further and advocate that students be exposed to film studies as a discipline before leaving the K-12 system. Just imagine all the videos and movies that students are watching, but no one is really giving them the sort of education that would help them truly understand what they are watching and how the creators of what they are watching are trying to affect and manipulate them.”
I think this badly misrepresents the aims of the New Critics, the efficacy of “new critical” methods and emphases, and, most ironically, the historical context that engendered the movement and methods. In saying that, I’m in no way defending or even commenting on David Coleman, his ideas, his machinations, or the Common Core, the “New SAT,” ad nauseam. So if you want to respond here, I’d appreciate your restricting your comments to what I’ve said. You know: close textual analysis.
The point of grounding critical response in close analysis of texts is to stop the trend of literary criticism to look at just about everything BUT the words on the page. Seems insane, but if you look at the history of literary criticism as it stood at end of the 19th century, the text as written seemed lost in the shuffle. Putting the focus of criticism back on the text forced critics to respect the art, not a host of extrinsic issues that apparently many of them would rather be studying and talking about. Nothing wrong with being a historian: just be a historian. Don’t call doing history “critical analysis of texts.” Substitute psychoanalysis, Marxism, Christianity/theology, ad nauseam for “historical theory” and you won’t have to change anything else. And despite the New Critics, these extrinsic forms of criticism didn’t exactly retreat into caves in the rest of the 20th century. Anyone who did graduate work in literature in this country in the last 100 years can attest to that.
As a (very) former adjunct/graduate teaching assistant in literature at U of Florida c. 1975, I can attest that getting students to write critical essays on poetry, fiction, plays, films, etc. that actually addressed specifics was an almost thankless task. Getting them to address specifics of what was written, spoken, or shown on-screen was worse.
But nothing I taught and nothing I gleaned from my studies of the history of literary criticism in general or the New Critics in particular led to the conclusion that all extrinsic TOOLS were useless and needed to be banned. Merely that they should not be the main or entire focus of criticism. And if that’s what someone is calling for when reading fiction, that’s a fine idea.
Applying such methods to non-fiction is dicier. But there is likely a reason for suggesting it that is well-founded: we still have generation after generation of students who cannot analyze a text of any kind by focusing on what appears on the page and sussing out some particulars of what is said, how it is said, and how that informs the work as a whole.
We still find a vast majority of students in K-12 and well-beyond who believe that a “personal reaction paper” or “newspaper review” comprises literary analysis. It does not. Nor, frankly, does it comprise analysis of non-fiction essay writing. If the assignment is to restate in one own’s words and the offer one’s personal, emotional response to what an author has written, with no regard to method, style, technique, so be it. But I find such assignments for any but the youngest students something best done sparingly if at all, at least until the students have had the opportunity to learn how to focus on what’s written and show that they can respond to that substantively.
Virtually anyone can misread or not read a text and then spew nonsense on a page in response to what s/he IMAGINES or guesses that it says. Takes zero ability at all. How would a teacher respond “critically” to a personal response piece? “Gee, these are fine responses and feelings”? “Wow, these are NOT valid responses and feelings”? “I love how you use your commas here in this list of your responses and feelings”? What an utter waste of training as a teacher of writing. What a waste of time for students who wish to learn how to write.
In grade school, sure: write imaginative essays, stories, what-have-you. The focus for the teacher is still going to be on how one writes, I trust, not whether one has had “good” or “valid” feelings. But If I’m asking students to write open-ended reactions to a story, might it not also serve some useful purpose to ask what they think someone in a story was thinking or feeling when s/he did or said something specific, and then to give reasons for that analysis? Or is it “anything goes, all feelings and reactions to texts are ‘valid’, and who is the teacher to decide whether the student is simply engaging in logorrhea or has actually read and in some small way understood something in a text to which s/he then is able to respond in a well-founded way?
I’m not asking that 1st graders be T. S. Eliot. I’m just asking that high school students don’t graduate never being expected to back up what they say with quotations that they analyze, explain, and connect to the fiction or non-fiction they’re supposed to understand and in some small way analyze.
And in the service of those things, all sorts of extrinsic tools and methods may be employed. I would just ask that they are connected to the text. If that’s too much to expect, then answer this question: why do poets, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, directors, etc., not just write argumentative essays rather than create works of art if their goal is to serve up a message? And why do we speak of art and craft rather than “lesson”? If we want a message, we go to church and hear a sermon or to a political even to hear a speech. Art doesn’t preach or lecture. It doesn’t teach in any conventional sense. It operates in a very different way with very different goals. The old notion that the purpose of art is to “instruct and delight” had almost always emphasized the former at the expense of the latter. Let’s have students learn to see the manner in which art delights and stop arguing with and gushing about the matter in which it ostensibly instructs.
Michael,
I share your (and Coleman’s) qualms about personal reaction writing that shows little grasp of the text. Yes, kids should show that they grasp the text. But I think that close examination of a writer’s technique is peripheral. The technique makes its impact regardless of whether the reader is fully conscious of it. Making her fully conscious of it is often tiresome. I think the teachers’ emphasis, on the k-10 level at least, should be on making the work intelligible; on getting the student to be able to “eat” the literature, not place it in a centrifuge to discover its constituent parts. When I teach Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 to my seventh graders, I walk them through it and paraphrase it for them so they can quickly see that it’s about a forlorn guy who gets cheered up by the thought of his beloved. I tell them what a lark is and draw its morning flight on the board. The poem has a lot of meaning for insecure 7th graders –even Shakespeare felt inadequate compared to people around him! They hear the meter and the rhyme, but we don’t talk much about it. Kids have looked into another person’s soul and perhaps seen a reflection of themselves. This is where the primary value of reading Sonnet 29 lies, in my opinion. I think literature teachers make a big mistake in emphasizing analysis. Literature is other souls communicating with our souls in ways that ordinary human interaction does not and usually cannot. Dickinson, Thoreau, Plato, Montaigne, Bellow, Shakespeare speak to me; I care about what they say more than anything. I don’t care nearly as much about examining their technique (though I often find it interesting).
I have never agreed with psychological literary analysis where a poem or piece of literature is dissected as if an author/poet was aware of all of these different interpretations when they were writing it. As an author, I think that is BS.
When I was teaching, my students wrote about their world and how it was similar, for instance, with Romeo and Juliet’s world. They made links with the past and their present. They focused on the characters and examples of how their environment molded them and then made connections with how the students own environment molds them. They also focused on how individuals, in literature and real life, differ from each other by discovering how each character reacts to the different types of conflict.
Good poetry and literature, like history, teaches us that we are not alone and it teaches us about life and helps us see the repeated mistakes people and governments keep making.
Not having a deep grasp of any critical system, I assumed close reading was just being careful to not bring too much to the text and verify by careful reading what the text is saying. In other words, avoid jumping to conclusions.
@ ponderosa, just want to say: YES. Thank you for making this subtle distinction– yet expressed so plainly– between so-called ‘close reading’– and real literary analysis.
Common Core architect David Coleman does not a New Critic in his essay, “Cultivating Wonder.” In fact, he does not cite any scholars.
Coleman’s background is testing. The Common Core is easy to test. I don’t think we need to speculate any more than that.
Coleman’s background seems to be philosophy (Cambridge) & Eng literatureb(Oxford) while on Rhodes scholarship; previously, while a Yale undergrad, he taught poetry to inner-city [New Haven] kids. he partnered with a mathematician (Zimba) — a fellow Rhodes scholar who ended up working for Coleman’s mother (the Pres of Bennington College) — the 2 soon began a testing consultation in NYC.
But, Nicholas Tampio. This brings us to your conclusion: “Comon Core is easy to test.” certainly that is what our founders had in mind. But CCSS has proven not so easy to test.. Hence OPT-OUT.
“but it cannot be done in a vacuum.” We must connect, connect, connect for our students, especially our lower income children who don’t have experiences from which to draw. My philosophy on learning and teaching centers on making connections. Even back in the early days of my long and seemingly irrelevant life, if I had lived in a vacuum, someone would have had to explain to me who and what Dick and Jane were and what a Father and Mother were. Fortunately I had those family members, understood the family structure, and could therefore relate to the Dick and Jane experience.
I still operate that way and I’d be willing to bet a lot of people do the same.
When I was in first grade, I was confused by Dick and Jane visiting their grandparents on a farm. I lived on a farm and all my grandparents lived in cities. I still recall adjusting my background information to match this new to me information!
You learn to read well by reading a lot. You learn to read closely by re-reading and discussing, a lot. If you don’t do these things *a lot*, can any curriculum possibly teach you how to do them?
At the risk of blowing your little mind, Sunshine, the answer is yes, if by curriculum we mean instruction in intelligent, structural, analytic reading skills for non-fiction and fiction prose, respectively. I helped a lot of kids and adults along those very lines for over a dozen years from ’79 to ’92. Elementary school kids to graduate students and beyond. Thinking: it’s not just for liberals anymore.
Interesting. Insulting, but interesting. I’ve always assumed that you can’t become a sophisticated reader without reading a lot. How did you teach non-readers “intelligent, structural, analytic reading skills”?
And you have the temerity to accuse others here of not asking serious questions?
I think you should be introduced to the view that either/or is a very odd way to view that which does not consist of mutually exclusive alternatives.
Thanks.
Yes! Thank you, FLERP! It is all so simple.
You are suggesting that a one week curricular unit is as effective and important as becoming a curious and voracious reader?
MPG – you are setting a Ravitch record for sheer, unadulterated obnoxiousness. Why so rude?
I couldn’t care less about your mischaracterizations of what I’m doing. I do care that you completely mischaracterized what I have said. Where in hell did I say anything about an curricular unit of any length in any world or contrast one with being a curious and voracious reader? And why are asking questions about what you read (that is, posing questions YOURSELF) somehow antithetical or mutually exclusive to curiosity or voraciousness when it comes to reading? Talk about creating a series of straw people and knocking them down. And then you talk about me being obnoxious?
Oh, wait: I get it! You use “obnoxious” to mean, “Not sitting quietly by as people like you say whatever you like, regardless of how wrong-headed or doubtful, and say not a word in reply.” You’re right: I’m VERY obnoxious that way. Always have been. Always will be. If that bothers you, I’m not in the least bit displeased, even if I suspect you have tunnel vision as to who qualifies as obnoxious. Looked in the mirror lately? No, of course not.
FLERP:
You learn to read well by learning how to DECODE single words and then sentences, and then paragraphs, and then books!!!
And. most students do not pick up such skills on their own.
And sorry to throw facts out there, but schools are doing a very poor job of teaching literacy skills to students!
Most of the students that are poor readers in 3rd grade, stay poor readers for the rest of their lives.
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/waiting-rarely-works-late-bloomers-usually-just-wilt
And yet people wonder why there is still a school to welfare and prison pipeline! Seriously, how do you expect students to learn how to read when the majority of teachers out there have never learned how to teach reading using methods other than whole language? And they refuse to go back and learn how to implement proven phonics methods (Wilson, Barton, and other Orton Gillingham based methods, etc) Or worse yet, take one of those methods back into the classroom and NOT IMPLEMENT IT WITH FIDELITY and then blame the methodology, when it was their implementation of the methodology not being used as designed.
This is why there are so many students dropping out of school still; as well as why the majority of students that graduate from high school still are not grade level proficient readers and writers even when they have a diploma in hand stating that they should.
It is educational neglect &and malpractice that has been going on for generations.
Why should parents be mandated to send their children to school every day for 13 years, and yet they still the majority are unable to read, write, or do math with grade level proficiency, when they have the cognitive ability to learn and to do so?
Who is being held accountable? And don;t blame the parents, because many of us are begging you the teachers, your CSE leaders, and your school districts to help us help you and our children and we are being shut out of the process!
So sorry, but most students do not learn how to read well by just reading alot!!!
Seriously, this is the problem with the current education system, if you are one of those that are in the classroom thinking this is fact! It is not factual and it is not helpful for those in your classrooms that are struggling readers and writers!!!
Mary,
WRONG! I was one of those children who was born into poverty, who had dyslexia so bad his mother was told he would never learn to read, who learned to read well by reading a lot after his mother become involved in teaching him to read at home, because teachers can’t do it by themselves. They need the parents involved. Parents don’t have thirty or forty or fifty or sixty or two hundred children to teach and have to correct student work for several hours daily—-unless the parent is a teacher, but that didn’t stop me when I was a teacher and raising children.
When a child starts behind and then stays behind in literacy skills, it is the PARENTS’ fault for not being involved with the child learning to read at a very early age well before age five.
Once my mother, with my 1st grade teacher’s advice and help, taught me to read, I became an avid reader who read hundreds and thousands of books by the time I barely graduated from high school. I escaped into books. My dad was a alcoholic and gambler who often cheated on my mother. My older brother was an alcoholic and ended up illiterate and in prison for fifteen years of his life, because my mother did not become involved when he was in 1st grade to help him learn to read. She left that up to his teachers who are asked to do too much by parents who blame teachers for the parents shortcomings.
I was a horrible student K – 12. I didn’t do homework. I didn’t read most of the assignments. I did just enough to earn that D-, and I barely graduated from high school with a 0.95 GPA. And I didn’t take any college prep classes because at the time I didn’t want to go to college. I had no interest in school. I was one of those children who would have tested horribly on bubble tests. Since teachers aren’t allowed to hold a loaded pistol to a child’s head or torture them, there is no way to make a child like I was to learn what is being taught.
What was I doing most of the time in class when I wasn’t paying attention and not doing the classwork or homework? I was reading books I checked out of the library. I sat in the back of the classroom and hid the paperbacks in my textbook and because I was quiet, the teachers didn’t notice. Besides, my record—because of a test—said I was that retarded kid who wasn’t college material. My teachers were probably happy I was quiet instead of disruptive who steals teaching and learning time from other students. And I was happy because the teachers left me alone so I could read. I did just enough work to pass and graduate.
Why do I know teachers can’t do it by themselves without the help of a parent or two parents? Because after serving in the U.S. Marines and fighting in Vietnam, I changed my mind and decided to go to college on the GI Bill and I eventually became a classroom teacher who taught for thirty years and knows exactly how hard it is for a teacher to do what a parent should have done—like my mother did for me but not for my older brother.
In my early years as a teacher when I was teaching 7th grade, a mother came to me. She was concerned because her daughter was reading five grade levels below 7th grade. What could she do, she asked me. I told her to turn off the TV and read. I told that mother to start taking her daughter to the library and checking out books. I told that mother she would have to be in the same room and read a book at the same time her daughter was reading. I told that mother every night when reading time is over, talk to your daughter. Tell her about the story you are reading and have her tell you about the one she is reading. I told that mother to do it every night seven days a week and do it for at least an hour every night. I told that mother if she did that, her daughter would catch up by the end of the school year. I said the more she reads, the faster she’ll catch up.
She was the only parent of the 6,000 students I taught who did what I advised. All the other parents I gave that advice to, just didn’t have the time to do it for their children.
A year later her daughter tested at grade level and she wrote a letter to the district giving me credit for that. She said in that letter that she didn’t believe me when I told her what she had to do, but she decided to do it anyway.
It is too easy to blame teachers when parents don’t do what they should do.
In Finland, for instance, it is a cultural thing for parents to teach their children how to read starting as early as age two. Children in Finland don’t start school until age seven but most if not all of them start out reading on their own and are not behind when they start school because they learned to read at home.
What happened to me when I started college in 1968 after being honorably discharged from the Marines. The community college I first attended gave me a literacy test to see if I could do college work, and I didn’t have to take bone-headed English classes to catch up.
I didn’t reach that literacy level because of most of my teachers. I reached that level because I read books, lots of books—thanks to my mother giving up her time at home instead of expecting a teacher to do her job for her. Even in bunkers in Vietnam, my mother mailed me paperbacks and I read books over there between combat missions.
When parents read to their infants and then introduce them to libraries and books—-and turn off the TV, don’t buy the child video games, don’t give the child a mobile phone and don’t let the child live on the Internet, then the one option the child has is to read books, magazines and newspapers.
That what my wife and I did with our daughter. We turned off the TV six days a week and only turned it on for an hour or two on Sunday to watch as a family. We didn’t buy her video games. We didn’t buy her a mobile phone until she reached high school and needed one. We didn’t put a computer linked to the internet in her bedroom. The only thing we did was make sure she did her homework and visited the library every week starting in grade school to check out books. She read a lot of books at home because there was no other option to fill her free time. As her parents, we also limited her time hanging out with her friends after school and on weekends, who had so much time to hang out, because their parents let them.
Guess what—our daughter graduated from Stanford June 2014 and has a great job in Silicone Valley. She loves reading books. She has no interest in video games, because her parents never bought her any, and amazing as it sounds, there is no TV in her apartment.
I still have dyslexia but I am also an avid reader who has read thousands of books—-thanks to my mother and my 1st grade teacher, who couldn’t do it by herself.
I agree with Eric Brandon entirely, and I would like to add another layer. Reading without needing context and background knowledge is impossible, because language is embedded within context and background knowledge. Understanding what a word means necessitates understanding the usage of that word… i.e. in context. That context has an enormous and complex history and culture. Words do not carry meaning in and of themselves. Their meaning comes from their usage.
Also, I completely agree that critical analysis of films and media would be a fantastic addition to any school’s curriculum. I, for one, would love to teach a media studies class for a high school or middle school.
I enjoyed reading all the informative comments about New Criticism. I echo the call for a multitude of “criticisms” instead of trying to find the one magic formula. This reminds me of myself when I was a new teacher, and I always thought I would reuse lesson plans… as if I could just make a unit once and then roll it out year after year. HAH! Sure, sometimes I pull up an old rubric that I can adapt to my current purposes, but I’m almost always revising and creating new materials. There’s just no formula for every class and every student and not even for the teacher. If I still understand “Jane Eyre” at 40 the same as I did when I was 17, then I will not have grown an inch.
So then you affirm that children who come from families where parents are involved will have to get their child(ren) the APPROPRIATE instruction OUTSIDE OF THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM -as we had to do on our own time and dime – (and odds are probably they themselves were not also mis/undiagnosed with their own LDs for generation after generation, because those that have been generationally left behind and un/misdiagnosed tend to perpetuate the current failing status quo.)
Your comment then goes along with making a case then that we as parents and tax payers should not be mandated to support public schools that are not able to provide effective literacy and other instruction to the majority of students that attend those public educational institutions institutions.
Your statement confirms that these problems are real and exist and that schools and teachers are not able to help struggling students because that is the status quo.
So then I again ask, why are parents and tax payers being mandated to continue to support public schools that are unable to teach the majority of their students how to read and write proficiently or think critically, as well as to ensure that the are proficient in foundational and basic math skills?
This only confirms what more and more parents are doing by pulling their children from public schools because they are not able to see any benefit from supporting what seems to be a failed educational model.
We might as well home school our children then if PARENTS are going to be SOLELY RESPONSIBLE for finding APPROPRIATE and EFFECTIVE INSTRUCTION OUTSIDE of the PUBLIC SCHOOLS!
And if it is solely the responsibility of parent, that then leaves a majority of the students in these public schools left behind; since many children have no involved parent -such as those in foster care or those who have parents who have no clue about what effective reading and writing skills may even be since for many chidren, illiteracy is unfortunately a generational issue, that continues because they are in a loop that persists from one generation to the next, AND WHICH WILL ONLY BE BROKEN IF SCHOOLS DO WHAT THEY TELL PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES THERE MISSION IS: to provide a free and appropriate education to all students.
Your response supports the statistics that we are seeing about how public schools are not accountable and are not providing effective ELA and math instruction for those that struggle with literacy and numeracy deficits.
So I am sorry, but again I still do not see how leaving failing schools open is going to be of any benefit. (And there are more failing schools than are currently even on the radar of state and federal ed departments, due to them not having a large enough cohort size and therefore not being required to report on those statistics.)
Schools need to be accountable and most unfortunately are not being held accountable. Telling parents that theoretically they can change the status quo of a school is far from reality for the majority of families and students these schools continue to fail.
Maria,
Very few schools are “failing schools.” Test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are the highest ever–for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
Eric – I beg to differ. If you include the schools flying under the radar because of cohort sizes, especially for Special Ed, Title 1 students, minority students, there would be a much greater number of students showing up as not meeting proficiency in reading, writing and math. There have been independent reports in many schools in our region (NYS CASDA Reports) that has brought this to light. If it is happening in even one school, it is happening elsewhere in the state and the country.
Maria,
I taught for 30 years in California and special education was funded by and guided by law and legislation. The elected school boards and administration, to keep the certification of the public school districts they managed, must do what the legislation mandates, because every few years, a team showed up to inspect the school and its curriculum to make sure the legislation and ed-code was being followed and the school was offering all the opportunities possible for children to learn, but children who don’t cooperate can’t be forced to learn and parents who don’t support the schools and teachers can’t be forced to offer that support.
The public schools where I taught between 1975 – 2005 had special ed teachers, who had additional trained adult aids in their classrooms that had small class sizes as mandated by legislation in California. In addition, the legislation that deals with special ed students changes all the time because of the nature of a democracy and politics at both the state and federal level.
Why are you attacking the public schools? Are you ignorant of how the public sector works in a democracy or are you a shill for the corporate public education demolition derby?
Why not attack the elected representatives and government agencies that have the responsibility to make sure that the ed code that they wrote for special ed children is followed or improved?
For instance, recently, I read on this Blog that Goldman Sachs is making profits from the government to remove children from special ed classes and they are doing a great job making million in profits to take special ed away from children who need it.
The New York Times reported: “Goldman Sachs announced last month that its investment in a Utah preschool program had helped 109 “at-risk” kindergartners avoid special education. The investment also resulted in a $260,000 payout for the Wall Street firm, the first of many payments that is expected from the investment.”
No matter how qualified a public school teacher is to work with special ed students, legislation is what determines the level of support a child who has special needs gets, and the corporate public education demolition derby funded by Wall Street, Hedge funds, and billionaire oligarchs like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family and the Koch brothers is not doing much to help special ed students. Instead, it is arguable that most corporate Charters think that all it takes is harsh Marine Corp gulag style discipline to force special ed children to learn while ignoring their needs.
And when those special ed children don’t learn, what happens? The autocrats and bullies like Eva Moskowitz makes life difficult for these children until their parents remove them from the for-profit, autocratic, opaque and often fraudulent corporate charter schools that when studied closely are often doing a worse job than the public schools they are replacing.
Any informed parent who loves their child, who has special needs, would support the non-profit, community based, democratic, transparent, public schools where voters can vote in school boards that will support special education.
Correction- My response should have been addressed to Diane (vs Eric), Sorry.
New critical theory isn’t a magic formula, but it’s a good antidote to approaches to interacting with art that has no respect for or real interest in art. I can’t believe the distortions being offered up here about what the point of New Criticism is, or why close reading is a skill to be greatly valued.
There’s nothing in such thinking that stops a Marxist from doing a Marxist reading of a text or of a genre or of the culture in which a work or school of art exists and is engendered. But it shouldn’t be substituted for literary criticism or explication de texte (a long-standing tradition that predates New Criticism and still is practiced today).
I’m deeply saddened that because a worm like David Coleman stole this idea and put it into the Common Core that we will have generations of people thinking that it’s absurd to ask someone to focus on the text of a poem instead of how it reminds him of his first girlfriend. That it might do the latter is primarily of interest to him, but how the poem might trigger emotions in any reader if only a reader were to understand X (where X is something specific that the author has embedded in the poem somehow or other) is of general interest. The difference is between some quite possibly unfounded personal hobby horse (“I think MOBY DICK is warning us about alien invasions from Saturn”), and a true insight that other readers would benefit from reading (“Note how Dylan Thomas uses a particular set of tropes and word-plays to breathe new life into the language of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” so that the poem embodies its own theme in a living way”) The latter was my thesis in the best paper I ever wrote about a poem. And the rest of the paper did the job (that is, I showed it; I didn’t just talk about it in general terms, just as Thomas didn’t just talk about how art takes us into a sort of immortality, but made an object that actually does what he’s implying, one method for which entailing the breathing of new life into moribund words and phrases. That’s part of what makes a poet like Thomas a literary genius, not an essayist (or mere critic). I pity the student who is allowed to graduate high school without ever having the chance to see what poetry is and how it works, or prose fiction, or dramatic literature, or film, or other creative arts.
David Coleman may be a horse’s ass (and he almost certainly is), but that has nothing to do with the usefulness of ideas that got pulled into the Common Core. Those stand or fall on their own merits, and people who are now dedicating themselves to trying to destroy everything in the Common Core simply because it IS in the Common Core are, I’m afraid, doing far more harm than they realize or care to think about for even a minute.
So is what you are saying: those who put down the CCSS-ELA– on the grounds that’s it’s all about Coleman& his obsession with New Criticism– are throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
That before David Coleman & his CSS-ELA– apparently due to inferior state stds, students were analyzing texts in some slipshod fashion, based entirely on their emotional or otherwise not-connected-to-text reactions?
I have to call BS on that. My kids, raised in ps under NJ Core Curriculum (early ’90’s-mid-2000’s, pre CCSS-ELA)– under a district-generated K-12 writing program (which placed them well above peers in analytical writing ability once they were college students) were very well educated sans Coleman & his CCSS-ELA (which Christie bought into for purely political reasons).
The ’90’s NJ ELA Core Curriculum was developed by a panel of actual NJ educators, w/a feedback loop & 5-yr update. Districts (such as ours) were free to improve on the model. Our state grad rates, SAT scores, & college placements put us in the top 5 states for many decades.
Since then, our Gov Christie has seen fit to visit upon our district schools not only CCSS & it’s PARCC assessments, but also Marzano VAM SLO’s – all of which narrow our kids’ curriculum & introduce a stressful, competitive atmosphere while cutting down time for a tyallearning.
And that’s all part of Coleman’s CCSS.
If you wanted a good set of state stds, you could have just copied ours. They used to be online,
No, actually, I didn’t say any of that: you did. As soon as you start a sentence with, “So what you’re saying is. . . ” the odds are huge that what follows will in fact not come close to what I’ve said, thought, or vaguely suggested. I’m not obscure in what I write. It doesn’t need reinterpreting, paraphrase, etc., and it definitely doesn’t require the sort of distortion that appears to be a popular party game here. I said what I wanted to say. It wasn’t flattering to David Coleman. It didn’t touch on the Common Core State Standards for literacy, which I’ve never read and likely never will, certainly not in the sort of depth with which I’ve read the math standards. If you care to ignore Mr. Coleman’s prescriptions and proscriptions, you won’t hear a peep from me. So please don’t conflate what I’m talking about with what Coleman wants, says, supports, etc., or the content of the literacy standards in the Common Core, in New Jersey, or on Neptune.
I do think kids need to learn how to write about what they’re actually supposed to be responding to, regardless of who decides what that is. If it’s a prompt on the SAT or ACT where they have 25 minutes to craft a short essay reacting to something and offering evidence to support their viewpoint, then it would be a boon if they have been taught to stay on topic, not say the same vapid thing repeatedly but in vaguely different words, to actually pick examples that connect with their point, and to show the reader the connections between examples and main point. That was a good idea in 1979. It’s a good idea now. Ditto a piece of literary analysis of a poem, a response to an editorial, or countless other things. Staying on point, HAVING a point in the first place, offering support and/or explanation, linking it all together, not indulging in irrelevance, redundancy, or empty statements would also be a plus. They should have increasing challenges to do this sort of thing better over the course of their education. I did, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. It made me a vastly better writer than I would otherwise be.
If Mr. Coleman appears to agree with any of that, so be it. Doesn’t make it wrong. But from what little I’ve read from him, he isn’t really articulating the above. Maybe something half-assed that touches lightly and ever-so-briefly on a few of the same ideas, sort of. But were he saying what I’m saying and doing it without his characteristic smugness (“no one cares what you think” might be the dumbest thing ever written by someone in educational policy), I fear that few here could sort through their antipathy towards CCSS and recognize that these are not attempts to destroy or control students, but rather to make them effective writers. What a terrible fate to wish upon our children, eh?
Close reading was definitely intended for fiction. The close reading that David Coleman espouses comes out of the New Criticism literary tradition, and it was definitely meant for poetry. The idea is that the meaning of the text is the words. As such, background knowledge, context, authorial intent, and so on just don’t matter much if at all.”
Ok, read closely:
“Rimsky Coresickof”
Rimsky Coresickof hated Colemen
70-30-without-a-soul men
Wrote Sheherazade and more
To stick it to the Common Core
Sans context*, how would anyone know
Who “Colemen” are?
What “Rimsky Coresickof” is a play on?
What “70-30-without-a-soul men” are?
What Sheherazade was?
What Common Core is?
*or even with it
It’s good to have an actual poet add his voice to the debate!
Authorial intent… However is that ascertained? Seances with Shakespeare?
And if you found the ‘author’s intent,’ would that mark the end of interpretation? Could I bring something to a work that not even the author consciously intended, yet it might be defensible and of value?
You don’t need to know “authorial intent”
Just be familiar with the “70 -30” Common Core split and, less critically, that Rimsky Korsikov was an artist/composer.
In other words: you have to know a minimum of context.
You were the one, SDP, who seemed to be mocking the idea that knowing authorial intent didn’t matter. I was trying to debunk the notion that authorial intent DOES matter, or that if it does and is ascertainable (a tough task for long-dead or recently dead authors who thought they “said” whatever they meant to “say” by creating their literary work), that intent is only one among many voices interpreting the artwork.
That latter claim is in keeping with reader-response theory, and it’s ALSO in keeping with New Criticism, who gave us the notion of “the Intentional Fallacy,” a logical error in criticism that posits that we need to know or attempt to glean the author’s intention in order to read a poem, story, novel, play, etc., “correctly.”
Do we benefit from knowing certain facts? Of course. No one comes to a poem, etc., as a blank slate. If you don’t know a hell of a lot of classical references, good luck getting a lot of juice out of “The Wasteland,” for instance. Or Shakespeare. Or. . .
But you can in fact still get much from texts without knowing every reference. And in the case of texts as referentially dense as Joyce’s ULYSSES or FINNEGAN’S WAKE, no one on the planet will ever get every reference that is there to get, and that includes the late Jimmy Joyce: the text is so dense, so packed with allusions, puns in multiple languages, etc., that the scholar never has lived and never will live who could unpack it all.
And even if that were possible, there would still be things to find that simply cannot be found by anyone today. If you wonder why I say that, consider that literature influences readers, some of whom become future authors. And having been so influenced, they make literary allusions to those texts they read in the past. But their new texts give us new ideas about reading the past texts as well.
Couple that with the realization that future events will color in many ways how we and our descendants view the art of the past. So there will be a critic in the 24th century who gleans things in ULYSSES that you or I in the 21st century simply cannot see. From a certain perspective, those things do not yet exist, even though the text itself is “complete.” The best art is funny that way: it only grows in complexity over time. Doggerel verse, I’m afraid, only fades.
“Korsakov”
I’ll probably never be able to spell it right again
Perhaps I was not clear, but my comment that “You don’t need to know “authorial intent” was a reference specifically to my ditty
That’s not to say that it is never important..
MPG: I totally agree re: the irrelevancy(to the text) of authorial intent. So why are you such a proponent of CCSS-ELA? It is full of pedagogy suggesting close reading to determine authorial intent.
You should read a little more carefully: I have NEVER been a proponent of CCSS. I do happen to like some things in it: they’re all things in math and literacy that were around long before we ever heard of the weasel, David Coleman, or “Common Core State Standards.” I cannot and will not reject ideas simply because they are NOW included in the Common Core. That would be the intellectual equivalent of cutting of my nose to spite my face. I don’t do that for anyone’s pleasure or political extremism. That is why, for instance, Mercedes Schneider and I cannot have a civil conversation about mathematics education, for instance. She rejects everything in the CCSS-Math because it’s in the CCSS-Math. But she and I would have disagreed about math education without there ever having been a Common Core. And I would disagree with those attacking close reading SIMPLY (or primarily) because it’s allegedly at the heart of David Coleman’s literacy standards. I don’t give a rat’s toches about David Coleman and what he likes or doesn’t. It’s not bad just because he likes something and not good just because he doesn’t. He’s wrong far more than he’s right, he’s a creepy person, his vision of education is utterly different from mine, but once in a while he pays lip-service to things that are labeled the same way that actually solid ideas are labeled. I have no reason to believe that he understands those things the same way I do, and I’d in fact bet a good deal of money that he doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean I have to start hating the New Critics, close reading, or anything else. How I would implement such ideas in literacy for K-12 is a question I’ve not delved into very deeply because. . . I don’t teach English at any level any more. I’m in mathematics and mathematics education, and so I prefer to put most of my energy into dealing with issues surrounding K-12 math teaching and learning. But this business raised in the original post and some of the early comments bothered me and likely will continue to do so. The more I write about it, the more hopeless I think it is to try to get people to understand what I’m getting at and why I care. The answer to the latter is simple: I cared a lot about these things as a doctoral student of literature at U of Florida in the ’70s, when I was surrounded by faculty who were for the most part historical critics. My mentors, however, were not, and while I arrived in ’74 with a taste for doing psychoanalytic criticism, I very quickly dropped that as an approach. On those occasions when I indulge in amateur analysis of literature or film (the latter is more likely), my viewpoint is still grounded in the “text” over everything else. I’ll bring in, pragmatically, other viewpoints and tools as needed, but they are never my primary focus or methodology. Some bad tastes never leave. “Extrinsic” methods of criticism as primary tools still taste like crap to me.
It’s fascinating to me to see reproduced in this discussion much of the argument about the New Criticism that took place during the 1960s and 70s. In the dim past, I studied with Cleanth Brooks, one of the main architects of the New Criticism, and co-editor of “Understanding Poetry,” perhaps THE most influential of New Critical texts. Mr. Brooks did indeed teach us to read closely. That meant, first, understanding what the words meant, and that often required looking them up so that we could appreciate the range of meanings, and ambiguities, embedded in them. The Oxford English Dictionary was our main tool, but any dictionary was useful. Just to take one example, the word “deferred,” as in “What happens to a dream deferred?” I can imagine, indeed have had, an extended discussion about the relevance of the various meanings of “defer” to the Langston Hughes poem.
But second, Mr. Brooks also wanted us to be aware of what the “music” of the poetry suggested or revealed. Take Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” (which I won’t reproduce here—it’s on line). It is quite deliberately set in a sing-songy, children’s rhythm and rhyme pattern. But then the last line and a half of stanza two shatters that childish peace: “but he poked out/ His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’” That is, from my point of view, apparently “simple,” but in fact one of the most brilliant pieces of modern poetry in terms both of its diction and its implications with respect to racial politics.
That said, New Criticism had serious limitations and biases, and the attack on it insisted that we needed to reintroduce contexts, historical and cultural detail, in order fully to appreciate or more richly to understand a poem or a story or a movie. The last two weeks of the course I took with Mr. Brooks were taught by the poet Delmore Schwartz, and he wanted us to write a very different kind of paper, one that made use of historical contexts to explore a text. I wrote on Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens,” and to do so I learned more than I ever wanted to know about English and French garden styles, the enclosure movement, and how these shaped the ways people from different classes perceived gardens and gardening. I don’t recommend this as an exercise for most of our students, but it’s an approach that would be helpful in looking at a poem like e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s/ defunct” or a story like Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper,” just to select two of thousands.
My point in this overlong post is that close reading is a valuable skill, whether we’re talking about poetry, a story, a lease, an indictment, or a political speech. It does not, in fact, lend itself to filling in test-bubbles and anyone who thinks it does is simply missing the point. It is also just one kind of reading skill; there are others that draw upon a variety of contexts and theories. As teachers, we should not be excluding anything that is useful in the classroom and helpful to our pedagogy.
Paul, you are lucky to have worked with Brooks (about whom I did some writing in the ’70s) and a giant like Schwartz, who had a tremendous influence on Lou Reed. I never worked with any artist of that stature, though Harry Crews was teaching at Florida when I was a graduate student there.
That said, there’s a difference that I’ve not tried to make clear here given the audience and the argument, between New Criticism as practiced in its most austere form by Brooks, Elliot, Wimsatt, Ransom, etc., and what I was doing as a critic and teacher of literature and writing in the ’70s. And it bears repeating that there was never a “New Critical Manifesto,” so it’s rather tricky to define clearly and categorically what exactly was and wasn’t New Criticism.
My viewpoint then and now is that the text comes first. Art comes first. If artists wanted to teach lessons, they would be essayists, preachers, professors, orators, etc., not artists. Any sort of didacticism in art is likely to sink under its own weight. It took Melville having written a dud like MARDI to show him that you need something a hell of a lot more buoyant than the lame frame tale of that stinker to float something filled with the subtext that runs through MOBY DICK. It’s not a coincidence that the book has a cetology chapter and that there is a long section before chapter 1 that grounds the reality of whales and whaling in the very real world (some online editions skip that preliminary quotation and etymology section, a grave injustice to the novel as a whole).
Didactic and extrinsic philosophies of criticism appear blissfully unaware of such concerns. They bring in the kitchen sink, often in the service of personal hobbyhorses of the critic, who may not realize that s/he really wanted to be a psychoanalyst, historian, philologist, Christian minister, etc., but didn’t or couldn’t make it in those fields and so found succor in literary criticism under the tent labeled: Anything Goes.
I find such folks more than a bit fecal. And I use that word advisedly. I think they disrespect both art and artists, often seeing themselves as better than the writers they try to explicate definitively. A feminist critique of Norman Mailer can be terrific social analysis. Bringing in facts from his biography to support the notion that he is fearfully misogynistic is no doubt of great interest to many people. But I’m not sure it really contributes to analyzing AN AMERICAN DREAM as a work of art. Of course, some people who write “criticism” of Norman Mailer don’t actually like Norman Mailer’s work. Which begs the question: why would anyone choose to invest time analyzing the art of a writer whose work AND person one despises?
The answer is: I don’t. But many do. And reading what they have to say is, from my perspective, a nauseating experience. Writing reviews of someone’s books for the NEW YORKER allows for all sorts of personal sniping. Writing a scholarly article? ‘Fraid not. Not in my circle of literary critics. If the artwork doesn’t stand as worthy of engagement on its own terms, don’t waste time writing about it.
I have no idea what any New Critic would have thought of that. I formulated those beliefs 40 years ago. I’m long out of the lit-crit game, but my thinking hasn’t really changed fundamentally on those issues. I’m still very open to any useful tool, but I view the usefulness of tools in light of the importance of art, not the other way around. I recognize that I’m in the minority there even now. But I think I’m in good company. I mention in passing essays about literary criticism by Wallace Stevens (THE NECESSARY ANGEL), William H. Gass (FICTION AND THE FIGURES OF LIFE), Alain Robbe-Grillet (FOR A NEW NOVEL) and my mentor, William R. Robinson (Seeing Beyond: Movies, Visions, and Values), to name but four. If there were no more than those four, I’d be deeply honored to be in that company.
Did our pal David Coleman read any of those folks? I doubt it. And if he did, I would bet the ranch he didn’t get them. He’s a hack. He’s a hack imitation of a hack. He’s irrelevant to the subject under discussion here, once we see him for what he is and drop him from the conversation as unfit to participate even in abstentia.
I am totally ignorant when it comes to discussing literary criticism, so bear in mind that I am simply asking questions even when they are not. 🙂 I do not understand art as separate from its creator except in a rather behaviorist approach in which the devices used by an artist specific to his art explicate the art. We cannot “know” what an artist intended or was thinking no matter how much background knowledge we excavate. The appreciation comes in how skilled (in using the devices of his art) the artist is in creating this work of art. Yes, no, yes and no?
Yes, more or less. I don’t see how we can have any absolute knowledge of the artist’s intent even were the artist to write a separate work purporting to provide precisely that information. To accept that as possible presumes that an artist has absolute knowledge of his/her own intentions, process, method, etc., and that s/he has a privileged place from which to stand while “objectively” explicating the work of art in every single “valid” way. Forget about it: can’t happen. No one has the ability to take that stance.
If the artist can’t do it, how then a critic? It can’t be done. It’s never done.
So does that mean that all readings are equally correct (or equally false)? Anything goes? Whatever you think the artwork is “saying,” then that is indeed what it “says”? No, I don’t think so. Some readings are better than others. Some readings are better grounded in some sort of holistic and particular set of – for want of a better word – ‘facts.’ Some readings resonate. Some are self-indulgent bilge.
As for what you describe as the appreciation: I’d generally concur that we get more out of a work of art when we “see” something about it that isn’t an attempt to reduce the artwork to a “meaning” or a “message.” I’ve fought against that sort of reductionism since early in my graduate education in literature. Archibald McLeish wrote in “Ars Poetica,” “A poem should not mean. But be.” I think that sums it up nicely. I might add to that, “And do.” Art is an act and when we open ourselves to it, meet it on its own terms, allow it to help us craft critical tools with which to encounter it, we enrich the art. When we try to reduce it to a message, we fail. We fail the art, we fail the task we’ve wrong-headedly set for ourselves, and most of all we fail ourselves.
Oh, but can’t we just “enjoy it.” Sure thing. No one says it’s required that one take a critical stance in relation to a work of art. Yet if that art tasks us to take stances in relation to it (and to ourselves, our world, our possible worlds) and we fail to even attempt to do so, our experience is less.
That’s all I can say in general. To say more, it would be necessary to show through the sort of analysis I’m trying to describe (in the abstract) its application to a particular work of art and a particular tool or set of tools how this plays out in practice. We could take a poem by Dylan Thomas, sharpen a particular tool, and see how doing that and applying it to a specific work of art reveals some of the hidden facets of Thomas’ craftsmanship in that work. It’s truly fun to do this. It’s ultimately far more satisfying than a passive encounter. It’s why criticism done well is worth doing. But no instance of it can be said to be definitive. No interpretation exhausts the possibilities of a great and complex artwork. It’s folly to believe the contrary. Yet we have generation after generation of teachers asking students, “What does Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” mean? If I were to sit in an English classroom today and hear that question posed, assuming my head didn’t explode first, I’d ask, “If that poem can be reduced to whatever you say next, why didn’t Keats just write what you said instead of going to all the trouble of writing one of the most perfectly crafted poems of his century?”
It’s like asking what a Porsche 911 means, or the meaning of a soufflé. It’s like asking what Beethoven was trying to “say” with the 9th Symphony. If he wanted to say something, he’d not have composed a symphony. But we get tricked with literary arts into assuming that because the medium is language that there must be a simple linguistic message. That’s a serious misnomer.
A friend of mine who teaches at Harvard University (and has numerous teaching awards) watched Coleman’s instruction video on how to do a “close reading” of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. She described Coleman’s approach as “absolutely ludicrous!”
I’d love to know why. Not that I doubt it, just informative.
Texts exist in context.
Yes, Bob. In fact, they exist in ever-changing contexts. I once read sixteen different books: oddly enough, they were all called THE CATCHER IN THE RYE.
Brilliant, Michael!
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., made an extremely important contribution to hermeneutics by distinguishing between meaning as intention, on the one hand, and meaning as significance on the other. (See his Validity in Interpretation.) Often, these debates go round and round because people are using the same term but meaning these two very different things.
One can discount intention only at terrible cost. People write in order to communicate, and they depend upon their intentions being recoverable. Cultural transmission depends upon this. So do the empathetic and intellectual connections between individuals. The ancient mariner is impelled to tell his story, and he won’t be happy if he isn’t successful in that–if we, as readers, don’t say, “Yes, I get what you are saying there.”
I agree that texts can be read in many ways and that we’re going to have different experiences of them depending on how we are framing them, but the attempt to recover the author’s intention is one of those ways of reading, and the author’s intention (itself a construction) is one of those frames–a very, very important one. Hirsch doesn’t say that recovering the author’s intention is easy to do. Quite the contrary. He tells us that we must bring an enormous amount of learning to bear, sometimes, in order to do a credible job of that. But I’m reasonably certain that I know what Arnold was thinking when he wrote “Dover Beach,” and what he meant for me to experience, when reading it, and to take away from that experience. I feel, in reading it, that I am connecting with him across the years. That’s important to me. It’s one of the reasons why I read–in order to connect with those great souls of the past.
The whole notion that via art we can bridge the ontological gap between consciousnesses–that we can establish an empathetic connection with an Other–depends upon the possibility of success in such an undertaking–in the recovery of intention, understood, in a lyric poem, very broadly as the speaker’s presentation of his or her lived experience.
Bob, I appreciate your thinking and the time you put into expressing it, but we’re coming from very different places when it comes to what art and imagination are about. While I am always interested in looking at how a great piece of art “works” (and I’ll leave that undefined on purpose), I have little interest in the notion of what the artist’s “intent” was, let alone what s/he “intended” for me to experience. How could that artist possibly know me, my experiences, my knowledge, my capacity to make connections? How could an artist in the past have the slightest understanding of some experiences that people in the future can have that were unknown and likely impossible at the time that artist lived? It puts way too much of a burden on the artist to be a combination of Freud, Sherlock Holmes, and Nostradamus to expect that s/he could see into me decades or centuries or millennia into the future.
I think we’re still looking at correspondence theories of truth vs. pragmatic notions of usefulness. I’m with Rorty, Kuhn and Dewey in the latter camp and being their informs my notions of criticism and vice versa. Don’t expect to dislodge anyone from holding conflicting views, but I can always hope. 🙂
I suppose, Michael, that I could kick a rock, as Samuel Johnson did, but I suspect that you are right, that that wouldn’t get me anywhere. Besides, I’m with Berkeley. Rorty lost me in his Mirror when he claimed that consciousness was mere hyposthesizing. Utter nonsense. And Michael, that very difficulty (How could the artist know me? . . .”) is, I think, one of the reasons why people resort to art rather than to epigrams. Bridging that ontological gap isn’t easy.
Michael writes: “If I were to sit in an English classroom today and hear that question posed, assuming my head didn’t explode first, I’d ask, “If that poem can be reduced to whatever you say next, why didn’t Keats just write what you said instead of going to all the trouble of writing one of the most perfectly crafted poems of his century?”
“It’s like asking what a Porsche 911 means, or the meaning of a soufflé. It’s like asking what Beethoven was trying to “say” with the 9th Symphony. If he wanted to say something, he’d not have composed a symphony. But we get tricked with literary arts into assuming that because the medium is language that there must be a simple linguistic message.”
Michael gets at an important point here. Artists construct experiences, and those experiences have significance that cannot be reduced to some blithering generality. That’s WHY people are moved to produce art rather than epigrams (and why, for me, so much of neoclassical literature falls flat). But one cannot discount the notion that artists intend to create experiences for audiences of their work that will change those audiences in particular ways.
How does a Vietnam vet change a light bulb?
You wouldn’t know because you weren’t there, man!
This joke gets at one of the reasons why people produce art. To put the audience THERE, to give them that experience in its fullness, without reducing it.
That might be one reason people write. It’s not much of the reason I read.
Bob,
Of course it’s possible that some or maybe all artists create in order to communicate experience to audiences, but I’m skeptical that that is the driving force for many of the artists I value. My sense is that there are other motivations at work, not the least of which is the same reason people do many things: intrinsic satisfaction. When I solve a challenging mathematics problem, the satisfaction is internal. It has to be. I’m 65, I’m well past taking classes and getting patted on the head with grades, gold stars, and other meaningless rewards (to borrow from Alfie Kohn somewhat loosely). If I were fortunate and talented enough to solve an original problem, I would share it with others because: 1) it’s what we do in order to ensure we’re not kidding ourselves about our mathematical reasoning; 2) it’s what we do to increase the body of mathematical knowledge available to the community as a whole. The reward is almost entirely internal and intrinsic.
I’ve written film criticism that I’ve never tried to publish. I think some of it is pretty damned good, but I’ve never published or attempted to publish it. I truly feel grand whenever I think about it or reread it. Sometimes, the reason something gets done is because we have a need to do it, not because we have to communicate or have someone experience anything.
Yes. That makes sense, Michael.
Recently, Michael, I reread Wuthering Heights after many, many years because it’s part of the required curriculum in my state. Loved the book, much more so than I did years ago when I was forced to read it in a class. I was moved to cobble together some notes about it, more as an exercise in understanding my own experience of the novel than for any other purpose. I doubt I shall ever publish those. And I’m content with that. Perhaps I might reread my notes on the book, at some point, and have some satisfaction in that. So I understand what you are saying here.
She was a odd bird, that Emily Bronte. A tor out on there on the moors, aflame at sunset. A brilliant, momentary flash. All the more beautiful for that singularity.
Bob Shepherd,
Read “Silas Marner.” That’s the book I was compelled to read in high school, and no one liked it, including me. So boring! I can’t recall why, but I read it again as an adult and I was moved to tears. It is a wonderful book. Why do we ruin literature by assigning it to students who are not able to understand what they are reading?
“Why do we ruin literature by assigning it to students who are not able to understand what they are reading?”
I think it depends on how literature is taught. For instance, because the students I taught often had literacy skills ranging from 2nd grade to college level in the same high school classroom, when, for instance, we read “Of Mice and Men” and/or “Romeo and Juliet”, the students all read at the same time in class on a daily basis for ten to fifteen minutes from their text while also listening to an audio version. Following each reading/listening, we talked about what happened in the story that day and shared that on the board in a five sentence summary.
Then at the end of each act and/or chapter, there was an essay with a prompt that had the students link what was happening in the story to their own lives and the world around them—world events, parenting, poverty, gangs, mental illness, migrant workers, love at first sight, teen suicide, etc.
Those essays were shared in class in small groups where every essay was read out loud and then rotated from group to group until every student in the class had heard every essay, talked about it using constructive criticism—they learned the difference, and even used a rubric to rate the quality of each essay based on several points. The rubrics were created with the students in a cooperative setting so the rubric made sense to the students—too many rubrics are not written with children in mind.
The discussions were often lively and the read arounds managed to engage even most if not all of the poorest readers because they didn’t have to have the literacy skills to understand what was written on the page. Having students read in isolation doesn’t work well when many of them read below the literacy level of the material they are reading, but when they hear the story, the discussions, and the student essays, they become part of the story.
A very good question, Diane. For everything there is a season.
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