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Reading Reminders

I'll Grant You That

I Hear America Reading

English Teacher's Companion

Epilogue: Reading the World (Excerpt)

We must look at the lens through which we see the world as well as at the world we see, and recognize that the lens itself shapes how we interpret the world.
Stephen Covey, from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
Simone Weill, from "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"

These final pages do not conclude this book; indeed they invite you to become one of the authors of this book, to contribute to the conversation of this book through its companion web site, through discussions with yourself, your colleagues, your students, your curriculum. I cannot end this book with the simple declaration that it has reached “the end” because we are only just beginning this next phase of our lives as teachers who are and must be responsible for defining the work we do. The poet W. H. Auden never felt his poems were done; each time he published a new edition of his collected poems, he revised them, changed the sequencing, even altered the titles; he saw them as works in progress.

We and our profession are a work in progress, too. This book asks us all to engage in the conversation about what we do, why we do it, and how we should do it. It is also an attempt to remind us that we must take an active role in determining our role in the classroom. The title of this book, Illuminating Texts, incorporates not only the historical tradition of “illuminating” texts through graphic, written, and verbal annotations, but the active role of illuminating, of teaching, of performing an act that is responsive, that cannot be scripted given the inherent complexity of students’ needs and experiences. The title is also meant to include our very lives and experiences as texts which merit illumination through active reflection in the privacy of our own selves and within the community of the classroom where such essential conversations should take place. Writers as diverse as Simone Weill, Cornell West, Mary Pipher, and Maxine Greene speak about the existential crisis kids face; other writers and thinkers return again and again to the vital role teachers and other mentors can and should play in the lives of these kids who are creating the text of their lives.

See Lindsay Rosenthal’s "annotated life" on the companion web site. Her work, done in response to Diane McClain’s cultural bibliography assignment, shows her thinking about the different experiences that make up her life; through this assignment and the sharing of students’ ideas in class, students are encouraged to reflect on what makes for a rich life.

The best elements of the standards movement serve the interests of all our students in their quest to create balanced, successful lives. The worst aspects of that movement---the push toward standardization of methods, of means, of curriculum---threaten to displace our role as guides and professionals. This book is also a response to that trend, a reminder to us all that we must insist on nothing less than a curriculum as rich in experience as in skills, one that develops our intellectual and emotional capacities as much as our aesthetic and existential capacities. I’ve heard it said that children enter school as question marks and leave as periods. I want my students to know how to use a period, but I also want them to have learned to inquire as to the purpose of the period and whether or not an idea is, in fact, finished just because it has been given a full-stop. I want students to resist the neat ending, the quick answer, to say; as Emily Dickinson wrote:

A word is dead,
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

The idea of textual intelligence (TI) explored throughout this book honors the spirit of Dickinson’s poem by suggesting we should always examine the life of a word from its many sides to better understand not only what it means but how it works. I have kept the discussion of such aspects of the curriculum as vocabulary and grammar to a minimum, but I cannot end the book without emphasizing their importance. The very notion of grammar is central to the notion of textual intelligence for it involves the making of structures, the making of sense, of meaning.

TI is all about how texts are made, and how different grammatical structures create meaning for or affect the reader. Writers use their TI when they do everything from choose the format (poem vs. prose vs. play) or the purpose (to entertain vs. to inform) or the structure (narrative vs. expository), the medium (word or image, page or screen). They make TI decisions as they choose the point of view, the tense of the story (past tense, present tense), the use of foreshadowing or flashbacks, the organizational structure (linear or episodic). All these choices come from, in part, the writer’s understanding of how texts and language work. Therefore, the more a student understands these structures, the more options he or she has when they write.

I have asked myself new questions throughout this book, questions I hope that have inspired you to ask your own and which will lead you to a new and deeper understanding of the work you do, the teacher you are and want to be.