Blog Post #6 - Bri


Last week in one of my tutoring sessions, a student brought in a text analysis assignment.  The instructor had given their students the option to analyze Beowulf or a Shakespeare sonnet.  My student decided to analyze “Sonnet 91,” which as poet, I was delighted to work on with her.  But as soon as we began to go through the sonnet line by line, I realized that she did not possess the tools to conduct a proper literary analysis.

There were several sections in Bean’s article that spoke to this exact problem, one of those being student’s unfamiliarity with academic discourse, and more specifically difficulties with vocabulary and syntax.  Like my student, I read Shakespeare for the first time in a classroom setting, however my course was Intro to Shakespeare, not Interpretations of Lit.  I probably spent the first three weeks just getting used to reading Early Modern English and entered that class with an understanding of poetic analysis. 

While my student and I went through the sonnet together, she had little patience, wanting to understand quickly what each line was saying and then move on.  Each time we came to a word she didn’t know she’d look to me to define it for her.  According to Bean’s article, this kind of treatment of a text could be a students’ resistance to the “time-on-task required for deep reading.”  While I do think my student has this issue, I wonder if her impatience was also assignment specific.  This particular student is a Pre-Med major with no literary aspirations.  Working with a text that isn’t obviously valuable to her future career could also be a contributing factor to her unwillingness to spend meaningful time with this sonnet. 

Comments

  1. KathMarch 3, 2020 at 7:08 AM

    Hi Bri, I like that you pointed out the issue of assignment-specific impatience with your example; one of the differences that I found moving from TA-ing for a survey lit course to teaching a Rhetoric course is that I have to work harder to get students interested and engaged in the material. The texts and history were unfamiliar and in their minds irrelevant, which was something never explicitly stated but implied in their engagement with the course. I am interested in trying to work with this further; how do we get students invested in something that doesn't seem "useful" to them?

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