Blog Post: Helping Students Read Difficult Texts

While considering the reading problems my students encounter, several come to mind. I loved the passage that acknowledged how our current American school culture cultivates surface reading. And with that, to read texts only looking for a few specific things. I can feel this within my rhetoric classrooms when students are required to "think deeply" about a reading log or advertisement clip. Students are often trained to say things that seem "right" instead of "complex."

For example, if I were to have students read a TED Talk script that talked about feminism, it would be difficult to follow up with a question such as, what parallels can you see between this talk and our trade book, "We Should All Be Feminists?" Students may feel that the right answer is something like, "both the TED Talk and the book are written by the same person" instead of something more complex. I can especially see these setbacks when trying to make students analyze texts for long periods of time. I say to have 30 percent summary, followed by 60 percent analysis in every body paragraph in a rhetorical analysis. This ratio frustrates them, because they find it hard to go beyond the obvious surface statements at time. These things can be blamed on structures such as the "short-term memorization" instead of "deep learning that is transformative of one's perspective," as the Helping Students Read Difficult Texts articles suggests.