Sharing Reading and Teaching Reading (from your pal, Mark)

I have an idea for demonstrating close reading, but I haven't had the chance yet to put it to practice.

One of my best experiences studying a particular piece of music happened just 2 weeks ago. David Gompper  drew the piece (shapes and strokes, mostly) while the class listened. We added our own shapes and discussed the techniques involved-- big structure stuff, nuanced colorations, and aesthetic evaluations of the piece.

My greatest co-reading experience was in the Writer's Workshop with Mark Levine. He would write up 2 or 3 lines of Shakespeare, and after we discussed the meanings and histories of the lines, we finally dug into the sounds in each word.

Each of these experiences shows the professor indulging students in their initial gut reaction, be it to judge the work or go right for meaning. After that initial joust, the professor then turns their students' attention to smaller portions, moving to atomic level events.

In the Writing Center, I hope to replicate this experience for my students. I have an exceedingly small library of excerpts that I feel comfortable exploring and talking about why it works. I want to branch out into error detection and editing invitations as well. So, some excerpts include:

Excerpt 1: Richard Dawkin’s Unweaving the Rainbow 

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. 

Excerpt 2: Anonymous, Protecting our Patchwork (Student Sample)

There is something so serene about a forest: The way that the light glistens through the leaves as they blow in the wind. The harmony and counterpoint of birds, that the birds chirp in synchronization . The way that trees create a canopy of protection and their limbs stretch as high as your imagination. With a warming climate and tree overcrowding, it just takes one spark to light up this whole forest in flames. In Paul Hessburg’s TEDx Talk “Why Wildfires Have Gotten Worse- and What We Can Do About It,” Hessburg argues that today's wildfires are avoidable and only occur as megafires due to industrialization within the past century. Hessburg explains that the trees in our country are a patchwork and currently there are more trees than the landscape can support. Hessburg’s argument on wildfires is effective due to his credibility and his visual evidence. 

Excerpt 3: Robert Frost, The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.