I found the article written by Showalter to be interesting, and could relate to many of the things that were written about teaching poetry, and overcoming students aversion to it. When I began teaching literature I found that some of my students were reluctant to study poetry, and that not all teachers were willing to embrace it either. When I met with one of the instructors at my school I was surprised to learn that she didn’t even teach poetry in her classes. She explained that her students found it too difficult to understand, and she felt it was easier to engage them with short stories and plays. In a way I could understand her point of view, but I still kept poetry readings on my syllabus because I thought that as an English teacher I had a responsibility to teach poetry in a literature class. When I first attempted to discuss poetry in the classroom I found that some students assumed that the poetry we were to study would be difficult to understand, dated, and irrelevant to their lives. During our class discussions, when we began to breakdown some of the poetry, students began to open up as they could see how the poetry we discussed related to their own experiences and beliefs.

Before we can expect students to value any form of literature we must first show them how it is important to everyday life, and how studying literature can benefit them across different curriculums. As a student I found value in studying things that I could relate to my own life and experiences. The classes that I enjoyed the most, were ones in which the teacher taught the subject in a manner that made it real to me. I agree that in order for poetry to be studied more in the classroom as instructors we “ must select from a fuller range of poetic texts, and we should present them in a way that encourages reader to connect the poems to their lives” (64). The writing correctly points out that teaching poetry can be a daunting task when you consider all of the elements that go into interpreting a poem. The textbook that I use incorporates a diverse selection of literature that covers an array of issues. Being able to discuss both contemporary and classic works makes it easier to find writing that can be relatable and engaging to young students.

I was also happy to see that the writing discussed the benefits of reading poetry aloud in class and in using portfolios. I recommend that my students read poetry aloud at home, and also have them read it aloud in class prior to our discussions. I have never thought about having the whole class read in unison, but can see how this technique could be beneficial to the learning process. I also like the idea of having students to keep a poetry portfolio as a way of exploring and analyzing poetic language.  I like using in class writing assignments to help students think deeper about the readings that we cover in class, because it gives them the opportunity to be more critical about their interpretation of poetry before we talk about it as a group.  If students have a poetry portfolio that they can reference throughout the course it can help them keep track of their own progress while also assisting them with future writing assignments.

The excerpt of the Rabinowitz Book, Before Reading, clearly illustrates a point that I have seen argued about before many, many times: does meaning come from the readers, the author (as a reader), or the text? This has been written about since the existence of literary criticism, I’m sure, though most of the things I’ve read regarding it are from the mid-20^th century onward, and very clearly fall on the side of the readers in terms of creators of meaning. Rabinowitz uses the term “readerly idealism” to describe meaning as assigned by readers to texts, rather than provided by texts to readers. What he does that I hadn’t seen before is essentially propose a compromise with his swing set assembly metaphor. The author has a swing set in mind an provides the readers with the pieces to assemble it. He assumes the conventions of construction are well-known (maybe he provides an obscure one or two directly) by the readers, and then steps back, whether he wants to or not, to let the readers do their work. They may end up with a swing set that is nearly the same as the author’s, or they may end up with one that is a bit different, but that they built using the same pieces and similar conventions.

This approach strikes a balance between older notions of the text as a sort of godlike authorial surrogate and newer notions of authorial absence and textual malleability. We cannot reasonably say that every single person, given the same set of tools, will read the same text the same way because, well, they don’t, and they won’t. And where are we getting the exact “correct” meaning from? Dead authors cannot provide it, and living authors refuse to, or purposefully provide varying meanings, obfuscate it, or lie about it all the time. But we also cannot rely solely on readers for the aforementioned reason: they provide different readings of the same text using similar tools. If they are the ultimate authority, then the logical conclusion is that all texts are essentially meaningless; the meaning is entirely external.

The swing set just says that all of these things are important. What the text says, what the author meant it to say and wants it to say, what the readers see in it, etc. The danger now is only that someone without the proper conventions (tools, to keep the metaphor going) will be simply incapable of building anything from the pieces, or will build something so alien to a swing set that it cannot be reconciled with other readers, the author, and the parts in the text. It seems a bit democratic (e.g. if fifty people say it’s a swing set, the author says it’s supposed to be a swing set, and one other person says it’s a swimming pool, then that last person is doing something wrong), but it’s a much more refreshing and balanced way of looking at how people read and how meaning is derived from reading.

This actually reminds me of the discussion we had in class about the book How to Read Like a Professor, a book that claims to provide “rules” for teaching people to read “properly”. It may be inaccurate or simplistic (I’ve not read it, so I honestly don’t know), but trying to provide as many people as possible with the basic tools of reading so that they can all make a reasonable fascimile of playground equipment out of the swing set text is, I think, one of the major facets of teaching reading. A teacher would provide context in the set of a manual or instructions where the author would provide the pieces, and then the reader provides the elbow grease to get it all assembled.

I really don’t like poetry.

There it is.  I said it.  I’m not a fan.  I’m sorry.

Despite my general love of all things Literature with an ‘L’ as anything considered Well-Written Awesomeness in this world, poetry and I just never truly meshed.

I don’t think that’s on any level at the fault of poetry itself, as a form, style, or structure, if there’s a difference between such things?  I’ve just always been taught to read poetry that certain way. That formalist, New Critical method where the meaning of the poem is some Objective Truth with an ‘O’ and ‘T’ just waiting to be unearthed by each and every reader. i.e., me. Because authorial intent (or so I was once told) is king: the beginning and end of interpretive reading. What I thought of the poem or how I reacted to it barely mattered. But I was often taught to read all literature the same way yet didn’t have this problem with other forms.

Yet novels and short stories—and perhaps just prose in general—is meant to be understood. Sure, not everyone is meant to “get” Ulysses. But I would argue that James Joyce is very much an exception to the rule. Strictly speaking, prose is written in a language, more often than not, in a style that is intended to be understood thematically if not plainly; something written as “prosaic” is something entirely meant to be common-place, bridled in opposition to “poetic” language. Any attempt otherwise is just an overturning of convention.

So after all those years being forced to interpret in the formalist, New Critical technique of reading, I “got” the message of a novel, short story, or whatever, because they’re generally written in ways to be understood. But poetry always came to me later, if at all. And I guess that’s where my disconnection from poetry arose.

Not to make any too-sweeping claims, but my long-time disconnection with poetry arose likely because trying to “get” the message of a poem is to so painfully miss the point. Perhaps it was wrong of my instructors all those years force-feeding the “meaning” of the poem rather than asking: “Well, Alex, what does this poem mean to you?”

Like the way in which we often pick our favorite songs, albums, or bands, there’s a resonance to poetry that speaks to readers on a level that gets well-beyond the constraints of theme, motif, or message. It’s a feeling. Poetry is a feeling. And students will react to that feeling differently, just as my best friend will roll his eyes when I put Radiohead on the car stereo.

I think that helps too, to have struggled that way with poetry. To think that everyone will automatically come to appreciate it or understand it the same way one does would be a mistake; one must draw in readers of various perspectives, avoiding “apathy” if you will. To garner the attention of most of your students you must create an approach to poetry that eliminates “getting at the objective meaning” and more about “what it means” to them.

Students are still allowed to dislike poetry, as I often do, but they should be coming to that conclusion through their own perspective, in that it does not relate or resonate with them—not that they simply don’t “understand” it or its “meaning”—whatever that is.

I am learning to live with poetry, and feel better about my relationship to it having better understood how to read it. I just want to make sure no one endures the growing pains that I had to.

Somehow, poetry has always served as a source of both comfort and apprehension for me – and this week’s readings helped me sort out why. When I’ve read poetry on my own, when I’ve called the tune (and the piper), it’s been great. I can kind of wander and meander through the words of a poem like W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and contemplate whatever images and meanings occur to me. In any official capacity, however (e.g., in the classroom, whether as a student or during my 10^th grade teaching practicum), I tense up a bit. I’m thinking, “What am I supposed to be seeing in this poem? What did the poet mean to say? How do I guide the students so they get out of it what they are supposed to get out of it?” Where does poetry get its power to at times intimidate readers and writers?

In the Fish piece about poem recognition, we are faced with a seemingly simple question: What the hell is a poem, anyway? In reality, it is not a simple matter but, at least for me, it has an instinctive answer. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on pornography, poetry is hard to define, but I know it when I see it. In taking this position, I use Fish’s very interesting term, my “poetry-seeing eyes” to identify a written piece as such. I am looking for positioning of text, patterns of words and thematic elements, perhaps brevity and succinctness, etc., etc. So when I have identified and read a poem as a poem, the aforementioned challenge begins: What does it mean?

In Fish’s estimation: “Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them” (p. 271). This is a view that is at once liberating and intimidating. It is liberating because it allows us to construct meanings from poems based on our own personalities, backgrounds, experiences and knowledge; it is intimidating because that may not always be an easy proposition. Some people – students and adults alike – just want to know what a poem is about (Just tell me what it means, and then I’ll know and have that piece in my arsenal of poems I have read and “get”). When we open up the poem to subjective interpretation, we ask students to take a risk. We ask them to make connections in their own minds, and construct meaning that resonates with their own sensibilities and knowledge base. We will generally ask them to share their thoughts in a classroom environment. As Diane Middlebrook comments in the Showalter chapter, “It’s not just something you can learn on your own; poetry is best consumed in public” (p. 69). At the same time, it takes more effort on the part of the teacher, I think, because he/she is not simply imparting the meaning of the poem, but drawing that meaning from his/her students in order to construct an interpretation (perhaps many separate interpretations).

I was going to avoid going into this, but I’ve spent too many hours mulling over it to not write about it:

Stanley Fish begins his essay with an example of lying to his students—telling them that something meaningless and arbitrary was in fact a religious poem of some value—and, after they respond according to this lie, concludes (Host Poc, I believe) that “acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their source” (p. 270.)  It seems to me that this is true only if your “formal characteristics” are preceded by a source that you trust more than your own ability to recognize—like the suggestion of an instructor.  The difference, however, is ultimately mute because the recognition and what triggers the recognition both come from the same source.  The interesting thing is that Stanley Fish identifies there is only one way to recognize a poem: If someone (or something) tells you it’s a poem.  This is certainly true for anyone who studies poetry, who sees something called a “prose poem,” and thinks, “Sure, this is a poem.”  Why are “prose poems” poems?  Because whoever wrote them calls them a poem; whoever “created” the meaning is able to determine—or suggest with definitively—its most essential quality, the largest or most basic category it can fit into.  We take that overarching construct (it is because I say it is) and assimilate it into our own ontology of meaning, all of which is in keeping with our society at large: We determine a prose poem is a poem because others have determined it and have taught us about the determination-ontology of meaning.  Of course, one thing we don’t do in high school is study philosophy.  We don’t study how we interpret meaning and why—we’re just given it and that is enough.  I think if you look at education historically you’ll see a difference there.  But before I get too far off topic, I’ll disagree with Fish’s statement that “we create poetry (and assignments and lists)… through interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility” (p.274).  No doubt we create things within parameters established by such systems, but we do not create them through these systems.

Fish’s conclusion is that if we all agree we are programmed to think by our culture and the education prescribed by that culture, and that this holistic program comes down to us from our elders—and the only way to step out of our programming is to be lied to within the framework that defines the meaning of a “lie” and a “truth” (but which, because it is a creation of meaning rather than an access of it, is either falsity or verisimilitude)—than all our problems, our differences, will disappear, and we will be free to create within the framework we have been given (or rather free to push what meaning we create in pre-determined ways through the pre-fabricated holes of the pre-designed framework we have learned to varying degrees of a pre-calibrated exactness).  However, I remember being in high school and falling in love with Eliot’s Prufrock.  It’s meaning to me was manifest in the way it was something I experienced, took around with me in little memorized passages—“Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets / and watched lonely men in shirt-sleeves / leaning out of windows?”—and then a teacher asked us to dissect it, pull it apart by its seams and come to these realizations about the poem’s “meaning” by way of its associative innards.  Is this why we study poetry; is it nothing more than a mental exercise, a linguistic form of a logical puzzle?  Why do we care about poetry?  What is it that makes a poem important?  Fish’s essay is titled, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” and, in his postulation, the title isn’t facetious; after all, by calling the names on the board a poem, and by treating these names as a poem (to an extent that many “real poems” have not been considered), Fish created a poem—he is a poet.

I’ll leave it at this: Let’s say Fish found himself conducting the same study in a 16^th century classroom.  Let’s assume that in the 16^th century the prevailing ontology of meaning was that a thing had a meaning in and of itself—that at least certain things were self evident.  Now my history education revolved around battles and kings—not philosophies—but it’s a somewhat safe assumption (Decartes famous line “I think therefore I am” was a 17^th century challenge).  So we have Fish and his names on the board.  He tells the class “This is a religious poem,” and the class looks at Fish and says, “with all due respect sir, no, it fucking isn’t.”  The immediate response, that the 16^th century students simply happen to come from a society and education that ascribes its own, different meaning to poetry, is an easy one.  But it’s the implication I’m interested in: The 16^th century students wouldn’t have been duped.

The very first unit my host teacher gave me to teach as a student teacher was a poetry unit. Formidable, yes, but I was a young, idealistic student. I was Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society. I was ready!  To this day, I still remember the students’ underwhelmed expressions after I was done with my lesson. I just figured they were pretending not to be impressed. At the end of the day, my host teacher said, “That was great, but you never told them what a poem was.” Hmmm. That was enough for me to go make copies of the booklet I had been given in high school with all the different types of poems and examples from the poetic canon. I completely scrapped my “cool” unit, and taught out of the book because I figured I didn’t know what I was doing.

Over the years, I quietly snuck in some “cool” lessons: Reading and discussing Babette Deutsch’s “Ape” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Pappa’s Waltz” while reading To Kill a Mockingbird, comparing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” with Romeo & Juliet (stop groaning, Ben!), stomping out the rhythm of iambic pentameter, assigning memorization for R&J and Juiius Caesar, writing  found poetry, and a lot of other really “cool” lessons. I knew other teachers had poetry units, but I did my own thing based off of what I’d read in journals and what I felt would be effective.

Turns out that my internal teaching compass had led me correctly. Stanley Fish’s position on poetry seems to be ‘a poem is a poem if you think it’s a poem’. I could’ve kept my “cool” unit during student teaching and just had a little discussion with the kids about poetic context. According to Elaine Showalter, what I was doing with poetry as an experienced teacher was fine too. I thought for sure that the teacher gods were going to strike me down with lightning every year for still assigning poetry memorization. (FYI: I did give students my rationale behind the assignment).

Showalter’s article was my favorite of the readings for this week. Obviously, I liked it because it gave me some confidence in how I handled poetry, but also because it gave me ideas in how to improve my teaching when I go back to work. (I hate reading pedagogical articles that give vague ideas of how to teach, but are quick to point out ineffective teaching methods). It was interesting to see that some of the professors seemed to disagree in methods. For example, Donald Howard doesn’t like having students read in his Chaucer class, but Diane Middlebrook has students read aloud. Both have sound reasons, and it seems to work for their courses.

I am going to use some of the teaching ideas, but more importantly, I want to emphasize to students that poetry demands to be re-read because every choice is deliberate– including punctuation. I also want to reiterate “the accessibility of poetry rather than its difficulty” (64). I’m not sure I did this before.

I found Collins’ et al. ‘Cognitive Apprenticeship…” and Linkon’s ‘Visible Knowledge Project’ complemented each other’s overarching message quite nicely; while one aims to make the invisible, visible, the other subtly steers students through similar mental, albeit metaphorical environment of dense fog.  Both share a messy, complicated perspective of reading and understanding context—and if students were only made aware of said complexity—that’s half the battle.  The aforementioned statement is half true.

To sincerely take on exploring a complicated text with a “multilayered, shifting, complex, and often contradictory” meaning, implies one must embrace a level of unknown chaos.  As Joy alluded too, students, whether they know it or not, love structure.  So while Collins and Linkon flush out all the mental clutter in the world, the fact remains, higher order reading comprehension is a bungled ball of brain yarn.  Getting students to accept learning is messy—THAT’S half the battle.

It would seem Linkon, although subtly and mentioned briefly, would agree: “For students, however, this way of thinking about reading can be challenging, in part because it contradicts the assumption they have been taught about texts: that texts have set meanings that are available for identification by the informed reader, and that the purpose of reading a text is to locate and define its meaning…they read to find “the answer (1).”  I’m going to extend and push Linkon’s view, to that with a holistic sense of learning.  As Collins’ pointed out “…in solving mathematics problems, students rely on their knowledge of standard textbook patterns of problem presentation rather than on their own knowledge of problem-solving strategies or intrinsic properties of the problems themselves (2).”  Students stubbornly and knowingly avoid thought-driven entanglement—about any subject.

So how we do get students to overcome memorizing skills as “stitching buttonholes”, rather become aware and embrace idea knots so they can learn, absorb, and transfer skills throughout their educational tenure—and more importantly beyond?  We coach.

I was delighted at Collins’ pedagogical approach; personally speaking, my best teachers took on a coach role, over an instructor.  Similar, but pivoting slightly from the sample, in a few weeks I will introduce Socratic discussions/questioning.  Talk about magic! I love that day! Its like academic 20 questions, only better; the partners are given a sheet with several questions, the first being “What is History?”, then half way through “How many of the events during a given time period are left out in a history of that time period?, finally, “How can we begin to judge a historical point of view?.”  Circling back to the idea of chaos, this exercise exposes, and holds their hand while they realize our harsh reality: all questions don’t have one answer.  More importantly, I could easily stand in front of the class instructing such a comment until my face turned blue, but I coached and “oversaw the students’ [independent] learning” (Linkon 2).  I’ve observed students hold and cherish an idea/concept more, once they make it “their own.”  And coaching cuts out the middleman holding up this, selfish possession process—aka you, the teacher.  By putting critical thinking, analyzing skills, a broader worldly perspective, and discussion questions on a silver platter for students to take, it automatically becomes their own.  Which, when applied again, makes students much more engaged and generates an expansive effect on their classroom participation and overall comprehension.

The article on “Cognitive Apprenticeship” (Collins, Brown and Holum) enshrines principles and experiences of learning that bring to mind such historical figures as Benjamin Franklin and Benito Juarez.  Both these leaders used trade apprenticeships as springboards for advancement and lifetimes of self-development.  However, I wondered whether apprenticeship provides an apt paradigm for teaching the more abstract subject of literature?  After all, Stanley Fish argues that poetry is such an indeterminate art form that it blurs the distinction between the realms of subjectivity and objectivity.  Does the apprenticeship paradigm apply to this type learning?

I recall Benjamin Franklin, who was one of 17 children in his family.  His father withdrew him from school at age ten and sent him to work as an apprentice in his brother’s print shop in Boston.  Under the reputedly harsh tutelage of his brother James, Benjamin learned how to set type and help compose pamphlets.  He began to submit newspaper articles anonymously.  In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin opened his own print shop.  He became an excellent printer, mathematician, inventor, diplomat, and author, who helped write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The “Cognitive Apprenticeship” article seems to exemplify how a rigorous, close learning foundation can launch someone like Franklin.  It emphasizes that students must actively use their knowledge, tackle difficulties, and acquire the confidence to expand and improve in other areas.

 Benito Juarez is another hero who seems to fulfill this vision.  I have visited the village of Guelatao high up in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico where he was born into  poverty.  Juarez was a Zapotec Indian who became an orphan at age twelve.  In desperation, he walked barefoot some fifty miles to the Oaxaca state capital.  In Oaxaca, a Franciscan friar adopted Juarez and put him to work in a bookbinding apprenticeship in his home.  All the implements of the bookbinding trade are on view today in the room of the adobe house where Juarez lived and worked.  In this humble, hands-on workshop and abode, he also learned Spanish, reading and writing, and he found a path to law school.  Juarez became Mexico’s Minister of Justice, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a five-term President, who established the rule of law in the Constitution of 1857.  

I believe that a crucible of apprenticeship can against all odds transform individuals, particularly those of such determination and talent.  However, I cannot exactly envision Franklin or Juarez in a classroom learning literature as “cognitive apprentices.”  How does apprenticeship apply to a field that is more organic and to classes that are less intensive than a full-time, close relationship with a master teacher?  I concluded that key principles do apply to the teaching of literature, but that the active practice of writing is also required.  Apprenticeship is a hands-on process.  Some of the authors we read this week underscore this type engagement and the need to make personal connections with a text.  Student-centered learning requires the teacher to help relate a poem meaningfully to students’ lives and encourage them to see differently and struggle with their own attempts at writing (Showalter.)  Rabinowitz asserts that the very ambiguity of literature requires a teacher to provide practical analytical devices as keys to comprehension.  And Linkon shows how a piece of literature can be introduced into a larger framework that enlarges a student’s understanding of conceptual relationships.  She provides a toolkit – beyond the chisels and strips of leather that I saw in Juarez’s workroom – which any apprentice requires for an immediate and lifetime experience of effective learning.  At its best, this is what education can do.        

If we are all on an exploratory path towards enriched knowledge shouldn’t the vehicle that carries us vary as widely and vividly as the differences in ourselves?  Despite making hypothesis, claims, and conclusions throughout our educated and professional careers we’re all merely clawing at anything we can get beneath our nails on a continuous and changing investigation towards an indefinite destination.

Sherry Linkon’s The Visible Knowledge Project says it beautifully when she explains her approach to critical reading “with the underlying assumption that the significance of “meaning” of any text, then, pursues the identification of these multiple layers and meanings.”  So, where do we begin?  Meghan Short told an apt anecdote above about she’s experienced her students searching simply for the “right” answer.  Linkon goes on to challenge us to debunk our own assumptions and break apart the frameworks of mistaken intentions we’ve received throughout our learning lives.  Not only do we form bad mental habits of searching for the “right” answer, but we are finitely limited by the stretch of time in which we are expected to learn.  There are many unfortunate truths to reckon with and it is hard not to come away feeling a little discouraged by the odds which are stacked against us as students and teachers, institutionally as well as personally. 

If we are to embark on the new exploration that Sherry is proposing it seems that, like many others, she is proposing a paradigm shift in our thinking of how learning is measured.  Specifically, how we are to tangibly prove that students are exploring, reflecting, and contextualizing that which they read and may eventually write…. This is the new scaffolding on which our institutions may be able to re-inspire the intrinsic value of learning.  I very much love her idea of the research portfolio.  Finally, a specific idea to try!!!  Specifically, the portfolio would be a less formalized interaction between reader and text (and vice-versa) and therefore would encourage the journey and not the destination mentality that would allow students to get to know the process of critical reading and introduce their own writing as a form of reciprocal action where a grade is not begging the answer of the “right” answer.

At a certain point, Linkon notes that the fact that her students “liked” the project was not fully what she intended.  To this, I ask the question:  Does the teacher’s intention outweigh the student’s?  After all, if the students are practicing the “Defining Critical Reading Practices” outlined in our other reading: Self-awareness, recursivity, inquisitiveness, connectivity, and open-ended synthesis, then what does it really matter?  The student’s intercommunication with texts results in learning.  The fact that they enjoyed it at all is a triumph over apathy and signifies the value gained from engagement.

The thing that struck me the most about this week’s readings was the focus on demystifying how experts analyze literature, and moving away from thinking about one correct “answer.”  In her article “The Reader’s Apprentice,” Sherry Linkon delves into this as she says, “we teach skills and ways of thinking through demonstration,” but this method “can leave students with the impression that the process of analyzing cultural texts is natural and instinctual.  Unintentionally, we hide the effort involved, making textual analysis seem simple and straightforward” (247, 248).  I know that I have been guilty of making students think this even when I believe I’m teaching them how to read a text.  I have a vivid memory of talking about Tennyson’s “Ulysses” with ninth graders, which they found very challenging.  I offered some starting points for discussion and they continued to look baffled and unsure.  Finally, one student said to me, “It’s easy for you, you’ve got the answers on your poem in front of you.”  It was my turn to be baffled as I held up an identical copy to the poem they had in front of them without any sort of “answer key” (what would that even look like?!) on it.  They had never considered that I was simply thinking about the poem and talking about it; I had never considered that they thought I was just telling them the one “right answer.”

This week’s readings touch on many things that were going on in that exchange—novices often approach things like a multiple choice problem—as Linkon says in “Developing Critical Reading,” students believe “texts have set meanings that are available for identification by the informed reader, and that the purpose of reading a text is to locate and define its meaning” (para 2). Students also don’t realize that there is an awful lot going on behind the scenes for practiced readers, and students lack an understanding of the idea that literature can, and does, mean something different to all people depending many factors.

Even though I want students to understand that there are several possible interpretations, there does need to be some guidance about how to get to an interpretation that seems well-reasoned and sensible. Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading discusses this—he accepts the idea that texts can mean something different to readers, but he also promotes the idea that there are certain conventions, symbols, approaches in literature which guide readers as they construct meaning.  One example he gives is that a cross would never work as a symbol for Judaism in a religious parable (24) because there are certain interpretations of meaning which are not open to us.  Elaine Showalter also talks about this in “Teaching Poetry,” as she gives some practical suggestions for ways to approach poetry with students.  This balance is what I want to strive for—having some concrete ways of discussing things with my students where they can see my thought process and understand how I came to interpretation without making them think it is the one right answer.