With all this talk of embracing difficulty and recursive reading (practices that we are engaging in as “experts”, according to our readings) I am reminded of real-life experiences I have had trying to make the work of reading “visible” to my classes in the past. After hearing from a reading specialist, years ago, that my students probably didn’t understand it was NORMAL to re-read things, I tried modeling this behavior in class. Many times, we would read something, I would stop and point out that it didn’t (on first pass) make sense, and then tell them “this is where I would have to go back and read it again.” I got a considerable amount of eye-rolling. I think that, for this group of students, the idea of “wasting” one’s time reading any of the stuff we were doing in class, let alone (God forbid) RE-reading it…well, it was just unfathomable. I won’t pretend to have solved this problem. And I’m not saying this in a negative “the strategy will never work” kind of way. However, I did start asking myself why my students gave up on reading so easily, as well as other pursuits in English class.
One of my jobs as a ninth grade teacher (and the one universally dreaded by my colleagues) was to drag the class kicking and screaming through a term paper. One of the most unpleasantly surprising moments for me was getting the ninth graders in the library and onto the computers, suggesting they start their research with a google search, and having all their hands fly up within moments. “Miss…” they would say, gesturing at the list of search results. “What do I do now?” Baffled by their lack of expertise in, of all areas, COMPUTERS, I would suggest that they start opening some of the links and looking at them. Aghast, the students would look at me. “What…ALL of them? That’ll take forever!”
I tell this story to lead into a question I’ve mulled over for some time. Is today’s instant-gratification-on-demand-twittering (sorry, Prof)-soundbyte culture making all of us too impatient to suffer through difficulty? I, myself, am guilty of sparking to anger as soon as my screen won’t load. I have been known to hastily close a website that didn’t instantly reward me with an answer and surf to another. But as an Atari-wave Gen Xer, I didn’t encounter the internet until I had graduated from college. Was there enough “waiting” in my upbringing that I can still work through problems with some shred of patience?
I am not trying to diss the internet culture or say “GAWD, these kids today…” I just wonder how to present thinking and waiting as a positive activity in an era when even I, admittedly, no longer wish to wait. Can there be a slow-thinking movement to match the slow-food movement? What can we, as teachers, do to bring challenges back in fashion?
To close, I demonstrate with a picture of my 10-month-old, who shocked me yesterday by overcoming great difficulty in order to escape from the house. Babies are wired to overcome difficulty. What happens to us that makes us lose that?
Babies take on difficulty with no problem.
I’ve heard other people talk about the need for a slow-thinking counterpart to the slow-food movement, and exactly how to encourage that slowing down is something I’m very interested in. In fact, the “think alouds” we’ll be doing this week are my own attempt to slow down thinking — and even more importantly, to make thinking visible in a way that we can study it.
I hear what you’re saying about our instant gratification culture, and (cue defense of Twitter) I actually see (and like to use) Twitter to fight this. As several of our readings already emphasized, novice thinkers and readers fight against ambiguity, preferring to settle upon an immediate answer rather than hold and consider in their mind several conflicting interpretations. Expert learners have learned it’s okay to defer meaning, and they are comfortable not knowing, or at least not knowing now. Because Twitter is an endless stream of fragments, it’s actually an ideal space to practice deferring meaning. Outside of my academic-related tweets (and actually even including many of those), I use Twitter to rehearse ambiguity, writing provocative, surreal, or satirical posts meant to leave readers frustrated. Dadaists would have loved Twitter.
Most people look to technology to come up with answers; I like to see how technology can make us ask more questions.
More thoughts on Twitter…
I agree with Alicia that today’s students tend to want instant answers and instant gratification. But, I love the way Twitter provides a forum to continue the conversation about the text! I am seriously considering using Twitter with my classes in the future as a way to keep the conversation going. I feel that, all too often, students have the “one and done” mentality, and they think that we’re “done” with a work and the ideas it raises after we’ve discussed it for one class period.