Perhaps I am too easily influenced by the things I read in my grad. classes, because I am already incorporating what we read this week into my teaching. For example, I was already planning on teaching a few Hemingway pieces from In Our Time, mostly because that’s the only book we have enough copies of to give out, but also because I read most of his stories last semester and loved them. I now have every intention to have my Honors 10th grade students dig through Interchapter VII as Scholes did. While he’s right that it will be tempting to “show off” what I know now about the text and its context, I’m going to let them analyze first with what they know and then introduce them to some of the “principles and procedures that lead to strong interpretive positions” (30). I’d love to see some of them move from understanding the allusions to putting the whole piece together as a larger comment on “a world where human qualities are regularly crushed and brutalized by social and biological forces too powerful for individuals to resist” (35).

Likewise, as of today, I am asking my 12th grade AP students to pay more attention to not only the experiences they bring to the texts they read, but also to the approach they naturally take. I told them that I tend to lean toward a more psychological or gendered approach, and I told them that one my classmates (that was Todd!) said last week that he tends toward archetypal readings. I want students to pay more attention to their own theoretical approaches. As I told them today, I realize now that I need to empower my students more by helping them to become more aware of (1) what they bring to the text and (2) the power they have to interpret on their own.

I want students to understand that there is no one way to interpret Hamlet’s behavior—perhaps he is mad, perhaps not—but that they have the power to decipher on their own what they believe to be the case. This recalls something in Linkon’s article: “It is the combination of these [multiple habits and practices] that generate the excitement of scholarly work—the moment when everything changes, when research and reflection transform a story or painting, making available more complex insights into both the text and the world that it represented” (252-3). During my thesis-writing experience so far, I have had several of these ah-ha moments myself (in between the hair-pulling and nail-biting moments), and I really want my students to share this transformative experience, particularly the AP students who are about to enter college classrooms where that kind of inquiry and analysis will make them more competitive and better-equipped to succeed.

I wonder whether my excitement (which I swear is real) about reading these pieces stems, in part, from my generally negative opinion of education pedagogy. I have often found myself frustrated with the simplistic and childish ways some educational gurus suggest we change our teaching, but these two texts have both made the case that we should adjust our teaching of reading in a way that makes sense to me. It’s logical to help the students to get stronger and more confident as readers and to do so in a way that moves them from a basic understanding to a more complex and meaningful criticism of texts we read.  It also seems particularly useful since the pieces seem to be directed at college-level courses, and I want to effectively prepare my Honors and AP level students for college-level work.