I said in an earlier blog post that I came to grad school because I wanted to know what best practices were according to a community of professionals. After having completed a course on writing instruction and being a quarter of the way into a class on reading instruction—well, I’m starting to think ignorance was bliss. But not in the way one might first assume.

One point that Blau makes—and I couldn’t agree more—is that rereading is key to understanding literature. I know this to be true of myself and I’ve observed it multiple times in others as well. This is something I try to facilitate in my classroom—and it’s been a point of contention.

There’s a log book in the English department at my school, broken into 3 week increments for signing out novels. I had one signed out for my 9th grade class earlier this year, S.E. Hinton’s That was then, this is now. It’s about 150 pages, and an “at grade level” read for my students. There is only a class set, so all reading is done in class. We read the novel within the 3 weeks, but my students were writing about and discussing the themes in the novel—drug use, growing up, racism. I wanted them to be able to reread as we did these assignments, so I checked the sign out sheet and as no one was signed up, I signed it out again.

I will spare you the details of what happened, but I had a serious disagreement with a colleague who came in a week later and wanted to use the book. She interrogated me angrily in front of a few early comers to class that morning—why was it taking so long? Do you really need a month to read that book?

Incidents like this, not to mention the breadth of what we’re expected to cover, makes doing this type of careful analysis and rereading so difficult that I have questioned myself and fretted more than I care to admit. My foray into grad school has pointed me in the direction of what practices are best and confirmed some of the practices I was already employing—but what good is a tool if my hands are tied behind my back?

I acknowledge that the answer is as simple as doing the best I can, but it’s distasteful to me to have to compromise what I consider the core principles of my work. Blau said in his writing that teachers are often put in the “professionally humiliating” position of being told what and how to teach, and he could not have been more right.