One of Blau’s criteria for achieving performative literacy is “tolerance for ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.” This struck me as one of the major problems that I see with my students on a daily basis. At my school, senior year is divided into AP Literature or “regular” English 12. I teach the “regular” sections. Although I do have some solid readers, most of them are inexperienced, or just not that interested in reading literature.
Whenever I try to get to the bottom of this distaste for reading in English class (which is often), I usually get some response about how the reading is “stupid” or “doesn’t make sense.” When I probe more about what is “stupid” or “does not make sense” about a reading, it usually has to do with some ambiguity in a reading. Students want answers, they are waiting around for me to tell them what a text means, so they can write it down in their notebooks and dutifully re-hash whatever I said on the test. To try to combat this reliance on my readings of texts, I stopped giving them “answers,” I decided to leave interpretation up to them. Easy right? Well, not so much. The problem then became that many of the students would just give up. They had no persistence when it came to literature with any sort of ambiguity in a text, or when a text’s meaning was not obvious right away. There was a near riot when I tried to use William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say” as a warm up (ok, I am exaggerating, but there was some yelling and they were not happy).

The other problem that I have with this approach is that instead of coming up with an interpretation on their own, students grasp onto the first interpretation that someone in class presents. Now often these opening interpretations are good starting points, but they are no means the end of the conversation. Also, sometimes they could definitely be considered incomplete or missed readings. They will go out of their way to come up with spurious, often logic-defying evidence to back up an interpretation presented by someone else instead of forming a new one on their own.
Students today are just not interested in any sort of grey area. They want everything to be black and white. I think it may have to do with the testing culture that these students have been surrounded by their whole educational careers. It does not really matter what has caused it, it needs to be addressed in some way. Reading Blau, I realized my “I am just not going to give any answers” is not really the solution. I need to help them understand the mental processes involved in reading and interpreting and foster an environment where students can learn to trust themselves. Hopefully, if I can adopt some of Blau’s ideas and activities I can lead them to be more accepting of multiple interpretations and the ambiguity that goes along with a literature reading.