Not the Voice

I just finished reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and this particular quote stuck out at me:

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." (p. 135)

There is something about this that just screamed YES! to me. In all of my pre-service readings, we read about and discuss what it is for students to come to a text and decipher it, what it used to mean for students to read "literature" or the "canon" and regurgitate pre-approved interpretations that would get you into an Ivy League university but wouldn't get you thinking for yourself. This is something that, especially coming from an author, is a direct challenge to that long-held tradition of university interpretation - of what constitutes good literature/how we should or should not respond to that literature.

Because it isn't the voice that commands the story. As much as some people will argue this is true, once a novel or an op-ed or a children's book is out of the author's hands and in the hands of the public, the way that piece is received and interpreted and responded to is going to be dynamic. It's going to change. The ears that a text falls on are going to command how that text is interpreted - how it should be read. And since there are any given number of ears for a single text to fall on, well... the interpretations will be varied, to say the least.

I struggle with the knowledge that this approach to reading and literature is so abhorrent to the academic community at large. I know that many pre-service programs these days advocate for such approaches to the teaching of literature, but there still seem to be so many challenges to fully implementing a curriculum that embraces varied interpretation, even when "progressive" teachers are supposedly filling the ranks left by older teachers who cling to the conservative, bottom-up style of instruction.

I start my practicum next Monday. I received my placement today, and all I can think about is how amazing this book was, how it is a book for people who love the look and feel and sound of words... and how I am going to inflict such readings on my poor guinea pig students. By the gods, I'll make them respond... even if the response is to hate the book!

Making Meaning.

So, as a pre-service English teacher, I have been exposed to an awful lot of text dealing with the teaching of writing. It's one of those things that I never really thought about before I went off on this crazy journey, but it's definitely something I'm thinking about now. What is writing? What does it mean to teach writing?

Even after two years in an education program and coming out of a class on teaching writing just this December, I still feel like I haven't a clue as to how to answer these questions. More specifically, I still don't really know how to expose my students to writing and explain to them how to do it without simply explaining what I do as a writer. This of course has its potential benefits as well as serious drawbacks (the most obvious being that my students are not, in fact, me, and therefore will not learn the same way that I do or did), but I am at a loss to otherwise give writing instruction to students who don't really want to write, much less have someone comment on whether or not they're doing it well.

I'm a woman with many interests. I want my fingers in every pot. I want to travel and I want to experience the world through a distillable lens. I want to play with language and I want to play. But most of all I want my own life experience to inform my teaching so that my students can be equally interested in life - equally desirable of having their fingers in all the pots. I want to foster their sense of curiosity because they're human and they have one whether or not they'll admit it. And I feel, on the brink of my student teaching practicum, that I have been utterly unprepared to do this.

They say that one in every five teachers leaves the profession before they've spent an adequate amount of time getting their feet wet (about five years). They say that this rate is highest in urban centers where a multitude of factors make for (in)tense learning situations. They say you'd better harden your shell, because the kids will eat you alive if you show even the smallest bit of compassion for them as human beings.

I say it's all bullshit.

I will not be one of those teachers who doesn't care about her students. I will not be one of those teachers who gets scared off by administrative bullies or the testing culture. I will not be the teacher who walks away after two years because it's not what I thought it was going to be. And I will not be the teacher who goes home at night and doesn't reflect on her own practice. Because this is not who I am. This is not what I want. And I won't let it happen.

I will reflect. I will rejoice. And I will renew, when the situation calls for it.