Newkirk Introduction Notes

Overarching Comments

1. One thought I am having is about order. Is the order that the pieces are in the existing draft the order they will be in the final book?
2. A second thought I am having is about set-ups: what will readers need to know to have some context to understand the readings. Particularly something like Looking for Trouble, for example, published in 1984, so many years ago. Perhaps just a few quick sentences of reflection before or at the head of each piece. What would these reflections speak about? 
1. What is this a piece about? 
2. Why was it written?
3. Who was it written for?
4. Why is it included? (?)

Or:

1. What was happening in your career when you wrote this and why did you write it?
2. What, minimally, in terms of context, will readers need to understand before they read this piece?
3. What still seems "good" or of value or relevant in regard to this piece?

1. Would we also need a quick overview for each section of the book (e.g. "Reading")? Or would we need this instead? Perhaps we could write a quick intro to each section which briefly introduces each piece in the section? 
2. Tom sometimes says things that stay with me for a very long time: his comment about teaching, from my interview with him, where he says, essentially, that people's pedagogical practices are less rooted in what "the research" says we should do when we teach writing and more rooted in what they've learned from their tribe and experience

READING

Wedding Crashers

Observations:

• Popular Culture
• Humor
• Confession
• Empathy for his students 

Feel Better: There is a quote on p. 2 that reads: "No writer can begin from scratch, explaining every term, providing a context for every point--much of this has to be assumed. The mismatch between this assumed knowledge and the actual prior knowledge of the reader is the source of most difficulty--or so I will argue."

Later he says something similar when sharing wedding crasher strategies: "Accept the fact that you may not understand some parts (it's not your fault). It happens to all readers. Bluff and pretend." (9)

There is something lovely about this. When we read something and we don't understand, it's not because we're stupid. It's the situation. Reading comprehension is only partially about us. It's also about what the writer assumed about us.

This wisdom and common sense--how come no one said things like this to me when I was in school or said them to my teachers so they could say them to me? He is demystifying learning and school, maybe even "being."

Essays on "Freedom"--I puzzled over this word. Why did Tom want to use this word. It struck me wrong, the wrong connotation. I kept hearing George W. Bush saying "They hate our freedoms" in his 2001 address to a joint session of Congress. Freedom is not a word that I feel comfortable with for some reason. It feels like the republicans own it.

Freedom from what? Maybe this is the trope I'll play with in the introduction. Freedom from...

That's what I think the freedom is about in this book. Freedom from a whole long list of tyrannies of thinking that we absorb through formal schooling. For example, freedom from thinking you are stupid because you read something and can't understand what's being said (see Wedding Crashers).

Looking For Trouble

Students frequently speak of the "hidden meanings" of poetry, and by that expression they usually mean hidden from them but open to another class of readers--professional readers, teachers. So long as the process of interpretation is unrevealed, myths of inspiration can persist; students will claim that they cannot read poetry because they are not good at getting hidden meanings. The poem comes to be viewed as a Tarot card. (756)

If, in the last section he is talking helping us feel better about reading comprehension, here he is helping us to feel better about literary interpretation. I think many of us can relate to the scenario he outlines here--not getting the "hidden meaning" of a text. You feel dumb. You don't see it. One of the students in his small scale research project says: I guess I just haven't got a great or even good poetic mind. (758)

Newkirk, though, is giving us a pass. You weren't shown how to see it, he explains. The professor was incentivized to come to class having already worked out the interpretation. You didn't see it when he was struggling and feeling dumb, upon an initial read. That part of the process was hidden. He struggled too, he just didn't show you his struggle. Newkirk wants profs to show their struggle:

If students never see instructors confused, never see them puzzled by a particular usage, never see how an interpretation is revised in subsequent readings, it is logical for the students to conclude that reading is inspired in the same way that Coleridge's composition of "Kubla Khan" was inspired (757)

He proposes a method of reading where students conduct a 1st, 2nd, 3rd reading and then share these with one another, and with their professor. Then he says: "The discussion then focused on ways of resolving this difficulty. This procedure led to an openness in the discussion because the working assumption was that all readers experience difficulty. Students were less likely to blame their own problems on an inability to read poetry. (764)

This is it in a nutshell: "procedures like the one I have described allow us all, teachers and students, to drop the masks that can inhibit learning. We can all act as the fallible, sometimes confused, sometimes puzzled readers that we are. We can reveal ourselves as learners, not always the most graceful of positions" (765).

Slow Reading 

One thing that just occurred to me is the way Tom is able to call on a range of different kinds of sources to help contextualize phenomena he is writing and thinking about. In this essay, for example, he references the Roman orator Seneca and then goes on two pages later to describe the shift to silent reading that took place in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th century. He puts things in a historical context in a way which is frequently useful. A thing he confesses and makes us feel better about: “I, for example, read slowly. I’m convinced part of this is physiological. When I am called upon to increase my pace, in a test for example, I am thrown off my game and often have to sample and skip. (4)

When Reading Becomes Work 

Not much here worth commenting on. I find myself a bit bored. Perhaps because I have read these before. I will say that they all are situated within a context of their times and sometimes feel a bit dated. I wonder if this is a problem.

How We Really Comprehend Nonfiction

I've read this one many times before, a few things that stand out:

1. There are two moments in the text where Tom makes his characteristic move of pushing back against conventional wisdom or common ideas

2. There is the passage, near the end, where he talks about failing to remember what he has read, in this case the book The Emperor of All Maladies. I used this last time when I wrote my piece on things TRN is making me feel better about.

Literacy and Loneliness

This is really one of my favorite pieces which gets me thinking about my dad the non-reader (of literature) and my son, the challenged reader (of most things). I think Tom gets so many things right in this piece and it is one of those things that I read and I think, oh yeah, that's where this idea of mine (that maybe reading is more about the experience of reading than WHAT we are reading or WHAT we are learning) came from--it actually wasn't mine.

I'm not sure there's so much to say about this piece, although, when I first slipped into it, the narrative at the beginning made me wonder if this shouldn't be the first selection in the reading section of the book.

WRITING

The First Five Minutes

Tom looks at "the gamble" of the writing conference for the student and teacher: "I see the writing conference as a dialectic encounter between teacher and student, in which both assume complex roles." (10)

What Tom wants: "the teacher follows the current of the student's language to a real insight" (7)

"We all tend to talk too much" (9)

when we listen and don't rush in to fill silences (11)

Teachers: Know When To Stop Talking

"How many of us, after all, say what we really want to say on the first try?" (also read the rest of this paragraph)--file this under "things TRN is making me feel better about"

"Maybe we all harbor, somewhere, that model of the brilliant, charismatic teacher..." this is quote about teachers never appearing rushed that I love so much (2)

Why Students Find Writing to Be Torture

Should this one maybe lead off the writing section? I like it so much...

Tom's story about Northeast MLA on p. 2 is another example of things he is making me feel better about.

Story about TRN taking Freshman English, himself, also add to "Things TRN Is Making Me Feel Better About..."

The Hedgehog or the Fox

Tom takes on James Moffett. Long, dense, challenging article.