My high school English teachers would ask me why I loved reading fantasy so much. They were all classic and gen lit people. I told them that I want a story, something that doesn’t reflect real life, where the characters and world are engaging and I don’t feel like I have to analyze everything the author says for a hidden meaning.
Heavy reading is for school, my fun time is for reading fun things!
On the one hand, I think the answer he gave isn’t worth many marks.
On the other hand, the number of marks that he gets on this single 5th grade question couldn’t possibly affect his future education, happiness or success even one iota, so nobody should probably care too much.
It is hard to come up with open-ended, semi-philosophical questions that actually get at what you want the students to truly think about. Luckily in physics I could avoid this by sticking to problem solving… but every once in a while I would try to put some open-ended questions and the responses were ALL OVER THE PLACE. I blamed myself for not wording the questions more carefully, and it really is hard.
But that’s exactly what the question in the original post ISN’T doing. The teacher isn’t asking the student to decode the author’s original intent. The teacher is asking the student to analyze HIS OWN responses to the book. How did this book make YOU feel? What thoughts did it trigger in YOU? What is YOUR interpretation of it? These answers may or may not align with the author’s intent, but that’s not really the point. The point is to teach kids to become more thoughtful and involved readers by encouraging them to think about how they engage with the text.
That said, I think the wording of the question is awful. But the pedagogical tradition it’s emerging from is the diametric opposite of the “decode the hidden meaning” school.
I fully endorse this answer. I’ll also add that the kids I’ve known, both when I was in school and as a teacher, who give answers like this are often giving them because they’re trying to get out of work.
I’ve been doing a lot lately with kids on the work of engaging actively with your text: asking questions of it, wondering why things happen, responding emotionally. Once as I circulated during reading time, a great reader hadn’t made any notes on his reactions. “Why not?” I asked, and he answered cheerfully that he hadn’t had any reaction to the text. I think he expected me to reiterate the lesson and then leave him alone, so he could go back to reading.
Instead I pulled him back to my desk and explained in my best quiet-but-intense voice that he was failing at the assignment, that learning to engage with the text is a crucial skill, that if he wasn’t reacting to the text he wasn’t growing as a reader, and that it was precisely these skills that he hadn’t yet developed that he most needed to practice. I assigned him extra homework of taking the book home and writing down reactions to it.
He was mortified. But the next day he brought back a page full of beautiful reactions to the text, and he couldn’t have been prouder of himself.
If I were this kid’s teacher, I’d be tempted to say, “If you didn’t learn anything from the book, then you’ve failed the assignment. Read the book again, and this time you’ll need to write a paper on what you’ve learned. This is extra homework for you.”
Because you might hate Bridge to Terabithia (I’m not fan of it myself), but it’s a very well-written book that has a lot of substance to it. If you absolutely hate it, then you can pay attention to your reasons for hating it and learn something about yourself as a reader. If you learn nothing from reading a book like BtT, you’ve failed as a reader.
I don’t really have any opinion on the subject. However, I am intrigued by:
What’s this about?
Ugh. Having to take notes on fiction would have made me stabby even as a 10 year old. It completely ruins the immersion. If the kid was a great reader like you say, he probably felt the same way. I don’t even know how it’s even compatible with fully emotionally engaging in a work of fiction.
Heh. I know how you feel. But the reason why I liked the Inferno and TSatF was because of how much they pulled me in when I read them. De gustibus, I guess.
Newbery Medals tend to get awarded to books with a sudden, tragic death, since it “means so much more” than a straightforward story.
On the third hand, this is the age where he will learn the study habits that will affect his future education, happines and success, so someone should care at little.
This reminds me of my kid’s reaction in our version of second grade:
Assignment:* List five interesting facts from this article.*
Kid: I can’t do this. There are lots of facts, but they are all really boring.
I went and had a chat with her teacher, who brilliantly re-worded the assignment to:
Assignment: List five facts from this article, how would you make them interesting to a new reader?
The kid used many exclamation marks. She rewrote more than five facts and got bonus points. The teacher told her that if she ever got stuck that way again, she could work out what was really wanted (list five facts) and go from there. Fantastic teacher.
Some of this reminds me of my eldest, now 25, who really came into his own academically in college. His explanation? “I learned to figure out how to give the teachers what they meant to ask for.”
We got the very beginnings of touchy feely crap when I was in a public HS back in the mid 70s. What the fuck, I am SO not fucking going to keep a personal journal and actually fucking let the assholes in school read it, let alone a fucking teacher. My personal life is personal and not going to go public with anything. I did the absolute bare minimum, and transliterated it into the greek alphabet. Teacher bitched me out, sent me to the principal, dragged my mother down to the school. Honestly, why they put me back in public school after the crap in 7th grade make me wonder if my parents got replaced by pod people. She simply pointed out that yes there was an assignment to keep the damned journal, nothing in the assignment said it couldn’t be kept in a different alphabet. It was up to the teacher to deal with the results. Of course, they changed the assignment after that, so it sucked to be in the later classes. :rolleyes:
I detest touchy feely crap. I am high functioning aspie and have issues with dealing with emotions publically normally. The idea that someone can just open a notebook and read my personal thoughts is totally abhorrent to me. I had gotten enough abuse when we first moved to that damned town which is why I ended up doing an assortment of private schools. Kids are very cruel to people that are different. Being a protestant and new kid in a basically catholic and everybody is related small town school sucks ass, and to have a damned teacher pile on as well made my 4th grade year a living hell. The montessori school I floated in and out of was great, they didn’t force the touchy feely crap, I could pretty much learn as fast as I wanted to - at 5 pupils to 1 teacher for almost all the classes [athletics and drama had larger classes] and literally a private tutor for spanish. [the 2 times I got popped into public school was because my kiddy shrink said I could be ‘mainstreamed’ back to public school so I wouldn’t have an hour of commuting every day. The catholic school was the first one I went to before we found the montessori school, and the french boarding school was for the hell of it and we had an exchange going with that particular school if we wanted to do a year or to overseas.]
Ah, you’ve nailed it. I hate Bridge to Terabithia. Not because it’s a bad book or the life lesson it teaches is a bad one. I just hate that life lesson. Namely, sometimes people die unexpectedly, even young people, even people you love, even people you can’t live without.
Life seems determined to beat me over the head with that one and it’s probably not a bad thing I got exposed to it first in literature rather than in real life.
I thank every one for their responses. I have a little more fellow feeling with the ones who are like me and thank their lucky stars they never have to summon up a response to a book they don’t care about ever again, but the ones like the above are very helpful and will probably make me a better homework supervisor.
For the record, my main objection was the personal wording of the question. I wouldn’t have minded:
What life lessons do you think the author was trying to convey?
or
What life lessons do you think Jesse Aarons learned?
yeah, that’s pretty much why I let his answer stand. There were about 500 other questions about the book over the last three weeks and on the rest of them he did his level best.
Oh and I looked up the list of Newbery Winners and I retract my blanket condemnation. It’s not all depressing downers. The Westing Game won, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, so can’t be all bad. Though come to think of it, I think there’s a sad death in each of those too.
I think as long as you explain to him why his answer will almost certainly be scored low and he’s okay with a low score on one question, that’s fine. But if you let the kid turn that in with the expectation that because he honestly didn’t learn anything he’ll get full points, you’re unfairly setting him up for disappointment…and similar scores later for similar lazy answers to poorly-written questions.
King of the Wind and The Witch of Blackbird Pond won also, and there were no sad deaths in either of those, unless you count the Godolphin Arabian’s dam not makin it through the foaling. I don’t remember anyone dying in Mixed-Up Files, Shadow of a Bull, A Wrinkle in Time, or Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry off-hand, either. They weren’t big balls of sunshine, rainbows, and unicorn farts, no. But neither are award-winning adult works of literature, ya know?
My guess is that the teacher didn’t want that type of analysis but to actually challenge the reader to connect with the book on a personal level. That may not be a valuable assignment, to you, but it is a valid question.
See? This is it exactly! Yeah!
I love that you transliterated it in Greek. In high school we were supposed to keep journals, and I wrote mine in Danish. (The teacher’s goal was to help us develop a habit of journal-writing, which I already had but completely lost once it was a mandatory assignment.)
On another note, when it comes to literary analysis, my strong opinion is that less is more for a long time. It is so easy to kill the love of reading by asking the kid to analyze every single freaking thing, or stop in the middle and answer questions. My daughter is 11, and I’m now starting to ask her a couple of questions for her assigned literature readings. I pick two per book, and they’re things like “What does the protagonist want and what stops her from getting it?” NOT soul-searching stuff, because she shouldn’t be forced to expose personal feelings if she doesn’t want to, or to lie and pretend about her personal feelings. And some books–the ones that hit them really deep–you shouldn’t try to discuss at all with a young teen. Just let them have the experience, your interference will kill it.
Seriously, literary analysis is the thing that is way too easy to overdo. Yes, we can learn from reading–but dissecting a story is not what a story is actually for, and IMO way too many kids get to college thinking that a story is primarily a puzzle to be solved–just figure out the answer the teacher wants and get a grade. (What? You mean people can enjoy books and love the characters?)
Slight tangent: this thread gives me hope.
We have a toddler, and one of the things I’m not looking forward to dealing with as she gets older is this idea that every single one of your feelings should be out on display, on demand, for the whole world to paw at will. Part of it comes from teenagers (when I was fourteen I would have killed anyone who read my diary, now fourteen-year-olds happily put theirs online), but part of it is from adult sources. Reality shows: now sob about your crippled mother!!! And teachers: now tell the class exactly what you’re feeling! I had this guidance counsellor in seventh grade who kept trying to get me to ‘open up’, on the grounds that I had to be hideously out of touch with my feelings if I wouldn’t *shaaaare *them with her. I never figured out the right way to tell her that I had no problem talking for hours about my feelings with my friends; I just couldn’t see any reason to share them with some nun I despised.
The implication is that, if you won’t strip and splay on demand, you must be ashamed of your feelings, or uncomfortable with them, or out of touch with them. The concept of privacy is completely ignored; eroded. And we both want our kid to know that some things are private. Not because you’re ashamed of them; just because you don’t feel like telling the whole freaking world. And you don’t have to.
So it gives me hope that there are people in this thread who feel the same way. I was starting to feel like we were the only ones out there.
I think it’s a dumb question, especially since I spend a good chunk of my (college-level) lit classes trying to disabuse students of the notion that the purpose of literature is to teach Important Life Lessons. (Now I’m reminded of one spectacular train-wreck of a paper by a student who sincerely believed that Polonius was the smartest character in Hamlet, and the play was only a tragedy because the other characters refused to heed the Important Life Lessons he was doing his best to impart to them.)
That said, I wouldn’t give any credit for his answer, as it doesn’t display any serious engagement with the book. (As a few other people have suggested, I’d totally give credit for an “I think the book was meant to teach people XXX, but it didn’t really work for me because…” answer.)
When my daughter had to do it, I told her to either just do what she didn’t mind sharing, or to make something reasonable up. I didn’t believe she had to share anything personal with anyone if she didn’t want to, but I believed she had to get in the spirit of the assignment. At least she was conscientious enough to do it each night. When I had something like that, I’m afraid I would be sitting there a couple days before it was due, thinking, “Uh, what did I do last Wednesday?”
When I had my class journal, they knew they had to share one entry with me. I told them they needed to write something they didn’t mind me reading. I also told them I was not the journaling police and was not going to follow them around all day to make sure they were writing exactly what happened. I also told them I wouldn’t read anything else, and I didn’t.
It’s a nice habit to develop, and some kids do continue it. I wish I had.
I disagree with people who says it’s not an acceptable answer, it is, considering how the question is worded. It’s not the job of the student to interpret a question in order to answer what he may think the teacher wants to hear.