 |
 |
Patrick: I couldn't agree more. Asking students to state the apparant meaning of a contextless paragraph is a dumb idea and I've told the instructor who assigned it exactly that, though in more tactful terms so that maybe she'll continue to listen to me and change what she's doing. But that's the problem. Whatever I do to try to change my own teaching style and that of other instructors, these sorts of problems keep getting themselves created, and students need strategies to help them work out the surface meanings of prose passages. And although this assignment seems misguided, it doesn't seem all that dumb in general to give students some tools for doing this; otherwise they are locked into just skimming, and in doing so oftem mistake the meaning of passages completely. (Yeah, I know there's no "right" meaning of any passage, but as the pig in the Boynton cartoon said, "There's no such thing as a wrong answer, but if there were, that certainly would have been it. Some readings just don't connect with the text that has generated them.) If we don't teach students how to read 19th c prose, will they be forever unable to read anything written before 1985? Roger: Thanks for the tip on Brown and Yule. I have that book on my shelf but haven't looked at it in many moons. I'll go blow off the dust. Doug