Adults Read Aloud, Too

Some of the books I've read aloud with grown-ups

True confession: The first time I read Moby Dick, I hated it. The second time, I loved it. What was the difference? Time, purpose, and community.

The first time I was in high school. I had chosen the novel from a list of independent reading books because I was a reader, it was a classic, and I felt I should. Then I put off reading it until the weekend before it was due. After all, I was a reader—it would be no problem to have to sit and read a book all weekend. That was before I realized that everything I was familiar with from the book as plot was covered in 50 pages. That left another 350 pages of chapters with titles like (I kid you not) “Of the Whiteness of the Whale.” Who cared? I had to have this read by Monday!

The second time was 3 decades later. A high school daughter struggled with insomnia. Not wanting to leave her up alone in the middle of the night, I revived our elementary tradition of a bedtime story. Since the point was to get sleepy, we decided to go for the classics (no cliffhangers or thrillers allowed). And do you know what? It wasn’t boring. In fact, it was thoroughly enjoyable. We read as I imagine much of the original audience did: for an evening’s communal entertainment, one person reading aloud while the others mended a harness or knitted warm socks. But we had no pages due tomorrow—we had infinite time. The point was not to finish, but to while away the time between bedtime and falling asleep. So every time we had a question, or the text made us think of something, we’d stop and talk about it. Sometimes we did more talking than reading. And that was fine. We’d been successful: we’d passed the time, and we’d enjoyed each other and the book. 

One discussion I particularly remember, because from then on we frequently alluded to “the luxurious discomforts of the rich.” (Isn’t that a great oxymoron—luxurious discomfort?) The passage described the wonderful feeling we were so familiar with on a winter night in our Tokyo house burrowed under warm quilts without central heat:   

…[T]ruly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. (Moby Dick, ch. 11)

Did you realize THAT was in Moby Dick? 
Since that time, I’ve read many books aloud to my adolescent and later fully grown kids. I’ve also had the chance to read books with friends and with students. Here are a few other memorable grown-up read aloud experiences I’ve had:

• The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (With a good friend--the book doesn’t have to be a classic to offer opportunities for conversation.)
• Jane Eyre (With older kids, at a cabin by the beach on rainy summer afternoons. I can’t remember if that was before or after reading, separately, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, which is clever and smart and funny, and greatly enhanced by familiarity with Jane Eyre.)
• The Rosie Project (With a visiting grown daughter in the lull after the celebrative whirlwind weekend of the younger daughter’s graduation and wedding. Reading, we laughed so hard we snorted and teared up, and it was just the perfect time for that. See this blog for my processing of some of the more serious emotions of the time.) 

Maybe you listen to audio book to a similar effect. If so, excellent. For myself, I don’t listen well, so I have always been our family’s prime read-aloud reader. One of my daughters was all fired up to read me a book she loved in elementary school—The Book of Three. I thought, “Great! Love the initiative, and we can do it while I cook!” As it turned out, I just can’t follow audio without at least the visual of words to focus me. I still don’t listen to podcasts—I’d rather read the transcript! Plus, I feel like it would be harder to stop and start an audio book than to just pause and comment.

Maybe you participate in a book club to a similar effect. That’s good. And in some books, there are just too many conversations to remember them all for one big discussion at the end. Reading together may be a way to cultivate an appreciation for a classic, or to share a book that is so crammed with humor or insight or beauty that the whole experience cries out for a companion.

These experiences have enriched my own experience of reading, my thinking, and my relationships with the people with whom I’ve read. They’ve also informed my teaching because I want students to be enriched by reading in the same ways. I value reading aloud with high school students, especially short stories (see this blog) and plays (see this blog).  

If you’re looking for a different reading experience—whether because you love to read or because you haven’t yet found just the book that will ignite your latent reader—or if you’re feeling left out of the read aloud craze because you don’t have any young children around or because you’ll go stark raving mad if you have to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar aloud one more time—consider trying a read aloud just for fun, as a shared experience, with an adult friend or older child.

I recently read aloud another book to my oldest daughter. It was Fredrik Backman’s latest (if you’ve read My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, A Man Called Ove, or Beartown)—Things My Son Needs to Know about the World. Times have changed. I was reading on my Kindle from the free sample available on Amazon. My daughter was hemming curtains while her 2 children napped. But the experience of sharing reading was still the same.

Have you read aloud for fun with older children or adults? What book did you read and what did you learn from the experience? What book would you like to do this with? With whom?

Effective Scaffolding Motivates

“We’re going to do pull-ups,” said the fitness instructor last week. I burst into a peal of laughter that momentarily echoed around the gym. I have never in my life been able to do a pull-up, so that wasn’t even on my radar of possibility at age 54. 

Then she led us to this weight machine that pushes up under my feet with the amount of weight I set it for to assist my effort. It turns out that I CAN do a pull-up—with 95 pounds of help. It was HARD, but I DID it! That felt great! And maybe, with persistence, I could do it with less and less help! However far I get toward doing a completely unassisted pull-up, working on it increases my strength, muscle tone, and bone density—my real health goals at this point in life.

That pull-up apparatus struck me as a great analogy for the scaffolding I need to provide for students as they learn. Everyone knows what the goal is, values it, knows that the scaffolded attempt isn’t the end goal, but IS an important step, both in providing the motivation of knowing what it feels like and in exercising all the muscles needed for the end goal at the level those muscles are currently capable of. And that working toward the goal is the real goal.

What does that kind of scaffolding look like in an English class? Here are a few ideas: Painting the goals of proficiency in reading, writing, thinking, speaking, listening to promote buy-in. Differentiating according to students’ readiness, interest, and learning needs. Providing a lot of time for practice along with targeted instruction and formative feedback. Setting high expectations, with sign-posts of progress along the way for encouragement. 

I still have vivid memories of the President’s Physical Fitness Test from elementary school. I was a tomboy who prided myself on competing with the boys in every way. I played basketball, mastered boys’ push-ups, and grabbed the frogs and bugs out of their hands when they shoved them in my face hoping to see me scream and run away. The only thing that totally defeated me was the pull-up. For the President’s Physical Fitness Test, I had to hang. It’s been this little sliver of hidden shame all these years, finally exorcised by those words, “We’re going to do pull-ups” and the apparatus to help me do it. I love practicing my pull-ups now!

How do you scaffold learning to help students discover joy and motivation in doing things that had seemed too hard?

How Does Your Brain Grapple with Difficult Text?

Every once in a while I choose a hard book—often a canon classic. I do this for 2 reasons: (1) to continue to be a learner in my field of literature and (2) to understand what I’m asking students to do when I ask them to grapple with texts that are difficult for them. 

Because I love to read, and because I read a lot, I’m a pretty skilled reader. I don't even think about what my brain is doing to make meaning. But many students are not as skilled. So every once in a while it’s helpful to put myself in their shoes, so to speak. To read something that doesn’t naturally capture all of my attention and fully submerge me, until I emerge, blinking, into the real world again, 3 hours later—like the latest Inspector Gamache mystery or Blake Crouch sci-fi thriller. To read something where I need to think about monitoring my comprehension and making meaning from the text. To understand what I am asking my students to do when I ask them to read texts that are difficult for them.

My recent challenge was the Iliad. 

In my class, we talk about 7 strategies of effective readers. They (1) plan and monitor their comprehension, (2) determine importance, (3) ask questions, (4) visualize, (5) make connections, (6) make inferences, and (7) synthesize thinking. What did that look like as I read the Iliad?

(1) Plan and monitor comprehension: I wanted to understand why this text is considered a foundational work of literature to western culture, and to what extent, if any, that is still relevant today. And I want to think about the strategies I use when I encounter difficult text. There are 24 books in the Iliad, and I planned to read 1 per night. Sometimes I realized I’d read several pages and hadn’t really been paying attention. Sometimes I’d go back and re-read it. Sometimes I’d glance over it and decide it was not important to my plan, so I’d just move on. Sometimes (true confessions) I’d check Wikipedia. (Note: I do tell students to feel free to use resources to support your reading—but not to replace it. Decide for yourself whether you need the summary before to have a mental construct for what’s coming, or after to check your comprehension.)  
  
(2) Determine importance: There are so many characters and so many allusions to other Greek stories—sometimes I’d look them up (see next section) and sometimes I’d just decide all I really need to know about those pages is Hector fights and kills a bunch of Greek heroes—I don’t need to know all their back stories.

(3) Ask questions: There were factual questions for comprehension: Who are these various people and gods? How are they related? Which side are they on? Half the time, at first, I didn’t know whether I was reading about who I’ve traditionally thought of as the Greeks or the Trojans—Danaans, Argives, Achaeans are all synonyms for Greeks. Then there were the bigger questions: What is honor? What is worth fighting and dying for? What is winning? What are the women, the ordinary citizens of Troy, and the Greek families left behind for 10 years thinking? How much agency and responsibility do people actually have? How do humans and the divine interact?

(4) Visualize: The descriptions of armor, fighting, and killing are pretty vivid and pervasive. Sometimes I’d stop and search Google Images for things like “greaves.” This is going to lead right into connections….

(5) Make connections: After visualizing many Homeric battle scenes, I came in my daily Bible reading to the death of Saul, and suddenly I visualized that scene in a way I never had before. The Philistines even stripped him of his armor, just like the Trojans did Patroclus, though the Greeks finally reclaimed Patroclus’s body—as the people of Jabesh Gilead did with Saul’s (1 Samuel 31).  

(6) Make inferences: I really don't like Achilles. He has anger issues and no respect for women. (Not that any of them did--especially Agamemnon. Seriously--he offers to return #1 prize woman, plus the pick of the top 12 women of Troy when sacked, plus the hand of any 1 of his 4 daughters in marriage!)

(7) Synthesize: The gods make even the worst interpretations of the God of the Old Testament seem...trustworthy and just...by comparison. They bicker, compete, play favorites, make intentionally misleading promises, and just plain manipulate people for the sake of their own Olympian politics.

All told, I'm just really glad I didn't live in that world--it wasn't much of a Golden Age for men or women. But I am glad I read the book. I felt immersed in the world, culture, and values distant from me in time and place for the month it took me to work my way through it. It has enriched the way I think about any related story, concept, or allusion.  

Plus, it feels really cool be able to say, “Yes, I’ve read the Iliad.”

How does your brain grapple with difficult text? Why is that important?

P.S. The last time I blogged on my reading of a difficult text was with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Here's what I learned then. 

Sharing Faith-Full Living and Learning

Living the faith generationally: my sister, daughter, grandson, niece, and nephew

Don’t worry about writing about your faith. Live your faith, then write about life.

Gene Luen Yang, artist/author of American-Born Chinese, the first graphic novel nominated for the National Book Award, and of many other graphic novels since then, addressing the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in 2014, shared the wisdom one of his teachers had shared with him. That stuck with me, because I think it’s true of teaching as well. How do I share my faith with students? Live my faith, then teach about life. In fact, live my discipline, then teach life.

It’s the same good teaching strategies that engage students in deep learning about science, English, math, and music that engage them in deep learning about faith. If math and social studies are just school stuff that doesn’t connect to life outside the classroom, and if Bible is just another thing to learn at school, it will connect to life in exactly the same way. If, on the other hand, our subjects connect to life—how we communicate, make decisions about health and stewardship, evaluate the news, appreciate beauty and patterns around us, spend our leisure time, and use our knowledge and skills to love and serve our neighbors—then Bible class and the faith that it nourishes will also connect to life. 

Here are some strategies I’ve found helpful in making life connections for students with my subject area and, consequently, with my faith:

Stories: Stories engage many parts of our brains from the logic of cause and effect to the sensory experience of visualization and also stimulate emotional responses. As a result, stories result in durable learning. 

• I choose literature whose characters or themes offer stories that help us appreciate the beauty of creation, mourn its brokenness, and commit to restoring peace, justice, and right relationships, like Cry, the Beloved Country (see “Integrating Learning and a Faith-Full Life”). 
• I find news stories that intersect with the themes we study, like “The White Man in that Photo” and “The Teenager Who Saved a Man with an SS Tattoo.” 
• I tell my stories of successes and failures to live out those themes, and I ask them to tell their stories.         

Heart: The stories that come from my heart show that I’m fully here, and invite students to explore the subject and their own hearts in the same way. I used to be afraid to show how much I cared—about students, about the subject, about faith—because it felt too vulnerable. If it were rejected, it would be a rejection of me. But the current phrase I’m seeing frequently really is true: “Students don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” I attend games and events to see students shine outside the classroom. I greet them before class. I share things just for fun, like pictures of my grandkids. I share books I’ve enjoyed. And I share how reading and writing help me process my struggles, like balancing the sadness of death with my hope in the resurrection (see my blog about my mother’s death, “Processing Death through Reading and Writing”).  

Application: Sometimes those heart applications just happen, and they happen more often when I plan for them. How do I plan for them?

• I structure units around themes that are important to my students, like finding love (see “Make It Real”) 
• I design a final assessment that keeps the focus on the theme, like a paper exploring cultural, temperamental, and spiritual identity (see “Giving Skills and Content a Purpose”). 
• I scaffold assignments to prepare students to do well on the final assessment of the theme (like empathy: “Reading Develops Empathy Even Better When It Is Targeted, Taught, and Assessed”)

Reflection: Applying learning to life takes deep thought and reflection, which takes time. How do I encourage reflection? 

• I ask questions. Then I wait—my students need time to reflect. (Sometimes, waiting is a challenge!) Then I listen in order to understand my students—not primarily to respond to my students or as a platform to say something.
• I structure my course around 4 essential questions (Who am I? Who is my neighbor? What’s wrong with the world? What is the significance of language?). And I structure each unit around essential questions: What is human dignity and why does it matter? What is the connection between the individual and the community? Why is empathy important?
• I have students journal on an essential question at the beginning of a unit so they can compare their view at the end and see what they’ve learned.
• I encourage students to come up with their own questions (see “Nurturing Questions”).
• I give students time periodically to reflect on what they are learning in relation to schoolwide student objectives (see “Not ‘What Am I Teaching?’ but ‘What Are They Learning?’”)
• I model my own reflection, sharing my journal, blogs, and other writing (like “Audience and Purpose in Writing: My Mom’s Eulogy”). I do this, in part, because I want to provide a classroom environment where the teacher (me) is the chief inquirer, modeling what it means to ask questions in subject area, in life, and in faith.

Keep on keeping on: tell your stories, share your heart, apply what you know, and reflect deeply. Live your faith and teach your life, wherever you are, and whoever you are with.