Thursday, September 27, 2007
Appleman Chapter 3
Appleman starts the chapter with a fantastic anecdote of a student with whom reader response didn't really work, the student was too into responding and not enough into the reading. She talks about some of the things I was talking about with others in my response to Be the Book! Sometimes reader response isn't the best. Sometimes it' s more important to make sure that the students are in fact reading the classics and it's important that they're actually getting what they can out of it. The dangers of only using reader response are very real, and I think they make a better case for teaching other types of reading theory than the entire first chapter. Thinking about how helpful it would be for students to know the different ways of looking at something is really interesting and I think it's definitely something that's teachable at the high school level, but I still think the risk of alienating your students is high.
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2 comments:
i agree that there are flaws in the system of reader response, but as Wilhelm talked about in "You Gotta BE the Book", it is very important to get students interested and involved in the books they are reading, so i think that teachers have to be able to find a happy medium of using reader response, because for many students it does help to make a personal relationship with the text, and other literary theories that do cover more of the "classics". I think this is an ongoing struggle that every teacher will have to deal with, and it will be different for all classes.
I think that's really true, every class is going to be different when it comes to dealing with this. For most teachers, I think it will actually come down to a student by student thing, I mean, you really have to realize that for any given assignment you're likely really only going to be connecting to 60-70% of the students if you're lucky. The goal is to make sure you're helping out all of your students equally over time.
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