Borderland

Reading is an act of interpretation, and it happens constantly. Consciousness is about making sense of things, and we busy ourselves with comprehension as our major mission in life. When I hear people talk about reading comprehension I know what they mean, but I wonder why they think about reading as if it was somehow different than “regular” thinking because reading is comprehending. And so is every other kind of thinking. I don’t see why we should limit reading to mean only understanding words on a page, and teach kids how to do that – ignoring the fact that they are reading and comprehending The World already. We’d make them better readers and thinkers if we helped them to recognize the sense they naturally make of the world around them, and then help them to recognize how similar that is to reading print material. I like Derrida’s view of text: any organized network of meaning. That would qualify just about anything to be a text, including the internet, or even a wedding.

I taught a science lesson to my fourth graders today that got me thinking about how to mix up the subject matter in new ways. I could teach them a lot about reading without showing them a book. The lesson I did was about making inferences – a science process skill. I planned to show them an image of the earth at night from space. I’ve seen the picture before, and it has a range of possible interpretations. Lots of ways to look at it. They were going to make observations and inferences in two columns. This was new stuff for them so I started out talking about detectives. That got us a bit off track, but I steered quickly back from crime scenarios to clue-finding and investigating. I needed an example for them to practice on. Quickly looking around, I saw my coffee mug. Perfect. I grabbed it and said, “I’m going to carry this around and I want you to look closely at it. Don’t say a word.” They watched me like hawks. I got back up in front of the room and they started telling me what they’d seen.

• It’s dented. [It was dropped. It's old]
• It’s shimmery. [It's made of metal.]
• It’s dirty. [It's old. It has dirty stuff in it.]
• It has a bent handle. [It's broken. (rejected by the other kids as false.)]
• It has a top on it. [It's for holding hot drinks.]
• It’s old. [This one was rejected because many of them recognized that "old" was an inference itself].
  “That part is coming soon,” I said.

This went really well. I showed them the earth-at-night image on the overhead projector, and the lights were a bit too soft for the projector. A lot of the kids thought they were looking at clouds instead of lights.

They started making inferences right away. Eventually someone said, “Hey, there’s way more lights on the right side of the US than the left side.”

“And what about Alaska?” I asked.

“It’s dark,” they observed.

“Why?”

“Because hardly any people live here,” they inferred.

“So what can you say about the eastern part of the US?” I asked.

“There are a lot of people there,” they explained.

So the lesson went pretty good. And I am thinking now that we need to do this A LOT. We need to practice reading The World using common – but interesting – things that will cause the students to look and think about what they’re doing.

I’m pretty sure that this form of inquiry would encourage more thoughtful reading – strategic reading, in which students are making observations and connections, asking questions, and developing theories that explain what is happening behind the scenes offstage in the book. If students began to notice themselves making inferences about the world around them throughout their day, I believe they’d begin to work more thoughtfully no matter what they were doing.