What do students mean by "going over the readings"?

[kaysixteen]

Group discussions are fine, but it is like Socratic teaching.  It does not work if the students either 1) do not even attempt the reading, 2) try but have no idea how to read the type of stuff being assigned 3) have limited study skills, preparation, etc, and, of course, as one poster here noted, some classes have a huge discrepancy in students' relative abilities, let alone attitude, effort, prep, etc.   That itself might well make a group discussion, or a directed Socratic lecture presentation, almost impossible.

Related to this, a question for all comers-- roughly how many/ what percentage, of freshmen overall, nationwide, really would benefit from taking the sort of remedial 'reading for college' reading/ study skills class I taught last fall, how many of these are actually getting such a class, what can be done in classes where students need such classes but have not gotten them, and what happens to upperclassmen who still have not gotten these skills?

[Vkw10]

Introduce them to tools to help them understand the text. You mentioned SparkNotes, but I'd be willing to bet that at least half your students aren't familiar with SparkNotes. Take a few minutes in class to show them how to use SparkNotes to understand the text.

FYI, I was a first generation college student from a poor rural school thirty years ago. My roommate introduced me to CliffNotes, which weren't easy to read, but did help me identify major plot points.

[polly_mer]

Here's what I tell them.  It's no fair just having me "translate" these for you. I already know what they say and what they mean.  You can all read (well....); you have a ton of contextual materials for each text (I'm a New Historicist, so they don't lack for context); you all know how to do the critical reading drills from Comp I and make your lists of author, title; historical context, form/genre, and social context.  I need you to put in the work to show me that YOU know what the texts say and mean.

Is that really useful or a productive use of time for people who aren't on the path to becoming English or history professors?

Yes, learning to read hard texts for meaning is important and I do it all the time for my job because there aren't Cliff Notes and few living people know the answers.

However, I read your post and then I read Hegemony's post and I can't help but think, "playing the 'read the expert's mind' game is a really annoying way to spend class after class.  It's clear right answers exist, but the professors won't give them to the students. Thus, a ton of class time that could be spent of fabulous discussions connecting the novel to the broader world or current examples is wasted on trying to guess through the most painful way."

Is that really a good thing for the one gen ed literature course that non-humanities majors may get to take?

[Hegemony]

Here's what I tell them.  It's no fair just having me "translate" these for you. I already know what they say and what they mean.  You can all read (well....); you have a ton of contextual materials for each text (I'm a New Historicist, so they don't lack for context); you all know how to do the critical reading drills from Comp I and make your lists of author, title; historical context, form/genre, and social context.  I need you to put in the work to show me that YOU know what the texts say and mean.

Here's one of the passages that bamboozled me. Now, it's no fair just having me "translate" this for you. I already know what it says and what it means. And you all know how to do critical reading, so I expect you to know what this says and means. 

" 'Now, Mortimer,' says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand—which is particularly rich in knuckles, 'I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about the man from Jamaica.'

'Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the man who was a brother,' replies Mortimer.

'Tobago, then.'

'Nor yet from Tobago.'

'Except,' Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady, who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out of his way: 'except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo.'

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again."

Of course, this is only one section of a substantial chapter of this nature. I trust all is quite clear and that you won't need to go over the reading in class (class is for — things other than discussing the reading), and can proceed straight on to the test.

[JFlanders]

However, I read your post and then I read Hegemony's post and I can't help but think, "playing the 'read the expert's mind' game is a really annoying way to spend class after class.  It's clear right answers exist, but the professors won't give them to the students. Thus, a ton of class time that could be spent of fabulous discussions connecting the novel to the broader world or current examples is wasted on trying to guess through the most painful way."

Is that really a good thing for the one gen ed literature course that non-humanities majors may get to take?

I'm 100% in favor of cluing students in about the hard passage whose meaning turns on some obscure reference that's unfamiliar to them.  Anybody who comes in with specific questions or a paragraph that didn't make sense, I happily explain at whatever level of detail they request, and that makes sense to me as a variant of "going over it".   

"Going over it" gets more complicated when (a) the students claim to understand virtually none of the text, seemingly on a basic syntactic level ("Yeah, I couldn't really follow it, it was pretty confusing") and (b) most of what you want students to notice and analyze "lives" not in broad content, but in smaller textual moments at the sentence or paragraph level (like the comedy pacing of that Dickens passage, which I can feel the rhythm of perfectly well even though I also don't know the poem it's referring to).

I think I struggle with summarizing as part of "going over it" because a course taught from top-level summaries is just going to be so bland and dull and nonsensical-- like a course in the culture of American sitcoms where you only ever read the Wikipedia synopses of The Office instead of watching it.  (Why would anyone take a course like that?  What would be the point? You certainly wouldn't learn anything about how the show works.)   Since it sounds like some people have success with this technique, though, I'd be really interested to know if you think the summaries genuinely do help the lower-literacy students become able to parse the words on the page.   If so, what would be a good structure to ensure summary does get used as a reading aid, rather than as a substitute for reading? 

[marshwiggle]

Here's what I tell them.  It's no fair just having me "translate" these for you. I already know what they say and what they mean.  You can all read (well....); you have a ton of contextual materials for each text (I'm a New Historicist, so they don't lack for context); you all know how to do the critical reading drills from Comp I and make your lists of author, title; historical context, form/genre, and social context.  I need you to put in the work to show me that YOU know what the texts say and mean.

Here's one of the passages that bamboozled me. Now, it's no fair just having me "translate" this for you. I already know what it says and what it means. And you all know how to do critical reading, so I expect you to know what this says and means. 

" 'Now, Mortimer,' says Lady Tippins, rapping the sticks of her closed green fan upon the knuckles of her left hand—which is particularly rich in knuckles, 'I insist upon your telling all that is to be told about the man from Jamaica.'

'Give you my honour I never heard of any man from Jamaica, except the man who was a brother,' replies Mortimer.

'Tobago, then.'

'Nor yet from Tobago.'

'Except,' Eugene strikes in: so unexpectedly that the mature young lady, who has forgotten all about him, with a start takes the epaulette out of his way: 'except our friend who long lived on rice-pudding and isinglass, till at length to his something or other, his physician said something else, and a leg of mutton somehow ended in daygo.'

A reviving impression goes round the table that Eugene is coming out. An unfulfilled impression, for he goes in again."

Of course, this is only one section of a substantial chapter of this nature. I trust all is quite clear and that you won't need to go over the reading in class (class is for — things other than discussing the reading), and can proceed straight on to the test.

If there is something on a test based on a passage like that, I can't for the life of me figure out why. In technical subjects, I wouldn't have test questions about minutiae of individual devices, products, applications, etc.; I'd be looking for evidence they understand the important features and concepts that transcend individual cases.

[Caracal]

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Is that really useful or a productive use of time for people who aren't on the path to becoming English or history professors?

Yes, learning to read hard texts for meaning is important and I do it all the time for my job because there aren't Cliff Notes and few living people know the answers.

However, I read your post and then I read Hegemony's post and I can't help but think, "playing the 'read the expert's mind' game is a really annoying way to spend class after class.  It's clear right answers exist, but the professors won't give them to the students. Thus, a ton of class time that could be spent of fabulous discussions connecting the novel to the broader world or current examples is wasted on trying to guess through the most painful way."

Is that really a good thing for the one gen ed literature course that non-humanities majors may get to take?

I'm half in agreement with this sentiment. I think there's a lot to be said for giving students some of the context that might help them make sense of a reading beforehand. That said, I  think that learning how to deal with a confusing or difficult text is a skill that translates well to all kinds of contexts.

Last year, I had a hankering to re-read the Tempest and I was struck by how much more difficult it was than I remembered. My students always refer to 18th century texts as "Old English" and complain about how hard they are to read. That always seems strange to me because 18th century writing is as easy for me to read as anything else. But, I think it must seem to them the way Elizabethean English feels to me when I pick it up after a long time away.

I think the problem is that some students just get frustrated when they do have trouble and mostly that is just because they haven't had the experience of puzzling through something difficult. Fifteen minutes into the Tempest, I was doing much better, just because I kept plugging away. I wasn't drawing on any particularly complicated reading strategies, I've just learned that when I'm having a hard time with a reading, the best strategy is to just avoid getting bogged down. Often, the part you didn't understand isn't particularly vital, sometimes the subsequent context will make it clear and you can always go back and really try to puzzle through it if it turns out you need to.

I use these same basic strategies when I'm reading some modern document in a format or context that I'm unfamiliar with and they work pretty well.

[writingprof]

They want a summary.  They haven't done the reading.  And, hilariously, many of them probably view the Wikipedia or SparkNotes plot summary as unapproachably dense.  In my experience, this is true of ninety-nine percent of general-education students and at least half of English majors.  It's an illiterate world out there.  I blame television, but I'm equally happy to fault vaccinations, outsourcing, or President Trump.

When Oprah Winfrey called Toni Morrison the first time, Oprah told her that she found Beloved hard to read, and slow going at first. "That," Morrison replied, "is called reading."

This is a charming story; thank you for passing it along.  Beloved is difficult in places.  It's also worth the effort.  I don't think the nation will rise or fall on how many of us get through it, but I know that it enriched my life in a small way.  Sometimes making an effort is its own reward, and failing to is its own punishment.  Or, to put it differently, I mostly don't care about my students' ignorance and idiocy, as long as the checks keep coming.

[Hegemony]

Everybody seems to be of the attitude of "If they're asking for more direction about the text, they're trying to cheat and not read it at all. Don't fall for it!  Don't give them extra guidance!"  What happened to "You have to teach the students you have, not the students you want"? Alternatively, let's imagine students in a math class saying, "I just don't understand how this problem works, I am lost here." Would the right response be to say, "Buck up and stop asking for help!  This class is not for explaining things!  If you can't buck up and do the problem without extra help, you're just lazy!"?

Instead, I suggest putting some of the complications up on the board, and going through how they work. Stop and dwell on some of the nuances, so they can appreciate them. I remember teaching a Flannery O'Connor story in which a passage described the mother being "surmounted by her hat." None of the students knew the word "surmounted," as I ascertained in class. Sure, they should have looked it up. But they didn't.  That's why they were taking a basic literature class at a crummy university like mine. So we talked about what "surmounted" meant. I had them look it up in class. We talked about the various levels of meaning. We talked about the hat, which surmounts the woman in an important way later in the text. First she is literally surmounted by her hat; later she is figuratively surmounted by it.  The word "surmounted," and that passage, later appeared on the quiz.

I mean, the point is to teach the class, right?  Not just to say "If you haven't bothered to try harder, I'm just going to let you sink." It would be great if they were more proactive. But then they'd be at a different college.

[Caracal]

I mean, the point is to teach the class, right?  Not just to say "If you haven't bothered to try harder, I'm just going to let you sink." It would be great if they were more proactive. But then they'd be at a different college.

Yes. Part of our job is to teach students how to try. Often, they really don't know. If you think of some activity, like reading, as basically straightforward and passive and then are suddenly confronted by readings that they struggle to understand, you are likely to think that the easiest solution is for the person who made you read this thing and is going to test you on it, to just tell you what the hell is going on.

It doesn't really matter what the students want.  They are students, they don't know what they need. Obviously, giving them your version of the Cliff notes isn't going to help them become better readers, so the task is to model how to work through a difficult text.

[RatGuy]

I mean, the point is to teach the class, right?  Not just to say "If you haven't bothered to try harder, I'm just going to let you sink." It would be great if they were more proactive. But then they'd be at a different college.

Seems to me that you're making a lot of assumption's about the OP's class. In my literature classes, I spend at least the first three class periods with explicit exercises on close reading. Then there are a few more implicit or guided assignments over the next few weeks. This is on top of English 1302, a required freshmen-level course that directly addresses textual analysis (fictional and otherwise). Presumably passing 1302 and following the guidelines of my first week, students should have the tools to read and comprehend a story from 1825 on their own.

There are lots of reasons why students just want a summary in class. The more cynical folks are suggest that it's idiocy, laziness, or entitlement. But sometimes students are simply hesitant, shy, or uncomfortable giving opinions in front of peers. Others have ben called idiots or entitled for so long they'd rather just avoid the whole "the teacher yelling at me for being stupid" phase and get right down to the sage on the stage. And some students are so preoccupied with being right or doing things the right way that want to triple-check their understanding before beginning.

I see nothing wrong with providing a quick synopsis of the day's reading to start things off. It helps put into context any specific passages I'd like to discuss. Sometimes this means giving them a quiz to start things out -- it's a way to check their understanding while simultaneously "going over the reading" without, you know, going over the reading. Of course, this is highly complicated in classes in which students are "in class" via Zoom while also being "in starbucks, with friends, complaining about that guy from last night and oh crap is my mic on?"

[mythbuster]

I see something very similar in my science classes. Students often ask me to tell them what will be on the exam. Well the recorded lectures, textbook readings, weekly quizzes, online homework, and supplemental study questions are all designed to do just that.
   I can give them what they want, an itemized list of topics, but it won't be of any help to them if they haven't done the work to understand the items on that list. That work is built in to all the resources I have created. There just is no short cut.

[PScientist]

I see something very similar in my science classes. Students often ask me to tell them what will be on the exam. Well the recorded lectures, textbook readings, weekly quizzes, online homework, and supplemental study questions are all designed to do just that.
   I can give them what they want, an itemized list of topics, but it won't be of any help to them if they haven't done the work to understand the items on that list. That work is built in to all the resources I have created. There just is no short cut.

I agree, and I could have written exactly the same thing; I suspect it is somewhat universal.  So that suggests to me that the strategy of ignoring the course and studying the study guide must have been successful (more often than not) in classes that the students have taken in the past.  But I feel like I don't know anyone who teaches that way, in any discipline.  Is it just a reflex that is so engrained from K-12 "education" that it persists until they are college seniors?

[mamselle]

I do interactive reviews in French or art history, posing questions and pushing them for answers in a way that underscores the process of problem-solving itself. Orienting them to what the questions will look like and what they will be asked to do seems to me to be what they're really asking for.

I do it in a quick-answer, 'impatient' way (something like what I used to use when teaching slope-intercept to Saturday AM prep classes, in fact)....keep the process moving, get a sense of impatience going, etc. : to wake up the synapses and get them firing, as well as make connections with the material.

So, in art history, I used to have the slide sets up in the tray (or up in my Ppts, now) for my own exam prep, anyway. I'd run through them, asking rapid-fire questions about each one to test their responses, and slowing down where it's clear they're uncertain of a concept:

  "Does this work use any tertiary colors" (dead silence)
  "What's a tertiary color? (Anyone?)
  "What's an example of a piece we discussed that uses tertiaries? (answer)
  "Which Rape of Europa ?"
  "What's happened to it?" (stolen...etc.)
  "What's the five-point ID for that piece?" (Artist, Title, Date, Place, School)
  "Now, what's another example of a piece using tertiaries?" (Back to our original question...)

"Fine. You have 90 slides in your list, and the exam is open-book, open-notebook, but you'll need to have details like that in mind to be able to find things quickly for the 10 slides and 10 ID matches that will go with them."

Do the same with the global map on which they're supposed to be able to ID 10 sites of origin for each piece studied:
   - Show slide, fly in a pointer, on to the next.
   - Go over 2 or 3, locate the continents for the truly clueless (there are usually several), etc. 

Our Italian Renaissance teacher (he of the stolen MSs) did this the best of any of our instructors: he handed out the slide list on the first day, and went quickly over all the slides covered at the end of each week, so we were well-familiarized with them by the exam.

---
In French, I might put up a sentence with a missing verb and solicit the answer (in French), thus:

  "OK, what's the infinitive of the verb you want here?" (acknowledge hands, reinforce nearly-right answers, keep going until the right one is given)
  "OK, what's the form of the verb needed to make the sentence correct? (get the number and person)
   "Now, what's that mean for this verb?" (solicit answer directly; if no-one gets it, we do the 6-part 1-S, 2-S, 3-S/1-P, 2-P, 3-P matrix and figure it out).

Once done, "OK there will be six of these on the test: partial answer for the correct infinitive, but the wrong ending, full credit for the fully correct verb."

Next: "What preposition goes in this sentence?" (same quick-drill to an answer)

  "OK, there will be four of these using the prepositions we just learned and two more using ones you should know from the first three weeks of class."

So, I hit one example from each section, impart a certain level of urgency into the process of figuring it out, and (maybe) get them fired up to do the rest on their own.

Sometimes it even works...

M.

[Aster]

There is a world of difference between students making specific inquiries about specific lesson topics, versus students making non-specific, broad requests to have their lesson content spoon-fed to them.