It occurs to me that the environment in which you read a
text can affect how you feel about the writing. I believe that is what happened
while I was reading this text, possibly. I was surrounded by a very foreign,
sterile, and unappealing setting when I read this article (not by choice), and
I think it influenced my feelings on the text. It felt very medical, and what I
mean by that is dry, boring, and cold. Or maybe that was just how the text
actually read? Admittedly, the text is a report on performed research so it’s
not going to be touchy-feely but a little language love would have been nice.
Logistically, I found the piece hard to read because of the
multiple line parenthetical text that was sandwiched in between the words of
the sentences. It got in the way of my reading flow and was quite distracting.
Now that I am done complaining, I did however like the concepts behind the
article but really did not glean anything new that we hadn’t learned in our
other texts thus far.
But, it was interesting to see how they gathered their
information for the study. It made me think about different aspects of research
that I normally wouldn’t have had to think of before. For instance, the author
discusses that the manner in which a question is asked, “where they emanate
from and how they are treated,” (3) can have an affect on the outcome of the
information as well. Langer also did a good job of eloquently explaining the
exploration of horizons by stating, “where uncertainty is a normal part of
response and new-found understandings provoke still other possibilities” (3).
As a non-believer and non-lover of standardized tests I
enjoyed the report’s focus on “literature tests [treating] literature as
content,” (4) as opposed to a
subject where the answer can have some gray area. The reference to the Huck
Finn test question put the nail in the coffin. Why can’t Huck Finn be both good
and bad, why one or the other?
Transitioning into the “What does this mean for literature instruction?”
section of the article was where the redundancy of other articles kicked in. Besides informing the reader about the
procedure of the studies it was simply…let all your students respond and don’t
have a set agenda to your teaching methods. Don’t stick to your lesson plans if
student’s questions and comments take you elsewhere…the sort of information
that, luckily, our class has discussed already. And on and on.
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