Chapter Four: Steve Nuzum

The key recommendation in Chapter Four is to find the balance-- or "sweet spot"-- between under-teaching a piece of literature (essentially handing the book to a student and saying "Go read this") and over-teaching it (stopping every other paragraph to do a close reading or excessively analyzing metacognitive reading strategies). This is certainly a balance I have had to be vigilant about finding this year, especially with my lower-level readers.

At the moment we are reading Their Eyes Were Watching God, and while I think I provided a reasonable amount of historical and authorial background on the novel, the challenge has been how much to explain the text while we are reading. Because many (most) of my struggling readers have had problems not only with the dialect and idiomatic expressions within the novel's dialogue, but also with the extremely poetic (metaphorical and allusive) style of the narration, I have felt the need to read much of the novel in class. This has been good for the struggling readers, who need to hear the dialogue modeled by other experienced readers (including some of their classmates, who are quite good at reading expressively and in character). However, it has been a source of frustration for other readers, who do not want to have the book, in Gallagher's words, "chopped up". "We're never going to finish this," one student whined yesterday. While I can't justify not reading in class at this point-- usually through shared or "popcorn" readings in which I try to model effective reading strategies for the most difficult sections-- I have tried to assign more reading at home as we get further into the novel. Hopefully the scaffolding of the early chapters will allow my struggling readers to read more on their own.

The other take-away for this chapter, for me, is that my struggling readers DO need some basic metacognitive strategies to help them get through the reading. I plan to model more of these. On the other hand, I plan to ease off even more on stopping to analyze the text, now that students have a better handle on the novel's context and style.