Learning to Read

Instead of a final examination, I assigned my students a retrospective essay to be written during the time reserved for the final exam.

I created an imaginary situation: your Uncle Dan and Aunt Jill have won 133 million dollars playing Powerball and have decided to fund your education.

All you have to do is write a letter telling Uncle Dan and Aunt Jill what you have learned in WR 121.

I didn't know what to expect. I had read their essays and helped trigger some rambunctious discussions about war, loss, reconciliation, and survival, but I wanted to read my students' own perceptions of what they had learned.

Before I write what surprised and pleased me most, let me say a word or two about teaching college composition.

A college composition course doesn't have any inherent subject matter, aside from the abstract principles of what good writing requires.

Therefore, I assign my students books to read and structure the reading around a central focus. For years, the question I've raised in WR 121 has been, "What is a well-lived life?" and I've worked with my students to read and understand books and films ranging from Plato to Tupac Shakir, from Into the Wild to Drinking: A Love Story.

For the first time, this quarter our readings centered around coming to understand the experiences of loss, survival, and reconciliation, which is the emphasis of Lane Community College's Reading Together program this year.

We read Tim O'Brien's The Things We Carried, a hybrid of fiction of memoir of O'Brien's Viet Nam experience; Dan O'Brien's Buffalo for the Broken Heart, the story of O'Brien transforming his ranch and his soul by deciding to no longer raise cattle and to raise buffalo instead; and, Louise Steinman's The Souvenir, a memoir centered on Steinman discovering who her father was after he died and she found his WWII letters and a Japanese flag hidden away in the garage in an ammo box. The flag has a Japanese soldier's name on it and Steinman tracks down the family of the soldier, travels to Japan to return the flag, and visits sites where her father was in combat in the Phillipines. (The books are here, here, and here.)

As I read my students' retrospective essays I discovered that none of my students had read books with attention to seeing how the story illuminated the larger human experience, not just the surface experience of the book's story.

Every student who wrote about the reading in the class expressed a mixture of surprise and joy that they could learn so much from books that had nothing to do with their own specific experience. None of my students had fought in Viet Nam. None raised buffalo. None had gone in search of a father through war letters and travel.

But, all of my students know loss. They all struggle with different kinds of survival. They all long for reconciliation.

My students came to understand what I hoped they would. Good stories narrate the dramas of the human soul. They experienced reading these books as looking more deeply into the stories, as helping them understand deeper experiences in their lives, experiences they shared with writers whose stories, on the surface, bore little resemblance to their own.

They learned to read more critically. They began to understand that how a story is told and how sentences and paragraphs and chapters are structured is as important as what happens in the story.

I was stunned with joy reading these retrospectives. For so long I have been reading books as a way of understanding the nature of human nature and as a way of better understanding the universal experience of human beings, that I had forgotten that for many this is a new experience.

The most rewarding payoff in centering a writing class around good books and philosophical questions is that students are faced with questions to write about that are alive in their lives. Again this quarter, as it always is, it was an immeasurable pleasure to read the essays my students wrote.

Many came to understandings of themselves and their lives they hadn't ever thought to consider before. They came to see that the questions published writers explore and dig into in their books are their questions, too, and that a person doesn't have to be a published writer to express cogent, poignant insights into one's own life, and, in turn, into the human experience.

Several wrote that what they learned about reading and from their reading would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

It's just a start. But, my students learned to read and came to understand that reading leads to thinking and that writing helps deepen and structure one's thinking and insights.

I couldn't be happier.