So here we are. The young reader has established an understanding of letters and words, they have solved the initial written puzzle. They are at a point where they are reading longer books, perhaps beginning the stage (which could happily last a lifetime) of reading graphic novels and comics. I have a couple of students in this range right now. They love reading comics about kids like them, or comics about history. Large graphic novels are being swallowed in a couple of days. Characters come alive and connect to their every day world, set in beautiful and familiar graphic scenes.
Around this point is when the novel presents itself. The novel is an incredible feat, both for the writer and the reader. On the surface each novel looks the same: 9 to 11 point type printed in perfect rows which stand flush, usually justified, against varying expanses of white margins, all bound in a rectangular book whose objective is to weave time together into a series of events, a story, a long story, with nothing to hold onto but the images in one’s mind and the deft grammatical architecture of the writer. But the language of each writer is very different, and you just don’t know how different until you start. And then you begin the process of reading literature.
For generally, the 8th grader to the 10th grader, students who have read a few longer books, who have written some longer stories, they now have a sense of what the texture of a story is from the creation and the experiential standpoint. Students are learning not so much to connect language together in English, but to connect literary works together, to learn how to make links with what they are reading to the outside world, to themselves. Yes, yes, in short, this is analysis, but in a deeper sense, it’s learning a different kind of literacy.
I was in ninth grade when I learned what literary analysis was. And now I am going to borrow a lesson plan from a teach whose name fails me. It was the beginning of the year. I was a new student, and she seemed like a new teacher to me (as a student, of course, you know). She was a little delicate, mayhem could have been achieved with the right chemistry of students. But our class was well behaved. Or maybe she was just really good at her job and made us believe in ourselves. She was thin with straight brown hair and something about her felt like bleached oats: healthy, and a little too contained. This is all to say that I wasn’t entirely impressed with the class in general. Yet here lies an example of the power of a single lesson plan. You have to admire the way children completely drop everything they don’t need. I did in any case. I have a terrible memory except for the things that I remember every detail of.
And this was one. As a first assignment of the year, this teacher had us read a version of Little Red Riding Hood. In class she asked us what the story was about. The answers proliferated immediately expanded. Fairy tales, of course, are about whatever you want them to be about, they are yours. But she guided us through the images of the red, the wolf, the trail, the pins, the needles. Little Red Riding Hood became a node of discovery to the entire world. Later that year we read The Scarlet Letter and red returned, an important link was made and began with red. Every piece of literature written in English can be connected to any other through symbolism, relationship and context. These elements become a different kind of reading that expands the entire art of language out, folding the craft out like a piece of origami, filling that paper with air. Once the reader learns to read symbolism they can learn to connect literary forms, understand, use, break, build them. They now participate, in whatever way that means to them, to the human art of written story.
Bending Tree Education 