Chapter 6
Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse

Tovani talks more about the tools she gives students for "holding thinking" while they read.  She starts off by having them analyze a provocative photo, and they have a lot to say about it.  The next day, she has them read a provocative article and notate in the margins their thoughts about it.  This is "holding thinking"--writing down a thought evoked by the reading.  But she says that when students have done this, they are more likely to return to the text.  The notes they have made or words they have highlighted gives them a way to review, whether it is for a test, a discussion with other students, or to start a related writing assignment.  But she discourages them from copying from the text or just underlining--they need to respond to it in some way, and there is no right or wrong way to respond.

She carries her story a bit further to describe a very antagonistic kid that told her at the beginning of the year that no one makes him read and he wasn't going to do it.  She managed to engage this kid accidentally by including his refusal to annotate text in some of her examples she used to show the class how their fellow students were doing it.  She pointed out that she thought he did read it but that by refusing to write anything down, she could never know how he felt about it.  He decided to try again, and she reflected on his progress throughout the year.  She said that struggling readers can refuse to engage and make themselves "invisible."  But her question is:  if students make themselves invisible, are we still responsible for teaching them?

This struck me as a real question for educators everywhere.  Tovani advocates tools--highlighters, sticky notes to use on text that you can't write on directly, double-entry diaries, comprehension constructors (basically "think sheets").... I think these are all great, especially on paper, with some lovely answers added.  But I don't think she ever really answers her question.  I hope, in my optimistic heart-of-hearts, that for every "invisible" student out there, there will be some teacher along the way that tries and succeeds in connecting with them so that they get something, anything out of their years in the public school system.  But I know that I am overly optimistic.

I was a good student growing up.  School was always quite easy for me, and reading has always been intuitive.  I'm not sure what age I was when I learned to read, but according to my parents, I taught myself.  I was always "intrinsically motivated"--I made my grades for myself and motivated myself to do well.  There was no twenty-dollar bill promised for bringing home all As.

I worry that as a teacher, I may miss the signs of the struggling reader, the invisible student, that has been passed along despite lack of mastery of reading and writing from many grades before.  I worry that I won't be qualified as "the Art Teacher" to help this student if I have the wherewithal to recognize him/her.  But I do feel that I am responsible to help these kids, even if they are almost done with public school and have been failed by the system so many times that they don't even know what to expect as success.

The only way I can reconcile myself to these shortcomings of our education system and to the mistakes and failures I know I will experience as a teacher is to remember that learning can last for a person's entire lifetime.  I certainly can't tell you what standardized curriculum elements I learned over the course of my public school experience in small-town East Texas twenty years ago, but I do remember how to carry and borrow in arithmetic--that's a life skill.  I know how to find the main idea and write an essay with an introduction, body and conclusion--another life skill.  I know the basic timeline of the U.S. Civil War and its battles--not a life skill, but damn useful at Trivia Night.  And I know that while I don't want to teach reading, math, social studies, or science as my content area, I can expose my art students to the connections between those subjects and art in meaningful ways.  Maybe a student will remember something he or she saw or read or created in my classroom and how it connects to astronomy or geometry or poetry and that will matter to them.  Maybe it will help them feel a little less invisible.  Maybe it will inspire them to keep learning, even as an adult.