Effect is such a funny thing to explore when reading texts. It is wrapped up in so many things. What has happened previously? What does the reader think will happen next? What is really going on in the story? A lot of what we expect from students is precision. Precise identification of a mood or a feeling.The best students are those that can identify a range of precise moods and even some of those moods are conflicting moods. Take the ‘Life of Pi’ paper and the conflicting disgust and comical moods surrounding the description of the hyenas. The problem is that we are expecting teenagers to articulate feelings, which, in all fairness they are struggling to identify in themselves and not just in an extract from a story.
The biggest problem we have in English, aside from apostrophes on everything ending with an s or the fact that a lot is two words, is oversimplification of overgeneralization. I had to write some curriculum documents and the word ‘oversimplification’ was the one I used in every box and on every page when it came to misconceptions. Knowledge isn’t the problem. It is how that knowledge is used in context that is the problem. It is the fact that it can be used in other contexts but it isn’t precise or appropriate. Take the students who use the word ‘discombobulated’ in their writing. They use it in every piece of writing, including essays. The same is seen with quotations from key texts that appear in creative writing. Or, voltas applied to non-fiction texts.
For this reason, I have been looking at how we can support precision around thinking in texts. Effect is such a nebulous concept and it is hard to pin down. That’s why I explored if I could group the feelings around something more precise.
Is the feeling related to power?
Is the feeling related to the place?
Is the feeling related to a character in the text?
Is the feeling that the reader feels differently to the characters in the story?
It is alright asking students what they feel in response to a text, but it takes quite a bit of skill to hone those feelings down. Quite sophisticated readers could do that easily, but most students can’t. That’s why I think it is important to think about what is causing the feeling before a student even grasps for words.
That unpicking of feelings is really important for understanding stories. Otherwise we get generalised comments. It feels creepy. It feels sinister. Take the Hartop paper. The car has a claustrophobic setting. Hartop is dominating the car. The women are powerless. Once we have established the different feelings. We can explore the subtext. Why is it claustrophobic? Why is Hartop dominating? Why are the women powerless?
Within any text, there are competing sources for our feelings and students need to see that there is a level of plurality in texts. We feel opposing feelings for different things in the text. Weaker students tend to generalise this fact and blanket everything with the same feeling. The better students pinpoint the differences in feeling.
Once students have the idea of opposing sources of feelings, we can then explore the what and the why behind them. To start that discussion, I used this table this week.
This week we explored Rosabel and discussed the claustrophobic bus compared to the magical outside. We further discussed the level of detachment she felt in her situation. We often have word bingo behind tables like this, but the students used this to narrow their thinking. The narrowing down on meaning is key. Instead of throwing everything out including the kitchen sink, we were refining and narrowing. How would we describe the mood of the bus? How would we describe Rosabel’s feelings?
We need students to be self-refining their ideas and words when approaching texts. That's what makes the best responses. They have sifting through their brain to be precise. They have picked out the right word and not the first word that comes to mind.
English is a massive subject and lots of things lead teachers to explore and grapple loads of things at once. The longer I teach, the more I come to the idea that exploring should be happening on a microscopic level. We should be refining and narrowing the ideas to be clear. As teachers, we should be working constantly on refining and sifting through things to get to the kernel of a idea.
Thanks for reading,
Xris
