One frustration I have in teaching analysis sometimes is that my students often want to rush through a text as if they’re taking some kind of high stakes timed multiple choice exam. They seem to have a mindset of getting it done rather than recognizing and understanding the richness in a passage. When I want students to slow down and really look closely at the choices a writer makes, I pull out a technique I learned from Larry Scanlon at a Bellevue, WA AP Summer Institute years ago. He called it an interrupted reading because you don’t allow the students to read the whole selection right away. An interrupted reading breaks the text into small chunks, each one to be examined thoroughly before moving on to the next. This forces students to focus on short bits for extended periods of time. More on that later.
Larry introduced it to us using the introduction to Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez. To do this right takes a bit of set-up. You’re looking for an interesting section of text that divides into workable sections and Rodriguez’s intro fits the bill well. Ideally, you’ll want to type the text into sections such that each section has its own page. To conserve paper, I put multiple copies of the same text on each page so I can use half sheet or smaller packets of text. I still use Larry’s example text from Rodriguez (this document has 3 copies per page) the first time I do an interrupted reading during the year, which for me was a little over a week ago.
The first section is the entire first paragraph: “I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have some run of this isle.” For this text, I ask them to look for allusions, diction choices, figurative language, predictions, and anything they might notice about the relationship(s) between the elements in the sentences. I give them a couple of minutes to annotate and write down any observations they might have. Then I bring them back together and I write their observations down on the board, discussing them as a class as we go.
Most of the time my students are perplexed by Caliban as they have not read the Tempest, so I need to fill in enough they will be able to make connections later, but not so much I make those connections for them. We run through possibilities of what kinds of books might have been stolen, listing ideas on the board as students say them. Examples here range widely: legal books, accounting books, cookbooks, spell books, instruction books, and so on. We'll even talk about what these different choices might imply. We clarify isle vs aisle. We keep probing the passage, wringing everything we can out of it while paying special attention to implications. My go to question is, “What else do you notice?” When the class has exhausted their insights and there is nothing major they are missing, only then do I have them turn the page. When doing the Rodriguez passage, we typically spend 8-10 minutes per chunk.
At that point, we read, “Once upon a time, I was a “socially disadvantaged” child. An enchantedly happy child.” I add to our previous list that they should pay attention to quotation marks and fragments. They recognize the fairy tale allusions right away and we spend quite a bit of time working out the connotations and implications inherent in the word choice, quotations, allusions, and fragments. This keeps going through all 6 sections.
Afterward (typically as homework or the next day), we read the rest of the introduction up to “It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far.” building upon our deep understanding of those first four paragraphs. Almost every time, they begin to see Caliban as a lens through which to interpret the rest of the text, making repeated connections back to the beginning and throughout the text. It teaches them to see detail and ask questions of the text even after they are “done” i.e. have noted the first thing they noticed. It helps break that tendency of students to move on as soon as they find something/anything. It effectively changes the goal of their reading.
So the steps are this:
- Pick a rich piece of text
- Divide it into 4-6 sections manageable sections
- Make a packet with 1 section per page
- Decide what you want students to look for and note those elements on the board
- Instruct the students NOT to read ahead
- Read the first section together
- Give the students time to look for the elements you’ve instructed them to look for
- Write their observations on the board
- Discuss
- Rinse and repeat.
- Use insights gained here to build deeper understanding of the rest of the text.
- Have students write about it.
Currently I’m using this method with the first three paragraphs of Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell. They will be writing an essay on that piece shortly, and it pays dividends for the rest of the essay to have them looking closely at word choice, tone, qualifications, etc. This isn’t a technique I use often like Liz’s back-pocket analysis strategy, but it does the job of teaching them to focus closely on a text admirably well and tends to make for a fun class period or two.
Note: I teach in 52-minute class periods. To do an interrupted reading well with the first three paragraphs of Shooting an Elephant typically takes a period and a half. With these longer paragraphs, I always begin by writing all of the interesting words they noted on the board, then we categorize them based on connotation or level of formality or whatever seems important for that paragraph. I start with word choice because it helps them recognize the tone and prompts other observations as well. With the Rodriguez passage from the handout above, we usually finish the interrupted reading in one period.
One caution if you choose to use the Rodriguez passage: In the past, my students didn’t always understand that each page was from the same text. Now when I introduce the activity, I make sure to be exceptionally clear that it is the whole text up to that point and they are consecutive sentences.
I hope you find this to be a useful technique. I certainly have.
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