Response to “Making Meaning Clear: The Logic of Revision” by Donald M. Murray

     What strikes me most about this essay is this statement: “The teacher must give the responsibility for the text to the writer…”(34) in that it, for me, perfectly sums up how teachers, with the best of intentions, can sometimes hinder a basic writer’s progress. When students turn in a first draft, many teachers immediately mark errors related to lower order concerns (LOC). The student then revises the document; however, the teacher has interfered with the revision process by giving students information about where the students should focus his/her efforts—on LOCs. The student typically trusts that the teacher is giving them the correct information and focuses his/her revision process on spelling, punctuation and grammar.  While students need to understand and use these conventions to be truly proficient, these errors are --by far -- less important than organization, clear focus and development of the narrative so that the audience can access the writer’s purpose. The students’ revision process, disrupted in this way, may lead them to simply correct the errors marked by the teacher and, after learning nothing, consider their work done. This focus, by the teacher on LOCs, basically subverts the process and potential of writing. It inhibits the growth of critical thinking skills, the ability to reflect on writing and the discipline to tough it out through what can be a very difficult process. Teachers—and again, I’m including myself—need to allow students to do their own work in a way that benefits them in the long run. We need to relinquish control of the process and trust that our students will improve without excessive intervention regarding low order concerns.

Literacy Narrative_The Red Pony_first draft

The Red Pony

     As near as I can remember, it started with the red pony.  It was August: hot.  I was sitting on a dark green bench in the 282 schoolyard, half-watching my brother and some other guys playing half-court pick-up basketball.  I was there most mornings in summer; I was too little to cross the street by myself – that’s what my mother said anyway – so the only way I was getting off the block was to go with my brother to the schoolyard in the mornings.  We had to go early because that was the only way to get one of the three half courts.  If you got there too late, you’d have to stand around and wait for someone to drop out and for a team to pick you up.  Anyway, it wasn’t bad there in the mornings.  We went before it got really hot, before the blacktop started to get soft. I usually watched and waited for some other little kids to arrive, and then we’d play freeze tag or regular tag or old mother witch.

     This morning was different than most; I had a book that Tony, an old Dominican guy on my block that sold piraguas, had given me three or four days before.  Tony was nice to the kids on the block; the piraguas were a quarter but he’d let you slide if you were short.  One day, when I was buying my icy – coconut was my favorite – I noticed an old tan book on the milk crate where Tony usually sat.  The book was pretty big, about 7x9, and it had a picture of a red horse on the cover.  “You reading that book, Tony?” Tony said he’d tried to read it but his Ingles wasn’t good enough even though the book was kind of a kids’ book.  “You wannit, kid?” I wanted it.

            So that morning, I was reading about Buck and the red pony.  Buck was about my age but he lived on a ranch in Montana.  He worked on the ranch even though he was a kid; he was a cowboy and what he wanted more than anything was his own horse.  Well, he’d gotten one, a red pony that he loved more than anything.  He took good care of him; he bathed him and fed him regular, but the pony got sick anyway.  The doctor cut a hole in his throat so he could breathe but the pony didn’t get better.  One day when Buck went to the barn, the pony was gone.  He’d gone off (to die?!!?) Buck caught up with him a couple miles cross-country and was walking him back in when he noticed the vultures circling.

     That’s where I’d stopped the night before.  So, this morning, fingers crossed, I opened the book.  An hour later, it was time to go home.  My brother came over to the bench where I sat crying.  “Somebody mess with you?” I told him what happened to the pony and what Buck did after driven to violence by grief.  “Buck?” I started to tell Brother the whole story. “Wait a minute. You crying over a story in a book?”

     I was.

     When I think of the story today, I can still feel it: tightening chest and throat --shallow breath --watery eyes.  I still feel it; 35 years later --as I write this sentence – I feel the grief, the rage, and the loss of a 10-year-old boy who was the figment of someone’s imagination. It’s magical, no?  That feeling persists, after heartbreak, deaths in the family, addiction and divorce.  I still feel it.

     I think that day I understood, albeit in a very rudimentary way, the power inherent in the written word. Through the story of Buck and his red pony, I was able to really experience – emotionally -- something impossible in my world.  We didn’t get ponies on St. Johns Place; you were lucky if you got a cat.  In that moment, when I was reading, the story was real -- Buck and the red pony were real – what happened in the story really happened.  Maybe not word for word; but something like that; something that made a kid feel angry, sad and powerless; something totally unjust. So, I figured, that story was actually a lot of stories; stories that had different people and places, different events; different injustices but exactly the same feelings.

Response to “Interrogating Texts: From Deferent to Efferent and Aesthetic Reading Practices” by Cheryl Hogue Smith

     I agree with this author’s basic premise that students’ difficulties with regard to writing are directly linked to an inability to deconstruct and distill meaning from complex reading materials.  My own reading and writing skills are rooted in reading.  I was encouraged to read a variety of texts as a young girl; from the process, I inductively gained a set of skills that made writing much easier for me late in life.  I had internalized the conventions of writing and, with time, was able to reproduce what I’d read.  I was able to respond to a logical argument because I could identify the important elements and structure of the piece I’d read and respond in kind.  If a student is unable to identify the argument or what the compelling evidence of the argument is, they s/he is unlikely to be able to respond appropriately. 

     The occurrence of “inattentional blindness” defined by Simons and Chabris as the “phenomenon of missing something that should be obvious,” (59) also plays a part in students’ difficulties with regard to responding to text or even knowing how to respond.  I agree that part of the problem is that students miss important information because they’re concentrating on locating specific information in a text, but I don’t think that describes the problem in its entirety.  Students are also often unaware of the way different genres are structured and therefore can’t differentiate between important information and supporting details. This deficit can indeed be minimized by teaching students how to read and mark information that strikes them and then reread for greater clarity. There is a misconception among students that reading a text can be completed in one sitting and that all pertinent information will be available after that single reading.  Reading, like writing, is a process and needs to be taught as a process.