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“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?” – Emily Dickinson, poem 260

I’ve always loved Dickinson’s poem 260.  The text gleams with humility, given voice by a poet who surely could not have imagined the icon she’d one day become.

But I also love it because it reminds me of an important truth about writing: we often don’t really know precisely who our reader is.  No matter how serious our topic, unless we’re writing an email or friendly missive, our audience is ultimately a fiction.

So what brings you to this blog?  In my imagination, you’re a kindred spirit: someone who is interested in helping students find themselves in the humanities.  But I’m thinking there’s probably a bit of a skeptic in you, too — someone who would be fine trading some platitudes for practicality, even in all its messiness. 

It’s at this crossroads that I imagine us meeting.  But of course, that’s just my imagination.   

As educators, it helps to remember that this is true for the texts our students read, too.  The authors we read don’t know our kids, and they’ve made all sorts of assumptions about the lives and experiences of their readers.  

Some texts take this into account. For example, the young readers version of Just Mercy is every bit as powerful as the adult version, but it makes fewer assumptions about what terms its readers will already by familiar with.

Most books don’t do this, and most books can’t.  No author can imagine who will read them in the future.  If you read Lord of the Flies now, you might take it – as I once did – as a fairly depressing allegory about the darkness in people.  But if you know this text is satirizing the colonialist strains in the texts it mimics, the book takes on new dimensions and new life.

The bottom line? 

The authors we teach don’t know our kids.  But we do.  That can guide how introduce texts to students: frontloading the knowledge they might be missing and giving them tools to identify when an author is assuming knowledge they do not yet have:

• As Teachers: Plan to Drop Knowledge — Adding some background knowledge before or at the start of class can make all the difference in student comprehension.  As you prepare to teach, consider what understandings you needed to draw from to make sense of the text, and embed support texts into your unit plan. These can be quick media or passages at the start of class or larger deep dives for homework or full-class study.   

• For Students: Teach When to Get Meta — And for those times when students encounter texts that assume they know things they do not (yet)? I’ve always liked the self-question Kylene Beers and Robert Probst suggest in Reading Nonfiction: “What did the author think I already knew?”  What a wonderful way to step our students away from blame and self-doubt and towards action and self-efficacy.  

 

So let’s start there.  I know I’m making some big assumptions about who you are and why you’re here.  But  – and this is the nice thing about blogs – this format is easy to adjust the more I learn about just who is reading it.  

Feel free to write in with questions and ideas or just to say hello.  I encourage you to sign up for updates.  I’ll try to write occasionally, mainly when I feel I have something new to share – so know I won’t bombard your inbox with relentless missives.  

Welcome!  Until next we meet!