It's how we learn to teach. And it isn't always the best way to accomplish our one desire: to have students who understand and appreciate the matter we have set before them. It wasn't until about ten years before I retired that I really learned how to teach most of what I taught.
First, I finally realized that student's learning the smallest precise details of the plot of a piece of literature was not the important thing, but rather, learning how to read that piece of literature and understand the ideas in it, so that they might enjoy it and possibly become what we have always said we wanted to encourage: life long readers. To that end, I learned to begin a novel or a play much more slowly than "teaching guides" seemed to direct.
Taking time at the beginning of a novel to show students how to see those things they had been shown in short stories such as the beginnings of character development, the background of what would develop into the plot, foreshadowing, all the things we had labored with before, really made a big difference as they read further into the book. If they could see the beginnings of conflict, they could then follow that and see the development of the plot, be seduced into the rising action, be caught off guard by red herrings and blind leads, and enjoy the working out of the story.
That entire focus would be more on learning to make inferences, the one reading goal so many cannot pass on the standardized reading comprehension tests and the primary problem behind the fact that so many high school students cannot "catch" the humor found in comic strips. Good readers who have read everything set before them forever unconsciously infer from their reading all of the time and never give it a thought. But those whose reading experience has mostly been assigned have not learned to think past what is said to what is meant.
I had never thought about the fact that my students, reading a passage in a story, did not have any idea just what that passage was telling them about what was happening or what was about to happen. And so, I learned, far too late, to begin teaching inference very early, with those comics, showing students a strip and asking, "What happened just before this?" or "What is this character going to say/do next?" This way, they became aware of something they had never thought of: the significance of small details, details not to be memorized, but to be understood.
In this way, teaching how to read lengthy literature such as a novel or a play became one of the five or six major objectives I wanted my students to master before they left my ninth grade class. Inference was the primary part of that objective and one I have never found emphasized in any book or guide or class. Yes, it had been mentioned that students were unable to do this, at least on those reading comprehension tests, but I had never seen or heard anything about how to teach students to infer from their reading. That was how I discovered that when they were able to draw inferences, then their understanding of character, the importance of the setting and background, and the conflict and rising action seemed to be much easier. I have no idea why I had not seen that forty years before I did.
There is so much more that I learned in those last ten years of teaching, truly something new every year once my eyes were opened to the fact that what I had always done and what I had seen others do might not be the very best of methods. Those I will save for another time. Right now, I wonder whether my writing a book for beginning teachers would have any meaning or use whatsoever. If so, perhaps, I have found the beginnings of one in what I learned from my students in those last few years.
