Deeper Reading, Chapters 4 and 5

I was a sophomore in high school when I first read Brave New World and I absolutely hated it.  I hated the generic questions my teacher asked.  I thought the text was transparent and irrelevant.  I couldn't wait for the class to move on to a different text because I thought we were wasting time on an outdated book.  Two years later, on a flight to Italy, I read the book again.  I couldn't understand why I had hated the book before.  I couldn't even remember what had rubbed me the wrong way about it in the first place.  In fact, reading it again, I could see huge implications and relevancy to our modern American life.  I thought about the book for the entire two weeks of my holiday, revisiting passages on long train rides and discussing it with my travel companion at length over many dinners.

There are several significant reasons why my second reading was so different.  The first was that I wasn't being required to read the text.  The second was that I had learned a great deal more about the world, and specifically about the historical context in which the book was written, since my initial encounter.  The third was that I knew the basics of the story, so my mind was free to focus on details. 

With each reading, text becomes more vivid.  Every time we revisit a text, we find a sparkling gem of truth we hadn't noticed before.  Chapters 4 and 5 of Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading investigate the importance of both the initial and the second reading of a text.  We have to ask ourselves what is actually happening on the page, and secondarily, what does it mean.  Chapter 4 reminded me of a lot of the fix-up strategies discussed in Cris Tovani's I Read It But I Don't Get It.  Gallagher discusses methods for helping students realize where comprehension is actually breaking down and developing strategies for addressing the breakdown immediately.  Scoring Comprehension and Color Coding (p. 67-69) are two strategies students can use to help identify specifically what they don't know when they are reading.  It's so important to explicitly identify parts of a text that don't make sense because students can immediately know what's wrong and seek help and teachers can understand precisely what students don't know.

In Chapter 5, Gallagher discusses an important element of second reading, identifying not only what the text says and what it means, but also what the text doesn't say and how that impacts meaning too.  So often we are trained to see what's only on the page.  However, in both simplistic and complex ways, authors exclude information that's either implied or subverts the meaning of the text.  Gallagher talks about the excluding of information when reading statistics, but in fictional and nonfictional texts, the exclusion of information may be an intentional craft device.  Sometimes authors want readers to understand an emotion through inferences without explicitly labeling the emotion.  Sometimes leaving out specific information is a craft device to create doubt in the mind of the readers.  Left out information, as Gallagher illustrates, may also unintentionally subvert the meaning or the validity of a text as well.  This aspect of text is typically revealed in a second reading because it often takes zooming in on the details of a text to begin to see what's missing. 

Another essential aspect of the second reading is examining how the text actually works and why it matters.  The second reading is really where students can move from the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, to the higher levels, analyzing meaning and evaluating validity.  The second reading helps move students toward the standards the Common Core charges teachers with upholding.