Lesson in Practice

As I read The Homework Myth and Fires in the Bathroom, I inadvertently put one of my major classroom lessons into practice.

I went into reading each of these texts knowing that I wanted to write a somewhat detailed review of each book. But, for some reason, I decided to only take notes on one of the books. As I read Fires in the Bathroom, I stopped to use post-it notes (since I didn't own the book), but I didn't take notes on The Homework Myth.

Now I have finished both books, but I am slacking on writing my review of The Homework Myth. Is it because I liked Kohn's book less? Is it because I was less interested in the material? Was the writing enjoyable? NO, in fact, to all these questions. I very much enjoyed The Homework Myth, while Fires in the Bathroom was just alright. But now that I have completed the second book, I don't have anything to look back on to help me write about it. When I did my first review, I flipped through the text and pulled out each post-it and decided whether to use it in the review. Drafting the post was a breeze. Conversely, now that The Homework Myth is done, I'm having a hard time remembering all of Kohn's points. In fact, when I was asked a question about the book near the end of my reading, I struggling to respond.

Also interesting, I didn't talk about Fires in the Bathroom at all. But, particularly for the first half of the book, I debated homework with my husband almost daily. These were sometimes heated conversations where I referred back to specific passages of the text, but now I can't remember exactly what we discussed. What is interesting about this for me is that just talking about the text wasn't enough for me to remember it.

So, I have learned a few things from accidental experiment:

• I reinforced my knowledge that I remember information better if I write it down.
  
• I used to think that I remembered information from lectures and discussions in courses well because of my listening skills, but I'm wondering if it really was my note taking that made the difference. Even if my notes weren't excellent, they were enough to jog my memory later.
  
• I don't remember non-fiction texts anywhere near as well as fiction without the use of notes.
  
• What I've been telling students for years is true (at least some of the time, for some people). If you are planning on using a text for more than a pleasure read, taking notes of some kind is to your advantage. They are even more advantageous if you are going to use the information in another way, such as a report.
  
• Talking about a text right after reading it isn't necessarily enough to commit it to memory.
  
• Liking a text doesn't necessarily mean that you will remember it later either.
  
• I should pass on to students that this process also works with non-fiction. This could be particularly useful to help students figure out how to write about a non-fiction text for another course, especially since content area teachers often don't give a lot of direction about how they want their papers written.
• How can I teach this lesson to students? I am glad to have this experience to share with them, but it is unlikely that just the story of my experience will motivate many of them to give it a try. Could I challenge them to try it out with two texts? Maybe we read two short stories and return to them a while later. One has notes and the other doesn't.
  

The question I'm left to ponder is: How important is it for my students to remember a text after they have finished it? We read literature primarily in my classroom. Usually the literature is a venue for practicing other skills. The text itself isn't the content the majority of the time. If students remembered my beloved Huck and Scout, it would improve their understanding of American culture, but it probably won't directly impact them later. But, students do need to remember a text long enough to get through it. Some of my students have trouble remembering what they read into the next day. Or, some of my students read ahead and finish a text significantly sooner than the rest of the class so they have a large gap before discussing or writing about the text.

Also, I must not forget the kind of notes I am asking students to take, and I took myself in this accidental experiment. I did not note the content. I noted my reactions to the content. While it is often easy to remember your strongest reactions to a section of reading or a short text for a short period of time, as I've proven to myself, its hard to remember your reactions over the course of a whole book that is read over time. A record of those ideas would prove useful for generating writing topics or for gathering evidence to support an overall opinion. Thus, this type of note does serve two functions. They do force the reader to engage with the text on some level, hopefully one that is personally meaningful. But they also do leave a trail to follow when one has free choice on how to respond to the text once it is through, which traditionally is an analytical essay in the high school English Language Arts classroom.