Student repsonse, Week 6

Zac,

I really agree with your comment here, I think there is a tremendous amount of expectation for young students to read a poem and tell a teacher or write in an essay "what it all means." There is a great myth about there being one grand and ultimate meaning to a poem, but that is just not the case. Thinking small with the aid of sign inventory-ing really helps students, as you were saying, tackle the text in front of them. I have even found working with numerous students at the Writing Center here on campus that with most texts (not just poetry, but fiction, advertisements, film, etc) they have a difficult time narrowing down the focus of an essay when analyzing a text. I think that once students can begin to see that there are numerous, differing meanings to a text then they will be better able to pick one they agree most with and have the most evidence from the text to back it up, the technique of inventory-ing a text will be a great tool in making students better readers of a poem.