Who Cares What People Think?

There is a certain fearsome liberty in being able to say, “I don’t care what you think.” The word think can mean many things, all of them useful. Sometimes, “I don’t care what you think!” is an act of defiance and lonely liberty. Sometimes, it’s the “I don’t care” of Cassandra, preparing herself to watch you go to hell despite her warning. Even if rarely used, the phrase has been a welcome last resort for us all.

Teachers, however, have to care what people think. No stretching of the definition will escape the fact that teachers must change the thinking of their students. Sometimes, we change the way students think about something, a subject, a kata, a drive-shaft. Sometimes, we are even called upon to change the way students think—about anything. Literacy instruction, in essence, is a form of cognitive re-alignment therapy. Or rather, cognitive re-alignment is the implicit objective of literacy instruction.

State learning standards in language arts are demanding, requiring students to produce evidence that they are sophisticated users of texts. Texts include written, spoken and electronic expression. The gearing of state assessments, however, puts the greatest weight on written texts, and on the students as readers. As readers, students must be able to both mine the text for meaning and discuss the text as an object of study in and of itself. This kind of textual sophistication requires language operations that cannot be separated from either logical processes or experiential intuition.

There is disagreement as to the best way to teach textual sophistication. One approach takes the job literally, insisting that students practice logical processes as such. These are often called “reading skills.” However, though reading skills can be assessed, this is not to say we know how to teach them. Another approach sees logical processes as largely incidental to the acquisition of specific knowledge. That is to say, they see the way we think as a byproduct of what we think about. Is literacy the activity of reading and writing, or is it the study of literature? It doesn’t matter, our learning standards want to see evidence of both.

Either way, we have to care what students think, and how they think. And we do care. Our mounting hysteria is the best evidence of our concern. We are faced with a mystery that deepens the more clearly we assess the situation. How do we get students to do this kind of reading, these linguistic operations, that thought process? How, without throwing the problem out of our classrooms like a private school? We know what we want, and we know whether or not we get what we want. But when we don’t get it, when students struggle as readers, what should we do to catch them up?

A lot of emphasis has been placed on “research-based best practices” as a means of getting students to think the way we want them to. Perhaps one of them is good enough to transform struggling readers into proficient readers on a systematic basis. Mr. Stickfigure, for his part, also believes in setting high standards. But I have learned as much about transforming readers from The Autobiography of Malcolm X as I have from any other research: When we can teach the value of a sliver of light upon the page, we will know how to teach students to think. Until then, we must care, and fail.