Too often in education I feel that I forget to teach the basics.  In my classroom I use words like „subject“, „noun“, „direct object“, and „predicate nominative“ and I assume that my students know what I am talking about.  I forget that they are not linguists and that they have not studied languages for ten years.  It is easy to forget that my students are beginners who have never thought about language with these terms before, because they have never needed to look at why their own language is set up the way it is.

Just because a student knows how to speak English, does not mean that student knows the ins and outs of a language. Similarly, just because a student can read and reads often does not mean that that student has the skills to read and interpret literature.  Students in a literature course need to learn the basics before taking on certain texts.  As an educator this may seem frustrating.  Often times I will hear an instructor say „It’s not my job to teach them that“ and they will complain that they do not have the time to waste on teaching their students basic skills like close reading in a literature course or grammar terms in my German course.  

I understand their frustration, but not their reaction.  Taking the time to teach the basics may seem like it would take too much time away from the course material, but I believe this actually saves time in the end. Here I agree with the approach taken in „Teaching close reading skills in a large lecture course“ from Tinkle, Atias, McAdams, and Zukerman.  In this course, the instructors did not teach the students what to think, rather they gave the skills needed to learn how to think.  By teaching the students the skills needed to read closely, they instructor ultimately saves time lecturing on the meaning of literature and can instead look at the students’ writing to see what they took from the reading.  They can then use these interpretations for an engaging discussion rather than a lecture. 

The only drawback in this method is that they did not focus on critical editing like the Keleman article does.  Although, in my opinion Keleman puts too much emphasis on critical editing.  I feel that looking at how a text was edited is similar to examining a translation.  We cannot simply take a text at face value, rather we must examine who edited the text to get a full picture.  Translation is not an exact science which is why translations vary depending on the author.  Not everything is translatable and so one must pick and choose which elements of a text are important and which can be thrown out.  This happens with any edit and affects the way we read a text.  Still, I feel that this can be done as a part of close reading.  I feel both articles made very useful points, and that their ideas are best used together to create a well balanced classroom.