Looking at a Writing and Reading Process Connected to Research

Lately I am thinking about the amount of reading I am doing as I write two articles & wondering about how that process compares to research methods that middle and high school students are required to do at school. A few observations:

1. My reading list emerges alongside the writing.
2. My reading list is fueled by what I read. I read a lot of  the works referenced in a text. Like Frost knew: way leads on to way.  For example, I am anxiously awaiting Full House (Gould, 1996) as I need to read it in order to better understand a point that Brian Sutton-Smith makes concerning evolution and play. I could never have predicted this would be a text of importance as I began this work.
3. Sometimes an unrelated article I have read will later inform the work I am composing in surprising ways.
4. Sometimes I stop the writing and create a work visually. Not sure how this matters but it seems to help me write.
5. I know very little and am aware of this as I read and write. 
6. I could never list the resources I will read/view/listen to for any single article I write until I have the work ready for publication. Even then, my experience has been that editors and peer reviewers will raise questions that send me back to rewrite, reread, and select works to read I had not considered. If I was required to make a list of the resources I planned to use before I actually started, it would make me not want to write.
7. I never know what will emerge even when I think I have a good idea.  
8. Talking with key people as I have drafts completed helps me enormously. 
9. I have a handful of people (and now since Twitter some of that is changing) that I share initial drafts with and these confidants actually read and respond to the work. I am selective with whom I share drafts.
10. My husband is the best editor (not only in the narrow sense of surface text, but also in the deeper structure and thinking of the text) I know and thankfully he loves me enough to suffer through those early drafts and push me to think in ways that stretches my thinking and often my intentions.
11. I meticulously list the works cited as I write.  I don't leave this to some end time. 
12. Making the works cited page somehow makes me feel productive even when I am not producing pages.
13. What I am wondering about alters as I read and listen to taped interviews and classroom sessions. 
14. I could never write a thesis statement or chose one from a list of four choices (A, B, C, or D). Meaning emerges.
15. Just because I am writing it, doesn't mean I understand. Often I don't.
16. I listen to the interviews and classrooms sessions a lot, often.  
17. Vacuuming, driving, walking in the woods are all ways that help me to think about the work while not directly thinking about it.
18. As ideas flow, I visualize cognitive bifurcation happening inside my brain. It's a lot like tree lights blinking On. Off. Growing stronger.
19. I locate what will become *the article* in several different documents and later join some of these initial writings. Collage seems to be a method I employ.
20. I like to join dissimilar things and see what pops.
21. I write far more that I will ever use in any one article.
22. I reread a lot.
23. I do a lot of things not directly related to reading or writing, and yet so much informs the work.  Even when I am not consciously thinking about the work, my mind seems to be busy seeking patterns, etc.  For example, on a trip to have lunch with a friend one day I listened to Brian Lehrer show and had the opportunity to hear Jonah Lehrer discuss his new book. I though I heard him say something about reinvention of self.  And yet when I listened to the show again (thank you Stitcher) I couldn't find what I though I had heard. The insight nonetheless was important and will likely be a critical understanding in one of the articles: in a classroom I am studying, reinventing one's self is the curriculum. It is what play looks like inside of school.  The play is not the Minecraft. The play is the many ways reinvention occurs.
24. I rely on story in most of my 'non-fiction' works. Narrative informs everything. (Sorry Common Core people who think these things are unrelated. Not so for me.) 
25. I appreciate deadlines.
26. I detest deadlines.
27. I often doubt I will finish the work at hand.
28. I abandon writing and return it at time.
29. I am continuously amazed by how much I don't know which helps me to understand.
30. I read obsessively. It's like a hunger. 
31. I reread my work on screen as I am composing.  
32. I reread my work on paper when I need to do a deeper revision or edit. 
33. I need to hear the work aloud and find a pen in hand matters in that physically writing with a pen  helps me to find the 'right' word, phrase.  
34. I abandon most processes related to revision and editing and return to writing on screen as soon as these initial ways of delving catches some fire I need to follow.
35. I see in pictures, wholes. There is a logic to this that is critical for me as I revise.
36. I never use a rubric, checklist to guide my work.  I don't want an ending imposed. Impose an ending and I probably will find I have nothing to say.

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Now I wonder about how we guide students to think and compose as readers and writers. How does the list above compare with the expectation of school-based authoring? How do we manage the constraints and freedoms, both needed to compose well?  How is agency realized at school?

Nomadic Reading in a Standards-Based World

I have never really given much thought about how I get ready to read, but tonight as I went in search of a copy of David Foster Wallace's, Everything and More: A Short History of Infinity and failed to secure a copy, I realized that in lieu of the real deal, I am reading and talking about the book.

I first became interested this afternoon as I listened to my husband read aloud sections of the text from a copy of the book he is reading. It caught me ear. Then we talked about what he had read aloud and ideas we each had about mathematics. We talked a lot through the next few hours, off and on. Then I read a few reviews on line, abandoning some as I read and rereading others. Next, we went off in search of the book at two book stores and came up empty. I returned to the Internet found the opening of the text on Google books and read it and then read blogs that mentioned the text and I found myself cycling back to read more reviews. In one blog, I found a photograph of  David Foster Wallace reading, an image I had seen before, and this time I wondered what his voice might have sounded like. This stilled me and I wondered why he took his life.

All of these musings will (in)form how I read, stirring my imagination and readying me (perhaps) for when the book arrives on Tuesday and I open it. I imagine/anticipate that time when I come home from work to find the book has arrived and think about how I will spend that first night reading and writing in the margins, as this is a text where I most likely will want to write--will have something to say and to question.

So thinking about how I am approaching this text nudges me to consider how reading is situated in high school and wondering if room can be made so that possibilitites of reading stances are afforded to learners. It seems important to recognize that there are times when we ready ourselves to read and certainly times when we do not. Reading actions can be informed via an infinite number of possibilities and conditions and it is just staggering that any group could somehow contain such openness within a set of common core state standards that describe the conditions and outcomes of reading for all learners across 13 years. How could any group anticipate such vastness? How could anyone define, univocally, literate behavior?

The opening statement of the Common Core State Standards' mission says: "The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them." Oddly, when I read these standards, there was no mention I could find that suggests that pre-reading exists, let alone is desirable.

Tonight I wonder how any group can purport to know so much, when the possibilities of action/inaction that precede the arrival of the next book I plan to read are infinite? The path before me is largely nomadic; one that I am claiming and making simultaneously, and consider that I haven't even gotten to hold the book in my hands. What might happen to learners if instead of constructing epic certainties as a positive and sought outcome, we conceptualized curriculum as a road to make, not a determined path all must follow? Consider the possibilities that would immediately be opened.