Deconstructing Language To Reconstruct It All Over Again. Coincidental Epiphanies in Developmental Reading

Last night, graduate students read a chapter by Deborah Appleman about teaching Deconstruction in secondary classrooms and, because I forgot the book I wanted to use, I came up with an impromptu alternative, which worked and has me thinking in all sorts of new ways (potential everywhere).

The skinny is this - students read Dear Martin as a course YA novel so that I could hang lessons onto something concrete, and I'm always pushing for supplemental readings to get the themes and motivations across. The short is I forgot the other book I wanted to work with, so I ended up searching the NYTimes for relevant Opinion pieces around race, gun violence, international stereotypes, Black history, MLK, and justice. I ended up finding around 18 relevant OpEds from this year alone.

Because I was teaching deconstruction, I asked students to read their Op-Ed, choose a section, and then operate with a de-word poem (via Kwame Alexander's models in Booked). What occurred, I found, was a language synopsis from each article that could easily be turned into found poetry, but that also could make a larger point with academic writing. I had students put each article on the board with the words they 'contained and constrained' through the deconstructive/black out activity. What resulted was that 15 students established a word bank extremely relevant to a reading of Dear Martin. I then said, "I failed. I should have had you write the name of the author of each OpEd, too."

Why? Because I realized that with high school students, should they have opportunities to read numerous OpEds, would also gain perspective from NYTimes sources to help articulate larger arguments they might have for a reading of Dear Martin. I said, "This is interesting, because all of these words actually become focus points for what we might say and reference. These Op-Eds help us to form opinions, and I'm sure kids would benefit from such an activity, too."

The students, with deconstructing the OpEds with blacking out words to get to the main point, actually captured the essence of the article the could be turned into a statement to enrich the conversation for reading Dear Martin.

It was dumb luck. I figured the poetic connection would be made obvious (and it was), but I was more intrigued that this activity helped my students explicate the points of the OpEds in rather tremendous ways.

I will be doing this activity again.