My friend Brian is back from Japan. He's a music teacher, about to begin work at a new school on Long Island. Last night, he and I began comparing the teaching of music with the teaching of English. I shared with Brian my concerns around reading in my own English classroom--how a teacher can never actually know if a student has read a given assignment. My argument goes as such: reading is a purely internal act, and while teachers can indeed give students quizzes about a reading or ask them to produce an essay about a reading, these assessments can be completed successfully even if a student didn't read. What teachers often assess isn't a student's reading; they are assessing students ability to produce something not necessarily related to the act of reading at all. Literary works, for example, are layered, nuanced, and subject to myriad interpretations. Any type of reading assessment will fall way short.
Brian replied that in teaching students to sing, he doesn't focus on the sight-reading of music. For him, sight-reading is an advanced skill, only valuable after students have mastered the act of singing. And to master it, they need a model who coaches them. His description is one of physicality, and performance.
I wondered, if applied to teaching literature, what Brian's pedagogical value means. What if, for example, the English teacher prioritized physicality, performance? How would a curriculum that reserved the reading of literature for only advanced grades affect students' learning? What if students, after having learned a certain set of basic reading and writing skills, then had to master oration and rhetoric? Would this be a return to the medieval trivuum?
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