It’s Sunday morning, I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep, and I’m starting to sort through my notes and thoughts from the Nashville madness.

I just saw this over on BoingBoing, and I figured I’d rip it off as a way of starting. It’s from an interview with Zadie Smith on KCRW:

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

As a sometime lazy reader, I can’t agree with Smith more. In fact, it was in part because of this idea that the whole Moby-Dick online book group was started–the struggle with a particular piece of reading leads to greater understanding of the work and, if you’re lucky, yourself. This is why my students “don’t read” all of Macbeth, but do spend a couple of weeks fighting with the text as they prepare scenes. Discussion, individual writing, research, blogging–these are all tools that I hope to give my students as they practice interacting with texts, both in school and in their personal worlds.

That’s why the Writing Project model is crucial–it gives teachers the tools they need to help their students get to the kind of reading that Smith believes is so important. It empowers teachers to become writers and to help their students become writers, and it makes the class much less teacher-centric. I see blogging as the logical extension of that, and when we start moving towards wikis (and yes, we’ll start moving that way in the not-so-distant future) it’ll be even more so.

In some ways, the NCTE sessions I attended were disappointing. Maybe I got spoiled at the NWP event, and maybe I was just tired after a night seeing Nashville, but I didn’t have the patience to sit and be talked to. It was great hearing “celebrity” presenters like Don Graves and Tom Romano, both of whom I respect immensely as writers and teachers, but I wanted more interactivity. At the last NWP Tech Liaison session I attended, Troy Hicks and Bud Hunt started (and we all contributed to) a Wiki about our discussion. That interactivity was so refreshing and, more than the specific information that was transmitted, inspirational as a way that classrooms can, and maybe should, work.

My struggle now will be to try and articulate, then remedy, the reasons why I won’t totally let go and let my classroom be a place where we all, including (especially?) me, create our learning experience together. I need to figure out what I’m afraid of, or if I’m really even afraid. This is going to be fun, I think, and frustrating. I’m ready to hit the wall and I’m ready to figure out workarounds that might lead to dead ends. Off we go.