Blog Paper

I look back at my experiences in English classes and classes I needed to read quite a bit, and I can’t deny that I have had little to no success in them. I have always had this belief that I would never be good at comprehending texts that I read. It is not like I don’t want to understand, and it is not like I don’t try, but it just has been very hard for me in the past. It is something however that I want to be successful at in the future and I am working hard to accomplish it. I am at a place in my life where I would like to find a better understanding of texts so I can discuss them with other people. How do I do this though? First of all I have to evaluate where I see myself now in terms of reading development, and then decide how I can move up the ladder to the next couple of stages.
The stage I believe I was at when I started this class was definitely the text-self stage. I saw things as “I centered” and would always read texts and would relate them to experiences that I had in my life, or life around me. I remember reading The Da Vinci Code and trying to relate to my own life. I would try to put myself into the story and really didn't take anything out of the book itself. There are many times I have done this in the past and never really realized that I was missing some much within the story. I was in essence closing my eyes to most of the books I was reading. I was really only taking what I wanted out of the story and leaving other information behind never knowing there was so much inside some stories.
It is not only personal reading that I did this too. I have taken many English classes in the past and I have always been so behind in them because of my inability to see into the text. I took American literature right here at Cardinal Stritch and had a boat load of problems with it. I was always behind in the class and found myself being left out of the discussion in class. I was going to class and it seemed as though I was taking a different class than everyone else. I was so lost in terms of what other students were able to pick out of the text and what I was able to pick out. I was unable to see the story within the story. Other students had the ability to step outside of the text and relate it to other texts they had read in the past. I actually got so discouraged in that class that I almost dropped it. I didn’t drop the class but I had to work very hard to get by in that class and squeak by with a B in the class. It was not for a lack of trying in the class but it is the fact that I could not get past the “I” aspect I was bringing to the every text I was reading at the time. I need to take the next step and try to get more out of the texts I am reading.
What development step am I at now? I hate to say it, but I think I am at the same point now that I was at the beginning of this class. I might actually be a little further along but it is hard for me to say that I am much further now than I was before. How did I come to this conclusion that I have made little or no progress? Looking at my blog entries I found that I use the term, “I found” or “I saw” a whole bunch and I don’t really dissect the text very well. I can now see by my blog entries that I am still relating the text to what I see and I don’t look or bring outside texts into consideration. By looking at my blogs it is easy for me to see that I have a lot of work to do in terms of trying to make it to the next reading development level. I also refer to weather or not I like the text or not and I do that a ton in my blogs and this is a sign of being at the text-self level. I also relate the text to my life quite a bit, and no matter what I talk about it always seems to come back to what I thought or felt. To give an example of this from my blog, I will reference the blog on Moulin Rouge. I talked in the blog about the use of metafiction and how they used it throughout the film. I did a great job I thought of coming up with certain situations Luhrmann puts metafiction in the movie and then I end the blog with, “I will never view this movie the same way again”. I once again threw the “I centered” point of view in there once again, and it ends up taking away from the blog.
Even though I may be stuck in the first level of reading development, I do see some situations where I might be going to the next level. In some of my blogs I do see the fact that I am taking outside texts and relating them to the reading I am doing in class. There are not a bunch of examples of this, but I did find a few from my blogs. The first example of this is the fact that I saw Tarantino uses different aspects in Pulp Fiction that others have used in the past. It makes me think that if I could pick it up in a movie, there is no reason I should not be able to do it when I read. I also saw that in the blog I wrote about Auster I made reference to metafiction and how it was being used. With these two examples I see that I might be taking the first steps to the next stage of reading development.
So what is next for me and my progress to the next step of reading development? Well after giving this a whole lot of thought I decided that the first thing I need to do is read more and take my time when I read something. Just reading more won’t solve the problem I have but if I slow down and really think about what I am reading. If I take a step back from the book and realize that there is more to the text than what meets the eye, it will help me. I once had a professor that told me to stop every time I read something I didn’t understand and read it again. What I do a lot of the times if I don’t understand something is just keep reading and never really get a grip on the text. What I need to do is stop and find out what the author is trying to say through the text. Another option for me is to find a book club and learn different ways to interpret texts. I really do enjoy reading but I am lagging in terms of understanding the underlying story. I know not all stories have an underlying story, but I would like to be able to determine if there was one.
I will keep on working hard to improve my reading development and try the strategies I have come up with. I am determined to become more aware of stories under the story and feel more comfortable in conversations about certain texts. If I want to move up the ladder so to speak of reading development I need to take the time and put in the effort and I can do it.