Chapter 11: "This Wooden Shack Place": The Logic of an Unconventional Reading

Hull and Rose define their chapter as one about student interpretations of literature that “strike the teacher as unusual, a little off, not on the mark.” The focus of their chapter is sociocultural, concerning a Jamaican/Trinidadian-American student at risk named Robert, and his "unconventional" interpretation of a contemporary poem. They report that Robert is from a lower middle class, inner city SES. His Verbal SAT score was 270. Robert had, however, been bused to a more affluent school setting for middle and high school, achieving a GPA of 3.35. Robert was a student of one of the authors, Mike Rose, in “the most remedial” special freshman preparatory composition class at UCLA. As he taught the class, Mike Rose collected data on remedial writing instruction, and set up times to confer with and tutor various students, whose sociohistorical data he also collected.

Hull and Rose’s chapter analyzes and reflects upon Robert’s “misreadings” as he attempted to construct meaning in a conversation with his teacher, Mike Rose, after reading the poem, And Your Soul Shall Dance, written by the contemporary Japanese-American poet Garrett Kaoru Hongo. (see below)

And Your Soul Shall Dance


Walking to school beside fields
of tomatoes and summer squash,
alone and humming a Japanese love song,
you’ve concealed a copy of Photoplay
between your algebra and English texts.
Your knee socks,saddle shoes,plaid dress,
and blouse, long-sleeved and white
with ruffles down the front,
come from a Sears catalogue
and neatlycomplement your new Toni curls.
All of this sets you apart from the landscape:
flat valley grooved with irrigation ditches,
a tractor grinding through alkaline earth,
the short stands of windbreak eucalyptus
shuttering the desert wind
from a small cluster of wooden shacks
where your mother hangs the wash.
You want to go somewhere.
Somewhere far away from all the dust
and sorting machines and acres of lettuce.
Someplace where you might be kissed
by someone with smooth artistic hands.
When you turn into the schoolyard,
the flagpole gleams like a knife blade in the sun,
and classmates scatter like chickens,
shooed by the storm brooding on your horizon.

The authors are interested in 1) the way the “mismatch” in Robert’s interpretation of certain lines of the poem is revealed in a taped conversation between student and teacher, 2) in what they learn about Robert’s background and life experiences from his interpretation, and 3) the broader implications for teaching they might realize from investigating the development of his thought processes.

Hull and Rose observe that Robert and his classmates, on the whole, were able to grasp certain themes early on in the poem, but not able to construct an overall, unified understanding. The authors also found that certain students, Robert among them, were offering interpretations and reflections on the poem which indicated to the instructor, Mike Rose, that they might not be attending carefully to the text. It seemed to the instructor that the students were “misreading” the poem, and thereby not appreciating the dramatic tension between the girl’s desert farm surroundings and her “Photoplay” dreams. Although the authors agreed that Robert had a sense of the poem, he faltered about a third of the way through, unable to unify all the elements.

As he audiotaped Robert’s responses to his questions about the misinterpretations, Rose found his assumptions about Robert’s understanding were incorrect. The poem referred to farm machinery, irrigation ditches, and the girl’s mother hanging wash by “a small cluster of wooden shacks.” Rose had assumed, as the taped conversation began, that Robert would infer from reading these lines that the girl’s family was poor. Rose attempted to guide Robert toward this conclusion. Knowing the girl’s family was poor and that her ambitions and dreams were far beyond her status would then lead to an understanding of the dramatic gap between the girl’s modest circumstances and her “soul dancing” dreams and ambitions; the “storm brooding on [her] horizon.”

Robert, however, was more aware of “the trees” than of “the forest”: he concentrated on the visual elements of the “wooden shack place” , and the “eucalyptus trees block this wind, you know…”, (so the clothes can dry.) Robert was also not sure if the girl and her family were poor. The authors observe that Robert did not sense the touch of irony in the poem's mention of the girl's clothing coming from a Sears catalogue. From his background and perspective, he saw her Sears catalogue wardrobe as supportive of his belief that her family was not necessarily poor.

The authors described Robert as using his strong visual sense to guide his thinking: visualizing sentences before writing them, drawing charts and pictures, and “reasoning through the use of scenario.” Since Robert’s background was one of poverty, the poet’s use of the wooden shacks as a dramatic device was not as powerful as it might have been for a student from a more privileged socioeconomic stratum. For Robert, modest housing such as the poem depicts is more familiar.

(One wonders if Robert might also have seen farms and desert areas in the many years he was bused from Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley area schools, and called upon that strong visual background knowledge cinematically as he worked to understand the poem.)

The authors observe that “Robert was able to visualize …animate the scene in a way that Rose was not”, eventually enhancing Rose’s reading of the poem, even as Rose attempted to guide Robert to a unified interpretation of the poem’s dramatic elements. Robert constructed meaning in a more visually immediate, although more strictly legalistic, (word by word) fashion.

The authors write that teachers, as well as many poets, have spent years being "socialized" in the literature departments of American universities. Teachers bring to the classroom certain expectations about the kinds of responses they would like to elicit from students. Teachers hope that by carefully guiding and shaping student responses, they will expand students’ thinking and world knowledge, providing students with ”fruitful” new insights into undiscovered cultures, peoples and points of view. The article reveals that teaching of students from marginalized backgrounds is a two way street. The teacher, usually the imparter of knowledge, must also be student when analyzing a response to literature that could be characterized as “unconventional”. Like Hongo's image of the “flagpole gleaming like a knife blade in the schoolyard”, Mike Rose and Robert bring to their reading two sharply divergent ways of thinking coming from two very different sociocultural perspectives. The authors discover, through conversation with Robert and analysis of his “jurisprudential” interpretation of the poem, that his unusual interpretation stems from individual life experiences that his middle class teacher, Mike, does not share, even as he, Robert, does not share Mike’s more wide-ranging knowledge base and understanding of the conventional meaning of the poem inspired by the poet’s vivid images. (The authors note that they the terms “middle class” and “conventional” with some reservation.)

Mike begins to understand that what he had originally perceived as a simple “misreading” by Robert, actually reflected a kind of logic and coherence that Mike might have missed had he not delved more deeply and analytically into Robert’s more visually-oriented thinking processes and then related those processes to Robert’s life experiences. Robert’s interpretation of “this wooden shack place” is not a typical understanding, but it is not fruitless or unsuccessful in a larger context. The authors comment that even though teachers must keep their “structure, goals and accountability”, using a social-textual reading can also direct a teacher’s focus to another facet in the prism of interpretation. They discovered how one student’s ideas, although divergent from the conventional interpretation of six other invited readers “socialized in American literature departments”, are shaped by his life experiences, and form his own logic and coherence, influencing and driving his “unconventional” analysis.

The authors conclude that a meaningful pedagogical model would more deeply involve teacher and student in a process of questioning, reflecting and “making knowledge”. Such a model could lead to enrichment for both the teacher (whose new knowledge of the student's perspective would modify his/her reading and presentation) and for the student (who would be guided into new insights) The process might be less “efficient”, but ultimately provide a more valuable and rewarding classroom experience.