Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

 

   It is not often that I allow the internet to persuade me to read things. Given that my reading is governed primarily by whim, it is often difficult for even my friends to convince me to pick up a book. And yet, there was so much hype online about Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh that when I found a water-damaged copy in a neighbourhood little library in early October, it seemed like fate to pick up this horror-ish novel for a spooky autumnal read.

    If you listen to the internet, the primary draw of the book is how grotesque it is. I’m hesitant to refer to it as outright horror, but the story does take place in a post-apocalyptic world in which animals have become inedible. Prior to the opening of the book, there’s a deadly virus that spread through animals, resulting in a pet genocide and a radical reimagining (sort of) of the meat industry. You guessed it: the new, “special meat” is people and factory-farmed cannibalism is the norm.

    I described Tender is the Flesh earlier as a “horror-ish” novel, but I think some elements of the structure take away from the horrific power of the text. Let’s talk first about focalization. The novel centres on Marcos, a downtrodden and apathetic employee at a processing plant for human meat. This allows Bazterrica to lay her world bare for readers, staging a plant tour for prospective new employees. The scene is certainly grotesque—it gets graphic on how people are killed, dismembered, packaged, and soon. The worst of all, I think, is the room of impregnated women whose arms and legs have been removed; they existed as bloated bellies with heads. The imagery is revolting, but it’s horrific in the same way that a safety training video at work is horrific. There’s no mystery or subtlety to drive the tension.

    Actually, the horror is less like a safety training video and more like undercover footage of factory farmed animals. The horror here isn’t speculative, just displaced. Everything that is done to humans in this book is already perpetuated against animals: being forcibly sterilized and inseminated, being pumped full of chemicals, being dismembered for the convenience of their captors, being stunned and murdered, and so on. I’m not sure how many instances there are of animals having their vocal chords torn out, but that’s another element of this novel. The descriptions of factory farms in Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer could be transplanted into Tender is the Flesh and, if it weren’t for the mentions of hooves and beaks, nobody would notice.

    If you’ve done some reading or thinking around the consumption of animals, you’re likely already familiar with the obfuscating effect of language when discussing the ethics of meat. For instance, the way we transform “cow” into “beef” or “baby cows” into “veal” or “pig” into “pork” or “bacon” or “ham” or any number of words that disguise what we’re actually doing. While I don’t have the capacity to discuss the linguistic nuances for the ethics of eating animals here, language is critical to Bazterrica’s work. 

    The first hint of Bazterrica’s interest in language is in the epigraph for the text. She includes an epigraph from Gilles Deleuze, which reads “What we see never lies in what we say.” The second half of the book begins with an epigraph from Samuel Beckett, who also (in my mind) is a writer obsessed with language and animality: “...like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast…”.

    There are clear references throughout the text about how language normalizes practices we would normally see as unethical. The fact that humans destined for consumption are called “heads” creates a separate class of existence for them, and nobody eats human meat: they eat “special meat.” Moreover, there are a number of references to Marcos’ perception of language. Bazterrica’s reflections are presented as both ethical and poetic, sometimes to an excessive degree. In the span of a few pages where Marcos eats with his sister, niece, and nephew, there are at least three references to how words feel: “Estebancito looks at him with a sparkle full of words like splintered trees and silent tornadoes” (99), “Her words get stuck inside her as though trapped in vacuum-packed plastic bags” (101), “His sister’s words are like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting” (103). The persistent metaphors are evocative, though I’m not sure if it quite gels with the obfuscating nature of language in the ethical discourse of the text.

    The conversation around language works, though, because it operates in conjunction with a critique of the visual language of our culture. For one, if the book is horrific, it is because that which we are regularly able to ignore when it is within the walls of a factory farm. Bazterrica presents the gruesome conditions with vivid detail. This is an overgeneralization, but the first half of the book seems to focus on establishing the language that hides horror and the second half explores more of the implications of visual representations. For example, the first chapter in part two begins when Marcos “turns on the TV, presses the mute button, and flips through the channels without paying attention” (123). I think it’s significant that Marcos turns off the sound—words are erased and replaced with image alone. Moreover, the images on the screen are themselves depictions of depictions. It’s footage of when “People had started vandalizing urban sculptures of animals. The program shows a group of individuals throwing paint, rubbish, and eggs at the Wall Street Bull. Then it cuts to other images, a crane raising the bronze sculpture that weighs more than three thousand kilograms, the bull moving through the air while people look on in horror, point at it, cover their mouths” (123). The Wall Street Bull is such an iconic image of an animal. Without getting into too much of the symbolism, I think it’s significant that a bull—an animal routinely toyed with and murdered before onlookers for sport—is the image here, particularly since Wall Street is a symbol of economic interest. The bull, supposedly an image of strength, is doubly reduced to a metaphor of consumption. The visual language takes over as people “look on in horror, point at it, [and most notably] cover their mouths.” The same passage then discusses the iconography of animals in art museums being destroyed, including paintings by Goya and Klee.

    Perhaps more critical is that a significant portion of the second part of the book takes place at a now decrepit zoo. The animals were all killed off long ago, but Marcos finds a family of puppies, with whom he finds affinity. Despite his own life being at risk when the pack finds him, he still goes to great lengths to ensure the dogs can survive after his escape. The zoo is symbolic of the way we use our power of perception to reduce others to the level of consumption. Zoos themselves are built for spectators, and Marcos notes the defaced signs at the zoo where images are paired with derogatory words about the animals.

    All this to say, I think that Batzerrica is putting forward an argument for animal rights and recognizing the twofold reduction of our animal counterparts via language and imagery. By substituting in humans for animals, Bazterrica points to the absurdity and cruelty of our extant system but there are a few details that complicate the matters.

    A key complication here—and one of the few that is not given a clear answer in Bazterrica’s straightforward world-building—is a layer of conspiracy. There are several references throughout the text that, perhaps, this resorting to cannibalism may not be necessary at all. Rumours that it’s a government plot to reduce overpopulation, to create a more consistent food supply, and so on, abound. There are suggestions that the virus infecting the animals is a sham. For instance, when it comes to the dogs in the zoo, Marcos goes to visit them and finds that a group of teenagers are torturing and murdering the puppies. When one of them gets bit, the boys in the group toy with the idea of killing him. It’s a tense moment where the boy has to convince them that the virus isn’t real and that he won’t get sick and die. Similarly, Marcos’ sister insists on providing him with an umbrella with the implication that all rain is beyond acidic—possibly parasitic? Marcos continually refuses the umbrella and yet experiences no ill-effects, possibly giving credence to the idea that there is misinformation about the health-effects the government has advertised.

    That’s an area that is potentially more controversial. I won’t touch Covid conspiracy theories with a ten foot pole, but it’s interesting that this novel, originally published in 2017, makes the connection between conspiracy theories, a mysterious virus, and the mass slaughter of animals who bear the blame for it. When it comes to the real world, politically, it’s a little dubious to suggest that this post-apocalypse is spurred on by fake news about meat consumption. But I’ll leave that be for now. There’s another conspiracy at the end that’s more straightforward to comment on: towards the end of the novel, the Scavengers that lurk outside the slaughterhouse, figure out how to tip a truck. They then murder the driver and eat him before laying claim to the “heads” he was transporting. The whole issue of the Scavengers is a little unclear: it’s like they’re zombies, but still humans—a third caste on the fringes. In response, the slaughterhouse decides it will give them poisoned meat to make them think people died from the stolen meat.

    There are other ethical issues that arise in such a context that exist at the more personal level. For instance, Bazterrica explores the implications of selling humans for meat consumption with respect to law and religion. Legally, measures have to be taken to prevent the mistreatment of “heads.” Being a blend somewhere between regulations for legal slave-owning and the bare minimum of animal protection laws, “heads” cannot be legally sexually assaulted and they are treated as literally branded property (branding = language + visual?). Protections need also to be put in place to establish a separate class—humans need to be protected from being eaten after their deaths, while “heads” are eaten regularly as “special meat,” sometimes even being raised in suburban homes and eaten piece by piece while being kept as a kind of pet. When Marcos is eating dinner with his sister’s family, she yells out that they don’t eat people—it’s a darkly laughable moment of cognitive dissonance.

    Another implication for the human meat market is that those in debt can subject themselves to a hunt. Taken up mostly by celebrities, there’s a scene where people pay to be part of the hunt or supervise it as entertainment for a famous rock star who descended into debt. The scene where Marocs and others feast on his body is described with some gross blunt descriptions of them eating him. 

    Meanwhile, people pay for extra protection to ensure their bodies are not stolen or dug up after their deaths—a protection regularly ignored and guaranteed only to receive extra payment for funerals. Religious characters in the novel, by contrast, will sometimes offer themselves as sacrifice. It becomes somewhat of a death cult, for whom Marcos has no patience. The meaning of an afterlife becomes more difficult to justify when we’re all “just meat.”

    Yet, Marcos retains some level of commitment to non-material idealism. Throughout the novel, Marcos cares for his senile father in a special old-age home, and when he passes he feels protective of his ashes. One might make the argument this is less sentimentalism than resentment for his sister, who never visited their father and who wants to hold a funeral for him. Instead, Marcos takes the ashes and dumps them at a place of special significance and replaces the ashes in the urn with random dirt and trash as a final act of rebellion against his sister.

    The novel, in my mind, is more about establishing the world than fleshing out (pardon the pun) the characters in full. There are some nice character details, but Marcos as the main character leaves me somewhat cold. Marcos is not attributed much emotion, and his lack of affect prevent my full immersion in the story. He has what has come to be a rather lacklustre, since overused, trope. He has a child that died young, which strained the marriage to the point of separation, and he has very little motivation other than grief and very little outlet other than sex. I did not feel particularly invested in his backstory, though it does come together reasonably well in the final chapters of the book.

    Before we get there, though, you’ll need some knowledge of the core subplot. Beyond the tours of the slaughterhouses, the central story is that Marcos receives a gift: essentially a “purebred” woman. Initially resisting the gift, Marcos ultimately ends up domesticating the woman, even giving her the name Jasmine. Initially, she lives in the barn, chained up and naked and provided with food and water. Over time, Marcos has her stay in bed with him, he starts clothing her, housetraining her, and so on. You may anticipate where this is headed. He impregnates her.

    This is a more ethically complex issue in the book that the Internet hasn’t really discussed in full. Jasmine becomes a pet, a domesticated animal. The implications for Marcos having sex with her are much more controversial, in some ways, the “heads” are animals. There’s reference to other people using “heads” as non-consenting prostitutes and paying extra to murder and eat them. If “heads” are the same as animals, this whole situation gets much more disgusting to think about, and your sympathy, I think, should lie with Jasmine. Meanwhile, Marcos goes on to hide her pregnancy, knowing that he himself would be sent to the slaughterhouse if others found out. 

    The ending, if somewhat rushed, does hold an impact. When there’s a problem with Jasmine’s pregnancy, Marcos calls his estranged wife, a nurse, in desperation. The moment of revelation is rife with tension. Her horror, though, is quickly overcome by the need to take part in the birthing process. It’s surprising just how quickly she reserves judgement, but as the scene progresses it becomes clear to you that your predictions are likely right. Marcos and his wife hold the baby as Jasmine reaches out for it. As they continue to ignore her, it becomes clear that their interests are not hers.

    The last dialogue in the text makes a dark moment darker and darker still. It becomes clear that Marcos is going to kill Jasmine—after all, how can he avoid being apprehended for this illicit birth? He shows her tenderness as she “wants to speak, to scream, but there are no sounds” (209). Marcos knocks her unconscious, preparing to murder her. His wife “jumps when she hears the thud and looks at him without understanding. ‘Why?’ she yells. ‘She could have given us more children’” (209). Cecilia’s objection is not a humanitarian one, but a self-interested one. It’s a dark turn that Cecilia envisions Jasmine’s continual exploitation. Marcos, though, who in just a few scenes previously stormed out of his father’s funeral when he accuses his sister of hypocrisy for having a ‘house-head’ in a makeshift fridge that they’re eating bit by bit, rejects his wife’s objection. When she demands to know why he’s going to kill their child-producer, though, Marcos’ response is chilling: “She had the human look of a domesticated animal” (209). The ending reinforces a class division between real humans and heads, but it intimates that the distinction has eroded. When recognizing the “human look” (again: perception), it’s too uncomfortable. The irony of a domesticated animal being more human than the real humans being exploited as “heads” is a wonderful web of inversions to conclude the novel. It’s an excellent final line to complicate the ‘argument’ of the text.

    The Internet can be hit-or-miss on its recommendations. People were, briefly, obsessed with this book. I can see the value of the book if you’re looking for a discussion of ethics and morality. There are a number of aspects of the book to “sink your teeth into,” as it were. As a literary work, I would say my review is ultimately mixed. The style of writing has some nice lines, but it often is a direct matter-of-fact tone. I wonder if part of the sometimes stilted language is part of the translation, but I’m not qualified to answer that question. The characters are somewhat drab or uninteresting. There are some compelling moments, which are when Marcos is most contradictory to himself. Cold and apathetic throughout, the moments of tenderness stand out as bizarre inconsistencies in his spirit.

    I’ll be curious to see the lasting impact of Tender is the Flesh. It’s an interesting book, but will it have the capacity to break through our collective cognitive dissonance to have an impact? Will it be seen as a literary classic? A classic in the realm of body horror? Time will tell, or if not time, then at least the Internet.

    Happy reading!

Eunoia by Christian Bök

    Over the last twenty years, Christian Bök’s Eunoia has come to be hailed as a watershed moment in Canadian avant garde poetry, and it feels impossible to discuss its merit without an understanding of Bök’s self-imposed constraints.

    The first constraint is obvious to the general reader: in each of the sections of the book, Bök limits himself to just one vowel. For example, the A Section only uses words where A is the only vowel. Likewise for E through U. That in itself is an impressive enough feat, but the book’s true magnitude only becomes obvious when reading Bök’s notes on the text:

“All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire [...] The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once)” (103-104). 

It is impressive enough that each section restricts itself to the use of one vowel, but to use 98% of the words that meet the criteria is just incredible, all the more so because of how cohesive each of the sections is. While reading, I noticed the motif of the “culinary banquet” emerging (which, before knowing the 98% rule, seemed a bit of a cheat for populating the poems with a lengthy blazon), some of the other motifs are less clear on an initial read-through but shine more brightly on reflection.

    Eunoia, the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, means “beautiful thinking” (103), and the book is written as a “univocal lipogram” that is “inspired by the exploits of Oulipo [...] the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints” (103). The risk of such experimentation is that the ‘heart’ of the poems will be lost in the name of its self-imposed higher authority. While that is sometimes the case, it’s impressive just how well Bök is able to craft narratives through each section of the work.

    If you’re familiar with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Eunoia may inspire some resonance. In Chapter A, Hassan Abd al-Hassad goes through an entire rise and fall in just 18 pages. By contrast, Chapter E focuses on Helen and the Greeks. Surprisingly, “I” is a mere 8 pages, though “I” elsewhere seems to offer so many poetic possibilities. The “O” chapter is the zenith, I’d argue, of the “prurient debauch” that emerges in other forms in earlier works. Taking on the the challenge is admirable, though I have to admit that Ubu and the “U” chapter is the least compelling of the bunch.

    All said, I am truly impressed by Bök’s seven year project. It’s hard to take a sampling of the work and do it justice, but here is an excerpt from the “E” chapter, chosen at random, to illustrate how clearly the narrative progresses, despite the constraints:

“Helen remembers Crete – the Eden where senescent shepherds (les bergers des betes) herd bellwether sheep; there, Helen sees the pebbled steppes (the eskers where chert screen bestrews the ledges). Helen treks wherever herdsmen trek. She sees the veldts where ewes, when fleeced, chew the sedges. She sees the glens, then the dells, where elk herds chew the vetch. She helps the herders erect fenced pens where hens peck feed; then she helps the shepherdesses sell the eggs. The sheep-herders mend fences; the sheeptenders tend hedges. The sheepbreeders even breed steer, then geld them” (47).

Who needs other vowels, anyway?

    Returning briefly to Bök’s notes on what each chapter must include, he lists the following: 

1. Allusions to the art of writing

2. A culinary banquet

3. A prurient debauch

4. A pastoral tableau

5. A nautical voyage

    Each chapter opens with #1, and I find that he effectively captures the spirit of writing, if not the individual letter, in a way made all the more impressive since it’s comprised entirely of that letter. The combination of words for the start of “Chapter A” is particularly incantatory and illuminates the project as a whole. Bök writes the following:

“Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh – a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark” (12).

Honestly, at a certain point the craftsmanship is just showing off. From the very first sentence condemning “awkward grammar”, Bök anticipates critics of his work before meditating on the connection his avant-garde process shares with art movements like Dada. Describing the A itself as a “slapdash arc and a backward zag” seems to capture its spirit in a cheeky self-referential approach. Outlining his constraints with the constraint (“a law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark”) is that perfect touch of rebelliousness and showmanship that makes the project work.

    In less capable hands, Eunoia is a text at which people would balk. Bök, though, handles it with such care that the entire collection weaves into a complete image, a well-achieved machine.

    Admittedly, the personal resonances may be less frequent than in a collection that sticks to free-verse lyrics, but in imposing these additional rules of language upon himself, Bök seems to strike at the core of a hidden network of connections that continually underlie our language. Whether or not there’s a complete logic to language, Bök certainly gives the impression of one, characterizing the vowels in their own particular ways. (We do call letters characters, after all.) In some ways, it reminds me of some of Jan Zwicky’s work in Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences, where her poems characterize the letters on a musical scale. It’s a reason for optimism that all is connected, all can be explained.

    Overall, Bök’s Eunoia is a worthwhile experiment that pushes language to its limits. It’s an incredible statement on the possibility for meaning—even when it’s confined to such harsh limitations. Not all avant-garde projects “work”, but I can safely say that Bök’s ought not be ignored, if for no other reason than to revel in the possibilities that defy all constraints.

    Happy reading!

Teaching Reading: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading by James and Dianne Murphy

    Allow me to let you in on a little secret in education: even the uncontroversial is controversial. Even slight changes in pedagogy can cause an uproar, partly because the philosophies of teaching and learning are so nuanced, partly because the political and economic structures in which we function disincentivize change, whether it’s the imposition of goals from above, or overloaded class sizes, or being denied the time and resources to plan for and implement change…the list goes on.

    And yet, there are practices in education that require a substantial overhaul. This was made dramatically obvious with the release of the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read report, which demonstrates that the strategies teachers have used to teach children reading over the last twenty years have been at worst detrimental to student learning and at best successful for some, but ultimately inequitable.

    It is in this context that I read Thinking Reading: What Every Secondary Teacher Needs to Know About Reading by James and Dianne Murphy. In most ways, the text is as uncontroversial as is possible—but it will certainly seem to be.

    Often, educational texts begin by outlining a history of a certain pedagogical approach or a lengthy theoretical backing for a cluster of approaches. Such is the case for works like Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad, which gives a long history of Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy through the lens of Black history and instructional practice. Other texts offer specific strategies for instruction and leave it to your imagine how to implement them in books with titles like 101 Teaching Strategies. It is always my hope that texts will provide teachers with specific practices to help support teaching, or at very least a balance of theory and practice. Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts stands out in that respect as a great balance of theoretical and applicable.

    In the short span of Thinking Reading, the authors err on the side of historical and political context, which does prove illuminating—for instance, the fact that 20% of students cannot read at grade level is an alarming statistic. The Murphys do offer some strategies in the middle of the book, but the details often remain hazy—including on a very particular point that I’ll address in due course.

    First, though, let’s discuss some of the helpful frameworks the authors provide for learning. For instance, they outline the stages of learning, and the actions teachers need to take at each stage, to ensure learning:

1. Acquisition, where teachers offer “unambiguous presentation with guide practice and immediate feedback” (121).

2. Accuracy, where teachers offer “continued, spaced practice with a high accuracy criterion (usually 80%-100%)” (121).

3. Fluency, where teachers offer “daily timed practice with carefully sequenced practice materials to a high rate per minute” (121).

4. Retention, which involves scheduled review in a “spaced retrieval” (121).

5. Generalisation, where students “practice in adapted contexts or in combining the target skills with other previously learned skills” (121).

6. Adaptation, where teachers offer “opportunities for independent, creative problem-solving” (121).

Thinking Reading presents these parameters as a guide for reading, but I think this framework for mastery is worth considering no matter the discipline. It’s also worth considering how this might revolutionize lesson design. For at least the last fifteen years, we’ve been encouraged to apply a model that is Minds On → Activate Learning → Consolidating Learning. Alternatively, a hook, the lesson, the evaluation. While I’m missing the specific page references here, James and Dianne Murphy advocate for about 70% of each lesson to be review of previous material and only 30% new. This helps students to develop confidence and competency. They also go against the grain somewhat in suggesting that the most fun and engaging parts of the lesson should be placed after the deep learning as a reward for students mastering their knowledge. This flips the entire script of beginning with a ‘hook’ to tempt the students into working. These suggestions would radically change how I structure lessons towards mastery: Review, review, review, little lesson, something fun, something fun.

    One thing that’s a little unclear to me is their conception of repetition. They give an example partway through the book that leaves me perplexed. They say that you want to have students practice and review content most of the time. Then, they say, “Repeated quiz questions do not have to be the same every time. For example, the following three questions all require the same knowledge from a student of geography:
-What is the longest river in China?
-What is the third longest river in the world?
-On what river is the Chinese city of Shanghai?
In this way, the quizzes repeat the testing of knowledge without being repetitive” (79).

I’m not exactly sure how the three questions “all require the same knowledge”. To me, it implies that you’d need to know things about rivers in China but also the rivers of the world and also knowledge of cities in China. I’m not convinced that a student would be able to answer all three of those questions with the same bit of knowledge.

    Anyway, in a number of ways, the science of reading work that is now becoming re-popularized is aligning well with the culturally responsive and relevant pedagogical learning that is happening, too—it makes perfect sense, since both are rooted in equity work. There are a number of adverse effects for students who are unable to master reading, including increased bullying, poor self-esteem, lower wages, and so on. For society, the effects are estimated in the billions for underfunded literacy programming. The book outlines some premises that prove helpful for reconsidering attitudes towards students. They identify the reification of literacy problems (and dyslexia) as having the following effects:

1. “It places the locus of the problem within the child, not with the instruction.

2. It releases teachers and schools from accountability when a student has not learned.

3. It provides an explanation for the child and their family that is understandable, and which can become part of a positive personal narrative about overcoming disability.

4. It can be used to lobby for additional funding and resourcing for the student. This advocacy work assures schools and parents that they are doing their best for their child.” (43).

I find these observations astute and force us to reimagine our role as educators, especially with respect to instruction and assessment. In terms of its alignment with culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, we can see the correlation in that both strive to promote identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy through high expectations. The Murphys refuse to lower reading expectations, which I admit I’ve been guilty of for students that really struggle. They note that “in the past, school curricula have sometimes been under pressure to reduce demands on students because they did not have the necessary cultural knowledge to deal with more sophisticated or challenging texts. The cumulative effect of this process was to disadvantage those who were already disadvantaged by a lack of relevant knowledge” (95). When students are ‘reading to learn’ (rather than ‘learning to read’), students at the receiving end of the service gap have often been given less challenging texts—fluffy stories and articles. There’s an assumption that because they can’t comprehend text well, they can’t comprehend issues—which is something we’ll continually need to fight against. Of course, text needs to be at students’ reading levels lest they get too overwhelmed and disengaged, closed off to learning. 

    The whole goal here is to make reading automatic: “what seems like attention to context and visual cues is actually the luxury of thinking about what we are reading – created by the automisation of decoding” (35). Framing it this way, it makes sense why students have historically had such a hard time articulating what strategies work for them and why. Yet, given some political changes and funding that verges on the conspiratorial, teachers for the last few decades have been teaching reading through methods that are largely ineffective, including practices like predicting words based on a first letter and context clues. In many ways, what the Murphys advocate here is a return to phonics. One of the disappointments for me with this text is that the it continually gestures towards high-yield Direct Instruction reading strategies, but never fully delineates how the system is achieved. I think it would have been worth the extra 50-100 pages to explain how it all works.

    Instead, there are some small, specific tips that pop up throughout the text that I’ve already begun to implement when teaching, for example, poetry. One of their recommendations is to ask students whom “he” or “it” refers to in a sentence because it can “reveal quite alarming gaps in their comprehension” (74). Even in grade 12, I can say, it sure does. They also recommend providing instruction in the structure of words, which I’ve been continuing to reference in incidental ways. They also offer phrases that help encourage students to attempt and not ‘opt-out’ of learning, like telling students, “I’ll give you a minute to think about that and you can try again” (78). As they outline their habits for instruction, they note that their approach is characterized by the slogan ‘low threat, high challenge’ (78). The mantra demands that “For struggling readers, this means confidence that there will be opportunities for them to try things that they might fail at, that they will get reliable corrective feedback, that this will be low key, and that, even in the case of errors, their status with the teacher will be undiminished” (78). It’s a good framework for teaching reading, but also just for being an effective teacher.

    A concern that comes up for me with texts like this is when classroom practices come across as utopian, derealized from classrooms. Surely they’re targeting some strategies to a younger, elementary audience, since there are things that will just not fly in a high school context. For instance, they suggest that when students are reading to themselves, you circulate around the room (“while keeping an eye on the rest of the class” (73), of course). They suggest that you have them read aloud to you (“Most students love reading to their teacher, even those who are not confident about reading aloud to the class. Giving them an opportunity to read with you is a gift” (73-74)—I’m skeptical on that one…) and that “as they read, note down the errors they make. Are they recurring, indicating a knowledge gap that can be taught, or are they inconsistent, suggesting inattention to details or a lack of fluency? Also, note how fluently and expressively they read” (74). It’s difficult to imagine mass buy-in where you’re reading over a child’s shoulder while they read to you AND you’re documenting every mistake they make in terms of engagement and demand, it seems a big ask as a regular classroom practice. I’ll try, but I’m not sure yet on how it would look. Thinking Reading reminds teachers to “always remember to praise what they do well, and to give two or three very specific items of feedback” (74), noting that “You can’t do this sort of exercise all the time, but if you have two or three students like this with whom you check in every week, it makes a big difference to them. And, of course, it is likely that they will improve, because they are getting specific feedback and, hopefully, they want to please you” (74).

    More likely is that you are able to “Set up activities where students read to each other in pairs” (74). They outline the practice as follows:

“take turns, and tell them that they can work out between them which parts each will read, explaining that slower readers should read less text, focusing on accuracy. Even five or ten minutes of such activities will provide not only much-needed practice, but also modelling from an able peer. Modelling is most powerful when it is provided through someone who is close to the learner in age, status, and skill level. Students will generally take more risks with a peer than they would with an adult. Co-operative learning strategies (structured pair or group work, with clear ground rules to ensure productivity) have a strong track record in the research literature.” (74-75).

The practice is well-founded, of course. It offers some good background, too, of how to establish partnerships. I’m not quite convinced yet, though, that high school students will be more successful when reading with a partner. Most of my students don’t even want to talk to one another, much less read—I can imagine myself saying “go” and there being ten minutes of uninterrupted silence.

    Some of these practices may not be quite effective in a high school context without first building school culture in particular ways. What we come to is a chicken-and-egg situation. To their credit, the Murphys recognize that students may be resistant, but they attribute that resistance to a lack of confidence with reading. I’d like to offer a longer passage that characterizes the dilemma:

“[Students] manage teachers in order to reduce demands in lessons — disrupting the lesson, disengaging from the work, or becoming personally challenging. All of these are consequences that are unpleasant and aversive for teachers. If, by contrast, in a lesson with no reading demands the students are much more positive and pleasant, then it is easy to see how a strong (though often unconscious) motivation arises for the teacher to reduce reading or academic demands. This issue has to be addressed openly and explicitly with students: reading is a part of every lesson. Once students realise that this is non-negotiable, and that they are enjoying the benefits of wider knowledge and a broader vocabulary, success begins to create a ‘virtuous circle’. But it may take a graduated process to establish such a system as part of the culture of the classroom” (77).

I think there are two key words here. The first is “non-negotiable.” The idea of there being specific, high expectations is maintained there. It’s very common to succumb to student pressure—everyone wants to be liked!—and to make tasks easier when they don’t do well. However, if we are to maintain the idea of high expectations, there are some things that have to be done. The second piece worth noting is the “virtuous circle.” On that front, it seems a little naive. I’m imagining my classes that are most challenged by reading—reading is not something “cool”, so it’s much more difficult to get students to recognize the benefits for themselves to be led; plus, I don’t think it’s all that likely that students will spontaneously tell each other not to be disruptive and have it work.

    Now, let’s delve into some of the more controversial claims. One that I find particularly troubling is that they essentially suggest that dyslexia doesn’t exist—which contradicts the ideas put forward in the Right to Read report. Teaching Reading suggests that people can’t read well, so they get diagnosed as dyslexia. What’s the evidence for dyslexia? That they can’t read. Rather than being an issue of brain wiring, the Murphys claim that with early and effective intervention, dyslexia can essentially cease to exist. It’s certainly a provocative suggestion. While I understand the rationale for their claim—their aim is to improve instruction over and above suggesting fault with students—I would never suggest to a parent that dyslexia is a misdiagnosis.

    A controversy I actually really value, though, is the way the Murphys envision literacy within the broader school community. A few years ago, a Learning Support Teacher role came my way where I was able to meet with students in small groups or one-on-one to support literacy. The school board has decided to go in a different direction with the Learning Support role and it has redirected all support into math instruction. That being said, I’ll leave some of the comments from James and Dianne Murphy here without much comment of my own. To support learning, they implore that “students may be withdrawn from any subject for effective reading intervention.” Their rationale is that “if every subject benefits from improved reading, and if reading is a whole-school priority, then it makes sense for every subject to contribute a little of the catch-up time some students need. The condition, of course, is that the positive impact of the intervention far outweighs the negative impact of withdrawal from classes” (94). That’s going to ruffle some feathers, certainly, because—at least in high school—everyone is in their own silos and everyone feels the pressure of curriculum demands. (Luckily, the literacy team at my school has the goal of decentralizing literacy!).

    In order to accomplish this, the Murphys also emphasize the importance of assessment. They note that all students at risk of reading failure need to be identified and helped, which can only happen if “the school commits to a thorough, systemic screening process [...] so that no student is missed” (94). This is also controversial in its own way since it requires A) that everyone agree to a particular means of assessment and B) the time and resources to do it. It also requires a level of standardization that inherently gets teachers’ backs up in defence of their professional judgement. That said, they note that “Many schools still rely on teacher identification when allocating support, and this is fraught with error, particularly because many poor readers have developed sophisticated ways of masking their reading problems – for example, disruptive behaviour, playing the class clown, fading into the background, or absenteeism. Thorough, objective screening, followed by prompt and decisive action, is required to ensure that all students are picked up and helped” (94). I think there’s something to be said for this, since there are so many unconscious biases teachers have with respect to what poor reading “seems” like or which students would benefit. I admit to it myself that there are specific ways that attitudes manifest in my mind about what effort looks like. Not only that, but there needs to be assessments like this because otherwise “the only other resource the school has is either to a standardised testing regime, which is far too imprecise, or to a referral system in which the teachers who push hardest get extra resources for their students” (91). I’ve seen that exact phenomenon more than once where teachers (and parents too) take advocacy beyond the bounds of equity and into the realm of ‘make my job easier by getting this student off my hands’.

    The trick, of course, is that any standardized approach can be dangerous. The concern is that standardized testing serves to rank and stream students (90) rather than to select strategies that would actually improve performance. In that sense, the recommendations in Thinking Reading and the Right to Read Report align that we all too often conceptualize the issue as students failing rather than admitting that teachers have failed students (not necessarily by their own ill-intent or negligence, but because the system has been constructed in such a way and has trained teachers in the use of ineffective strategies). 

    Overall, Thinking Reading serves as a nice, accessible primer for the issues surrounding gaps in teaching and learning with respect to reading. It offers broad strokes for a pedagogical framework that promotes reading. In terms of the particulars, the book is not yet quite sufficient for the needs of working teachers. There’s no implementation guide for teaching reading, which is a little bit of a downer. As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the book is as uncontroversial as is possible in a controversial field.

    Give it a shot, but I’d encourage some further reading to get a better sense of particular ways of actually helping kids learn to read good.

    Happy reading—it’s a gift that is best when shared.