Sometimes the obvious and direct meaning of a text goes right over my students' heads.
It can be frustrating.
(Actually, the problem is usually the opposite of what Bechdel is displaying here. My students are pretty good at hallucinating a symbolic reading of a text and, at times, pretty bad at picking up the literal claims the sentences in front of them are making.)
God, the worst thing about hallucinatory symbolic readings is when people think they're reeeaaallly deeeeep.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that (for me) is the worst about some of my students' readings is that they run tangent or sometimes opposite to what the text says, and reading just a couple of sentences aloud is usually enough to make the "reading" seem like a joke. But often the student's reading is tenacious.
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