Bad Revision

     I am quite interested in the idea of "close reading" texts for a number of reasons.  One of the reasons is that since common core has entered the scenes of the K-12 curriculum it has been a front and center focus.  There are numerous professional developments that exist to teach teachers the craft of instructing and grading close readings.  As a participant in one of those professional developments, the focus was to get students to interrogate the text.  As questions of who wrote it and why, what historically was going on while it was written, how did they format the text, and why did they choose the words and the format that they did (what purpose does it serve for the text as a whole)?  This is similar to the ideas that were put forth in our readings this week also, to interrogate a text and it's choices within, but the article by Kelemen brought up an interesting point.  Kelemen discussed close reading in an assignment that included critical editing and within he hits on an idea that never occurred to me.
     Kelemen discusses an assignment where he has the students critically edit a poem of Chaucer's.  He has students start "with a handful of the manuscripts...Students then transcribe and collate the texts" (Kelemen, 130).  The students then decide what type of editorial focus they will have when they rework the text and then they look at the words and the punctuation and decide what stays and how and what needs to change (Kelemen, 130).  The assignment already has me intrigued, but the brilliance comes into play when he says that the work he expects them to turn will be horrible reworkings of the original.  It isn't until the end when he illuminates the genius of why it's okay to assign this assignment and fully expect horrible results.  He says, "Exposing the inexperience is itself good: students come to know much better not only what sorts of expertise editing requires but also what severity of discipline an edition's exactitude and correctness involves" (Keleman, 136).
     I have always been consumed with everything that I do increasing student's knowledge, that I hadn't considered that having students understand and have an appreciation for what they don't know is also a valuable experience in their learning.  Even through this "bad" reproduction of the work, he says that his students say that they have never been more familiar with a text.  Their own hands-on production of the work has allowed them the insight to understand all the elements of the text better and how the text would or would not be better served written in another format, which gives them a greater understanding of why the text was chosen to be written in the format that it was.  It seems so simple in retrospect, deconstructing and reconstructing a text gives you an intimate knowledge of how it works as a whole, the same way deconstructing and reconstructing a watch allows you to better understand it's inner workings.