Club of Hearts

I thought the book discussions in the hearts group were a lot of fun and vote we do stuff like that every class. That all of our groups went for the max time and still had stuff to talk about spoke to everyone's generous participation and earnest engagement, and I hope at least a little bit to our hard work in setting up the discussions. In general, and this holds true for book clubs I've been around besides in this class, people very much enjoy bringing prior knowledge and experience to texts and quickly abstracting ideas into underlying issues. This is somewhat at odds from the idea that questions must be "firmly rooted in the text" as I thought questions that required extensively close reading, especially for my group's discussion, were not picked up on as much as application questions like "what would you do differently" or "how can we deal with this issue in real life." I think this trend is magnified tremendously when working with larger texts, as a "book club" would tend to do, as at most a scene or event comes into focus, not precisely how something was written in a certain way and why. So while at first I understood "firmly rooted in the text" to mean questions that really necessitated one to have a certain page in front of them, and probably to have read and formed an opinion of said page, I wonder if we can tweak it to a more flexible, "just don't completely lose sight of the text." I will say at the least that a book discussion versus an English class is by nature more flexible and will cater more to following paths discussants are interested in, which are almost invariably to do with application and large, easily debatable issues. This may come at the expense of imparting close-reading or analytical skills. It really is impressive if one can foster both.

I think my group chose some rather challenging stuff, and while it wasn't a slam dunk, we did try to both allow for open assessment and interpretation while prompting some close analysis. Potential was there. It takes a tremendous amount of effort on both discussants and moderators parts to do both. I think a main challenge in discussing stuff such as our poems is not to lead too much based on the analysis you've already done, and to be patient enough to let everyone do work on their own.