The Matthew Effect. And rationality. And reading.

You can tell I've been spending all my time teaching when it takes me an entire term to write a post about teaching. My "blog entries to write" section is long and full of ideas. Here's one I'm really wrestling with related to reading from our Term 1 central text, Things Fall Apart:

"Many years ago when she was the village beauty Okonkwo had won her heart by throwing the Cat in the greatest contest within living memory. She did not marry him then because he was too poor to pay her bride-price. But a few years later, she ran away from her husband and came to live with Okonkwo" (40).

Are you familiar with "The Matthew Effect?" Keith Stanovich poses that in reading "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." In other words, if you encounter a text and know at least a little bit about the topic going in, then you are more likely to be able to "get richer" or learn and grow through that text. On the other hand, if you don't have any background knowledge going into the text, you are less likely to be able to take anything away from the text. I've seen this concern pop up in a number of publications including one of my current geek-out-on-reading texts, Reading Reconsidered.  And as I've taught our central text this term, I've come across some passages from our central text that have made me think, "Ahhh, the rich are getting richer here!"

Embedding texts with the central text is one way to give "the poor" the information that they need to understand the central text. Making sure that students are closely tracking the ideas that might be unfamiliar to them also works this way. The four lines from Chinua Achebe's novel in bold above flummoxed my kids, and we were 40 pages in.

What does a student need to understand in order to understand that passage?
1. "the Cat" is a wrestler. A man. Not an actual cat.
2. "the greatest contest" is a wrestling match.
3. "bride-price"is... well, that takes a lot of explaining

And then there are the connections between all the ideas. What did my students struggle with? Understanding that the woman referred to as "the village beauty" fell in love with Okonkwo. That he came to her and asked for her hand in marriage, but the tribe's tradition required that a man show his financial worth by paying an appropriate (but negotiated) bride price to the father of the bride in order to win her hand in marriage. That the fact that "she ran away from her husband and came to live with Okonkwo" both represented a personal choice on her part, and was connected to the fact that he had "won her heart."

We spent time studying "bride price" outside the text. I feel they really needed to understand this idea because (among other reasons) it comes up again in a couple of other texts we'll study this year, so I'm trying to give them a foundation. We closely read the parts of the text that detailed the wrestling match. The details are on the opening pages of the book. They should stick. But still, this short passage flummoxed them.

What could the students NOT get? They could not get over their impression of Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a not-so-nice guy who loses his temper easily. And even though this passage is about Ekwefi, his second wife and her love for Okonkwo, the students cannot get over their sense that Okonkwo is a man whom a woman shouldn't fall in love with.

I asked them this question about those three sentences: How does this section of the text show that Ekwefi (the village beauty) has personal power? 

Most students could not answer this text-based question. Because of Okonkwo. Some students even applied Okonkwo's traits to the husband Ekwefi left (this reference is the only reference to him in the text). They couldn't imagine that Ekwefi was running to Okonkwo because she loves him. Instead, they argued that she was running from her husband because he must be beating her, too.

The rationality work we are doing with students comes into play here. What makes it so hard for them to see Ekwefi as an individual woman with power? What makes it so hard for students to see all the examples of Igbo men in the text who do NOT beat their wives? What makes it so hard for them to understand the bride price's relationship to the modern engagement ring? What makes the Igbo seem so unfamiliar (when really, we'd hope that they would see the familiar)?

Beyond the Matthew effect (which is HUGE!), we are fighting a bigger fight here. Our students (and we!) are coming to a text with biases that we need to recognize, unpack, and understand in order to fully comprehend what we are reading. How do we get our students to slow down? Not roll by these moments in a text? That's this week's wrestle.