Asking and Answering Questions

One of the main points made in the book is that in order to understand media well, you must ask good questions. When interpreting a poem, for example, they suggest you ask: “Who is the speaker of the poem? What kinds of images are present in the poem? What does the poem sound like? What is the setting? How does it look on the page?” Asking questions are important because they give the reader/viewer purpose and reason for engaging with the work. They take the work off the page or canvas and make it into something that’s tangible to the mind—from dead 2D material to the realm of the human mind. Questions give the work meaning. Questions make the piece of work a puzzle to solve.

Ideally, I would like to bass my teaching around asking and answering questions. We did this in my biology class here at BYU. Instead of just learning the dry facts, our teacher asked us questions relevant to big issues in today’s world, such as: “Is cloning okay?” Then, we would learn the science surrounding the question—in this case, we learned the properties of a cell—and then came to individual conclusions about the matter. It made the class engaging and worth-while. In an English classroom, asking questions will help make reading an old poem or looking at a piece of art more engaging because it invites students to solve a puzzle. They shouldn’t just read the poem because I’m grading them on it, they should read it to find out who the speaker is and why they’re telling a story or why their story is important.

Another main point made in the reading is that, when asking questions, one has to realize that you will ask different questions for different forms of media. The questions you ask when analyzing a short story will be different than the questions you ask when analyzing a painting. In the classroom, this is important to teach our students. For example, if teaching an AP literature class, I have to make sure that students know the questions they ask and answer in their essays about a poem will be different than the questions they ask and answer when writing about pros. To do this, I will have to teach students the difference between the mediums.

Last of all, a point the reading makes is that there is no right answer. The reading doesn’t specifically say this, but it implies this. Now, there are definitely wrong answers one could come to when interpreting a piece, but there is no one, solid “right” one. The reason for this is because every person has their own story. Every piece of work will touch each individual in a personal way because the way one interprets is personal. The big thing to teach kids here is that there is no dictionary definition when interpreting. They can make the piece mean what they want it to as long as they are able to support their claims with solid evidence. This is probably the most important thing we can teach them out of all these three points.