Reading, February 20

Our readings for this week were: 

• "The Evolving Book Group" by Beth Dempsey
• "The Book Club Exploded" by Barbara Hoffert
• "Teaching reading: beyond the plot" by Margaret Metzger
• "Socratic Seminars: Engaging Students in Intellectual Discourse" by Lynda Tredway

These readings ran the gamut of comfort for me. The first, which discussed mostly traditional but updated book groups was familiar and made me want to run over to the YDL and join a book club. The second was still about book clubs, but in a more large-scale, technologically savvy way. A little less Jane Austen and a little more Mary Roach, but okay. The last two readings concerned Socratic Seminars, and that's where I disengaged a bit. 

The accounts of various seminars, especially Metzger's first-hand account of seminars in her own classroom, are interesting (and I wish my teachers had had them) but what is the application in a library setting? I can't imagine a group of adults dutifully arranging their chairs in concentric circles to discuss (but only during their turn!) the Game of Thrones series. It's the sort of thing that a free-thinking, progressive teacher does, but that people are just too cool for out in the real world. The Metzger article did have a helpful discussion, though, about the pitfalls of leading a book group - derailing the conversation by accident, influencing the way people are talking in unhelpful ways, and distracting people from talking to one another by forcing them to talk to you. 

I much preferred the "Not Your Ordinary Book Group" discussed in the Dempsey article (no surprise there). That model - monthly meetings supplemented or substituted by online discussion - involved much less stress than the seminar model and even the examples given in the Hoffert article. All of that to-do, the arranging for authors or videoconferences, the ritual of the Socratic seminar seem antithetic to what my idea of a book group has always been: a place to talk intelligently but not pretentiously about a shared experience, which happens to be a book. A place to explore your own mind and get to know your neighbors a little better. Do we really need chair-circles and publisher-sponsored pre-packaged programs for that?

- K