Background!

pudgy Dan at grave of
William Faulkner
Oxford, MS
summer 2004

Back in youth, when I was a somewhat-less-than assiduous student (I preferred comic books, TV, the sports pages, and dreaming of my future in MLB and the NBA to all intellectual pursuits), my mother, deeply worried about me (as she ought to have been), used to ask me what I had been reading recently. When I replied with (a) a grunt, (b) a mutter, (c) a wee lie, she would say, with a burst of breath and energy, "Background!"

A warning and a prediction. Without "background," it seems, I would be adrift on the sea of life--no tiller, no oars, no sail, no hope.

What annoyed me the most? I knew she was right. But for the longest time I could not not do anything about it. (I'm glad she lived long enough--she died at 98 in 2018--to see me embrace fully--even obsessively—her "Background!" idea.)

Anyway, I was reminded of all this a couple of weeks ago, when I got an email message--a daily "SmartBrief" from ELA (whatever that stands for). It contained a description of a research study (and a link about it). Here's the info:

How background knowledge affects comprehension

Researchers have learned that students will have difficulty understanding text if they are unfamiliar with 59% of terms relating to the topic, indicating that readers who have greater background knowledge about a topic will be better able to draw inferences about a text on that topic. Teachers can help students build background knowledge by identifying common terms, giving low-stakes quizzes at the start of lessons to identify knowledge gaps, and sequencing and scaffolding lessons.

It's kind of a DUH discovery, isn't it? That the more you know about a subject before you read about it, the greater will be your comprehension?

We all know the truth of this, don't we? If we read an article or a book about something with which we're already familiar, connections vibrate within us.

For example, I recently finished Jeanette Winterson's 2019 novel, Frankkissstein, a novel that leaps back and forth from 1816 (when Mary Shelley first began writing Frankenstein) to the present--or near future--when A.I. and robots seem to be a hope (and worry) for all.

Now, followers of this blog know that I've long had a Mary Shelley/Frankenstein obsession (I've published a book about it on Kindle Direct: Frankenstein Sundae: My Decades-Long (and Sometimes Interrupted) (and Often Digressive) Pursuit of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley); as a result, I knew just about everything Winterson said about Mary and her novel--I could even tell you the books that were her sources. And so (I think) I "got" all of her allusions and references--and I was aware, as well, of a couple of errors, errors that could, of course, have been intentional (for narrative/dramatic reasons).

Anyway, I'm going to write more about the novel in "Sunday Sundries," so I'll say no more for now.

Throughout my teaching career I tried to give students lots of background before we dived into a text. My vocabulary lists were full of words that came from our readings; for my 8th graders, I did slide shows and other presentations about Jack London, Shakespeare, Anne Frank.

Later, teaching 11th graders in a prep school, I always introduced a new text with lots of info about the writer, the settings of the text, the historical contexts. During the summers, Joyce and I would drive all over the country (I taught American lit) to visit the homes and haunts and graves of the writers I would be teaching.

Did all this have an effect on students? You'll have to ask them.

Did it have an effect on me? You bet. It changed the way I read, the way I thought, the way I felt.

And when I stood, say, near the grave of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, I would almost cry aloud, "Background!" And hope that Mom would hear ...