[2025 Re-post] Tinkering with Text
Learning is more than responding and complying.
Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
Kenneth Graham, The Wind in the Willows
We want our students to read and grapple with interesting reading material, but how do we know whether a text we choose will be interesting to them? Do we look at the topic? The genre? The author’s use of language? The publication date? The font size?
Well, maybe not the font size. But what can we rely on? What do we do when only some of our students (or none of them!) are engaged by the material we bring to them?
Some people argue that we need to change the curriculum to make it more relevant to our students (whatever that means). Others argue that we need to force students to care about the curriculum we already have. Move towards them; no, make them move towards us. Don’t read this book; read that book. Don’t cover this topic; cover that topic. What’s the right thing to do?
You could go crazy trying to find reading material that is equally compelling and fascinating to every single learner in your classroom. I think it’s a mistake to try. There is no single, magical text. It’s an impossible task.
The fact is, nothing in this world is inherently, by-its-nature interesting. That’s why finding the magical text is impossible. Things are interesting only to the extent that we bring our curiosity to them. Our individual investment of interest is what makes something valuable to us.
This argues for letting students select their own texts on their own topics, at least some of the time. But it also argues for us to actually care about—and be fascinated by—whatever we bring to them. Our investment can become theirs.
I’m reminded of a classroom visit, many years ago, where the teacher was using a retelling of the Beowulf story from some gruesome workbook: two pages of text and three pages of questions. A student asked how there could be crazy names like Hrothgar if the story was part of English literature. The teacher snapped at the student, telling him to get back to work. She didn’t know. She didn’t care. A true, teachable moment, missed. Not just missed; actively thrown away.
Any piece of text can be compelling; it all depends on what we do with it and what we let students do with it. Too many students (and teachers) see classroom reading as a series of tasks to complete—an assignment that well-behaved students will comply with, regardless of how they feel about it. Do the thing because I said so, and I said to do it because it’s the next thing on the agenda.
Just typing those words makes me depressed.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can move from compliance to compelling—from chore to play.
Playing with the World
When I say “play,” I don’t mean that we need to gamify our lessons (whatever that means). I mean that we can find meaningful things for students to explore and tinker with in a text—any text: opportunities to play with language, with structure, and with ideas, instead of simply responding to questions. Cognitive play. Intellectual play.
As the historian, Johan Huizinga, writes, everything we think of as culture originates in some form of play. We are homo ludens—a species that learns through play. The statistician and author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, says much the same thing in his book, Antifragile: our understanding of the world comes first from tinkering, and only later from scholarship. We learn how the world works by messing around with stuff. We do so from the moment we can wrap our baby hands around things. We are hard-wired to explore the world with our five senses and our minds.
For us as educators, a text can be more than a thing to read and respond to; it can be a playground for students to mess around in.
The Accordion
Are you aware of how many fractions exist between the numbers 1 and 2? The answer is: an infinite number. Even if you only divided things in half, you could go on halving numbers forever: first between 1 and 2, then between 1 and one-half, then between 1 and one-quarter, then between 1 and one-eighth…on and on it goes, literally forever, into the inconceivably infinitesimal. A number line can be an accordion, opening up and playing notes you’ve never heard before.
Can a text work like this? I can’t claim a news article can be plumbed infinitely, but there is certainly more in even the simplest piece of writing than most of us tend to make use of. There is abundant raw material to explore and play with, from the whole text to an individual paragraph, to a single sentence and even a word. Let’s start from the big and work our way down to the small.
The Whole Enchilada
The text as a whole is where many teachers focus their attention: what is the article or story about? What is the main idea? What is the tone? When we dig into details, it’s often to evaluate in what ways, and how successfully, they support the main idea.
If we wanted to give students opportunities to tinker with the text at this holistic level, what are some things we could do?
One of my favorite ways to get students to understand a text is to do what I call, “changing the givens.” Changing or removing some underlying fact or structure of a text can sometimes help students understand the importance of that structure or fact. Why did the author do it this way? Well, imagine if they hadn’t.
Here are a few examples:
If this text had to be 20% longer for some reason, what could you add to it, to improve it?
If this text had to be 20% shorter for some reason, what could you take out, that wouldn’t detract from its power or effectiveness?
How would the removal of a particular event in a story—or a different placement of that event—change the meaning of the story? If Atticus Finch doesn’t shoot the mad dog, or if he shoots the dog much later or much earlier in the narrative, how does that change what Scout (and we) think about him, and when she thinks it? If Harry Potter isn’t whisked away as a baby and raised in obscurity, how does that change who Harry is as a person, and what the themes of the story are?
If the piece has a definite viewpoint or perspective, how could you convey the same factual information, but from a radically different perspective? If it argues a particular point, how would you argue the opposite point (but make it feel like it was the same author, writing it)?
Could you rewrite this text in a different genre, but keep the tone, main idea, and the important information intact? How would you transform this article into a story…or a one-act play…or a poem? What does the transformation tell you about the purpose and power of the genre in which the original was written?
The Paragraph
When we have students analyze non-fiction paragraphs, do we go beyond how the paragraphs support the main idea of the article or essay? Is that all there is to explore?
Here are a few other interesting things you could have students do with paragraphs:
Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for a younger (or older) audience.
Have students rewrite the paragraph as if it were meant for an audience predisposed to disagree with the author.
Have students try to support or defend the topic sentence with entirely different evidence or arguments than those the author provided.
Have students write a completely different and contrary topic sentence and try to defend it using the same evidence.
The Sentence
In my experience, sentences receive very little attention, especially once basic grammar is taught. We focus on paragraphs, on essays, on stories—and yet, the sentence is the real workhorse of any writing—the smallest unit of an idea. Middle and high school teachers who struggle to have students write more beautifully, or powerfully, or even cogently, often labor to mark-up entire papers, when it’s really the inability to craft an excellent sentence that lies at the heart of poor writing.
The “Sentence Composing” approach created by Donald and Jenny Killgallon is one way to help students craft better sentences, but why not also let students tinker and play with sentences they find in stories and articles they’re reading in school?
What is your favorite sentence in the entire article? Why do you like it?
Is this a good sentence? How do you know? What makes it “good?”
Is it beautiful? Powerful? Why? Where does the beauty or power lie?
How could the sentence be improved if it’s not very good?
How could you improve the sentence with a single word, or with a single structural change?
If it’s a compelling sentence, what words would you change, or what structure would you reorganize, to weaken its power?
If you wanted to state the opposite idea, or make a contrasting argument, what would you write?
If you wanted to change the emotional tone of the sentence, what words would you change?
Could you convey the same ideas and information using fewer words? How few?
The Word
When we focus on individual words, it’s often to teach students new vocabulary—words we’ve decided they need to know. We give them definitions, or we ask them to look up definitions. We may ask them to write sentences using those words. The approach is usually to take words at face value and simply know them. But if we believe that real “knowing” comes from playing and tinkering, what are some things we could ask students to do with new words they encounter?
What’s your favorite new or unusual word in the article? Why do you like it?
How many different forms or versions of that word are there? How many different ways can it be used? Could you write a paragraph using EVERY form of the word?
How many times can you use that word in conversation from now until our next class period? Keep track!
Where does the word come from? (Here’s an online tool students can use to do that research).
If you had to replace a particular word with one (or more), but you weren’t allowed to use the letter E (or A, depending on what word you choose), what would you do? (This is fun to do with entire paragraphs, too.)
If you look at the origins of all of the words in a phrase or a sentence, how many different times and places contributed to that grouping of words? What does that tell you about our language?
Taking the World Out for a Spin
All of these activities and exercises take time, and certainly no one is going to use all of them, all of the time. But if we want students to own what they’re learning—to know things deeply and completely—we need to give them opportunities to do more than summarize a text and identify the main idea’s supporting evidence. We need to let them tinker—to mess around with the content we’re giving them.
After all, when you buy a Smartphone, you don’t just leave it on the desk and say, “Well, there it is.” When you go shopping for a car, you don’t simply look at the statistics and then hand over a credit card. You take the car out for a test drive. You put it through its paces. You see what it can do. You can’t really know the car until you’ve driven it. You can’t really know the world until you get your hands on it.
As I said before, we’ve been doing this since birth. It’s part of what makes us human. When we bang a toy against the walls of the crib, or even when we stick it in our mouths, we’re trying to understand what it is and how it works. Why shouldn’t something so definitional, so essential to us, be part of our schooling?
Our language has tremendous flexibility, beauty, and power. Getting control of it through fluent reading and confident writing helps students take control of their lives in innumerable ways. If we believe that this language of ours is a gift, we should treat it like any gift we give to children, and encourage them to use it, abuse it, toss it around, bang it up a little bit, and find out what it can do.