Reading The Signs

What did the author mean by this? That is probably one of my least favorite questions to hear emerge from the mouth of the teacher. Let us consider, shall we?

Picture this: You’ve been dropped in the midst of a foreign country where English is not the first language. For simplicity’s sake, lets say Japan(if you can speak Japanese, replace it with another applicable foreign country mentally). Someone walks up to you and points to a sign by the road. “What does that sign mean?” They say. You look at them, at a loss for how to answer. You can guess by its shape that it is a road sign, perhaps pointing to a museum or some other tourist attraction, but you lack the ability to truly understand the information it is trying to impart.

This is where it is imperative to have a tour guide. Someone who has studied the language and culture, and can immediately look at the sign, and declare with confidence that it is saying the museum is to the left. This brings me back to my original question, what did the author mean by this.

This question can cause many rather awkward silences as the students try to puzzle out the meaning of a particular work. Well, seeing as they have been dead far longer than I have been alive, I can’t merely ask them to impart this knowledge upon me. I clearly didn’t pick it up from the reading, as my silence will attest to. So how am I to know?

We have, my friends, our very own tour guides (and very good ones at that) to help us through our conundrum. They are learned in the culture and knowledgeable about the language that we are attempting to read. They help us to answer these questions and to better understand just what it is we were assigned to muddle through.

This brings me to my point. Yes, you can read these works without a teacher, just as you can go to a foreign country without a tour guide. But, without some explanation or some seriously insightful research, can you truly understand them?