I'm sort of bragging now

This is part 7 of my project about teaching kids to actually read.  It's the first mention of my Philosophy elective, which is focused on the often unbearably-difficult process of reading philosophical texts.  The first part of the project was posted on 9/1/12, titled "The Problem."

I'm teaching Hegel's "Lord and Bondsman" to a bunch of 10th and 11th graders in my Intro to Philosophy Course.  We started out with a conversation about rearranging syntax, then spent the whole class on just the first 2 sentences.  I worked through the first sentence w/ them – modeling the process, asking questions, etc.  Students did things like circling awareness and drawing an arrow from it to self, crossed out in and for itself when, and by the fact that to substitute the word when, then summarizing in the margins.  So any philosophy PhD out there is perhaps raging now at the simplification that has undoubtedly ruined all of Hegel’s nuance.  But, with a little help, students were able to figure out how to make meaning out of this phrase:

         Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.

Then, students had to work in pairs to repeat the procedure with the next sentence I gave them – the final sentence in Hegel’s original paragraph, since I had edited this first paragraph for clarity (the rest of the text remained completely intact from the Miller translation).  In pairs, they made sense of

The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition. 

And they did it.  It took some help in the form of reminding them to pay attention to what they did know and to translate words like Notion into Idea (again, Hegelians are aghast at the significance of this change) to keep themselves from getting stuck on it.  By the end of the day, in an informal “raise your hands if” assessment, students agreed at about a 70% rate that they couldn’t read Hegel, but felt like they were on their way. 

Since then, we’ve taken another class period to read about 4 more sentences and students are off reading and annotating 3 more for homework.  It’s slow going, but students are not only grasping Hegel’s concepts, but they’re getting used to the process of unraveling complex syntax, which is one of the key skills for reading higher-level texts. 

We’ll see how the homework looks, if this (seemingly imaginary from my current perspective) hurricane ever lets us get back to school. 

Teaching "Masque of the Red Death"

This is part 6 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post was "The Problem" back on 91/12.  The following lesson is simply an example of how I might introduce this method with a text that I'm absolutely certain will challenge my students.  See the previous 2 lessons for other fine-detail thoughts on how I ran this class.

Reading “Masque of the Red Death” day 1                

Aim:  How do I use annotation to read really difficult texts?
Obj:  SWBAT use elimination and annotation to read and summarize a text.

CC standard:  RI.9-10.5  Analyze in detail how an author's ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text. 

Do Now:  Read the following passage and use any knowledge you have to try to make sense of it.  If you can't figure out all of it together, pick out individual words and try to figure out what they might mean.

Peruse the language of this query to determine the relative meanings of the words vis a vis the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to associate local meaning with a sense of the global intentions of this statement, select individual signifiers and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

Work through the language with students –

Tricks for using annotation to understand texts
Look for words/phrases that you do know
Read those phrases together
Put together meaning that you can write/summarize in the margins

So let's look at a really tough story now. 

This next part here is key – it’s the good ole’ workshopy process of doing the first paragraph or two together, followed by paired work, then individual work – scaffolding down to students feeling ok about going into their heads and doing it themselves.

Read through the first paragraph of “Masque” - work through the tricks with students.

OK, so now with the person next to you, let's try to figure out what the next two paragraphs are about.  Use the 3 tricks for using annotation and we'll see if we can figure this text out.  [circulate to assess student progress – keep students moving despite frustration]

Share out – keep filling in annotations as students share them – possibility to massage their actual notes.

OK, so now your job is to finish reading this text.  Use all the tricks!  [circulate to assess]

Share out what we get in the last moments of class time.

Homework:  Finish annotating “Masque of the Red Death” (DUE TOMORROW) 

Introducing the method’s use with really hard texts

This is part 5 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

Early in the year, I teach the idea of summarizing the main ideas in the margins first, using simpler texts so that students can focus on the skill apart from struggling with content.  They get it, but honestly there’s not always a lot of buy in to that kind of idea because kids know that they can hold all the ideas in their head without annotating much.  The first chance they get to really see the value of annotating for comprehension is when we read Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” 

This is a hard text for students, as the numbers show on my previous post.  So I start out with an extreme version of the annotation method – getting kids to really see that they can read around unfamiliar words and make meaning out of very difficult texts.  It’s a bit gimmicky, but here’s what I do.  Students come in to a Do Now that says this:

Read the following passage and use any knowledge you have to try to make sense of it.  If you can't figure out all of it together, pick out individual words and try to figure out what they might mean.

Peruse the language of this query to determine the relative meanings of the words vis a vis the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to associate local meaning with a sense of the global intentions of this statement, select individual signifiers and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

            Predictably, most students don’t really write much of anything in the 3-4 minutes I give them.  They generally get stuck on peruse and if they remember to read through that, query and vis a vis usually seal the deal.  Then we get to work as a class.  I play a bit dumb and say that I don’t know all the words either, but can read around them – it’s important to make this very caricatured, I think.  Students have to know you know what you’re talking about and playing a part.  I highlight words I supposedly don’t know and turn them white, leaving them erased.  Usually we end up with the following.

              the language of this           to determine the            meanings of the words           the overall knowledge of which you are already possessed.  In the event of a complete inability to                          , select individual                and explain how their meanings might add up to something.

 From this, students are able to read that the passage says:

“Do something . . . the language of this to determine the meanings of the words.”  Then, a more advanced student rearranges “knowledge . . . already possessed” to “knowledge you already have – something you already know” and this set of ideas, along with “how their meanings might add up” leaves the final blank as having something to do with words.  Students have made meaning out of a seemingly impenetrable passage, largely by simply removing 4 words and 2 unclear phrases. 

            They are ready to move on to “Masque of the Red Death” which will require them to use this skill continuously throughout.  I’ll post that lesson separately. 

Measuring Reader Confidence

This is part 4 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.

So I thought that I would try to measure this process as thoroughly as possible.  Obviously I’ll want to do it by measuring students’ abilities to read increasingly difficult texts, but simply testing kids with comprehension questions and observations of their annotations would leave out one of the most important factors – their sense of their own comprehension skills.  Since the problem is really students’ inability to confront difficult texts with the skills and the confidence to work through the reading, it seemed to me that I should measure the more subjective aspect of comfort with texts.  So I asked the kids how they felt about the texts I was giving them after a brief pre-reading skim. 

            Let me be clear about this.  I usually hate these kinds of things.  I’ve never found much use for interest surveys in reading workshops and I’ve never been able to use learning style tests.  It turns out that most kids would rather talk and have hands-on experiences.  No shit.  But I’m interested in the power of confidence and I wanted to know whether or not this methodology improved students’ senses of their reading abilities along with their more objectively-measured abilities.  So I just asked them how they felt and I’ll do it again from time to time. 

            Basically, I showed them the articles and said something along the lines of “If I asked you to read this and then we were going to do something that you needed to know it, how would you feel?”  Not terribly scientific.  I even neglected to survey my smallest class, from which 3 of my target students are drawn.  But that’s the day to day of being a teacher.  We had other things going on.  Their responses were limited to the 4 possibilities listed.  You can make what you want to out of these numbers.  The Stop & Frisk articles were part of my initial preassessment for the year, tied to a writing task.  They were the first things students got from me.  The Poe came about 7 or 8 classes later, after students had been introduced to the annotation method but hadn’t really seen it in action.  I’ll post a full bit on those lessons later.

            Hopefully, I can finish this introductory unit and reward kids with some more Poe – maybe “Tell-tale Heart” – because they loved “Masque.”  When I hand it to them, I’ll ask them the same question and get their response.  Hopefully, the numbers go up. 

New York Times Stop & Frisk articles

104 students surveyed

Very uncertain – 27  (26%)

Uncertain – 43  (41%)

OK with it – 28  (27%)

Comfortable – 6  (6%)

Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”

102 students surveyed

Very uncertain – 58  (57%)

Uncertain – 36  (35%)

Ok with it – 6  (6%)

Comfortable – 2  (2%)