This is part 9 of my literacy project, focusing on teaching kids to construct meaning by annotating and working with what they do know about the text instead of being paralyzed by what they don't. The first entry in this series - “The Problem” - was posted in early September.
Most of my time on this project has
been spent on my English classes, mainly because they're the place
where I spend the bulk of my time and energy. It's where my job is to
teach kids to read and write. My Philosophy classes absolutely tear
my heart up every day though. They're great. I love them because it
gives me a chance to interact on a more intellectual level than I
might otherwise with students, at least in terms of the content.
But, if I'm being honest, it's also because a lot of my favorite students from the last few years fill these classes. It's a place for me to be
nurturing and brutal and biased and demanding as the individual
student requires. So . . . it's not the most objective classroom
space.
Still, I like to try to measure
success and growth in these classes as much as possible. Following
an initiative my administration is pushing, I've been focusing on a
sub-group of young men of a pretty wide range of academic tendencies.
At the school where I'm teaching, we don't exactly do a great job of
pushing young men into high intellectual practices, a trend that's
pretty recurrent throughout the Bronx. So I figured that I would try
to track the growth of 4 young men in my philosophy classes.
This is my first full reflection on
that, although the focus has been pretty real for me since the early
classes this September. For several weeks, students worked with the
reading and annotation method I've been advocating – writing
everything they know and ignoring or moving past what they don't
until later. At the end of the unit, students got a choice of texts
to read on their own, annotate, and explicate. This student chose to
read and annotate a selection from Rousseau's Discourse on the
Origin of Inequality. It's a
fairly challenging text once you go below the surface level of the
dichotomy between natural and social sources of inequality, and he
follows Rousseau's nuance admirably. The really nice thing is that
you can see the student learning to transfer Rousseau's language to
his own over the course of the text; early on, it is largely a series
of loosely-copied phrases and ideas, but by the end he is summarizing
and explicating the text in completely new langauge.
The
annotations start out simply, as he picks out the basic ideas that
Rousseau is setting up, ignoring a lot of the finer details. This is
about two types of inequality and it doesn't make any sense to talk
about the source of natural inequality. You could do worse than to
get this out of the first 2 paragraphs, I think. Going on, the
annotations bear a pretty strong resemblance to Rousseau's own
wording, as he teases out the meaning. However, by his notes on the
bottom of the page, the language has shifted to his own. Similarly,
on the 2nd
page he defaults to small revisions to Rousseau's phrases –
clarifying them – but then summarizes in his own language at the
bottom. He is picking out the connections between the pieces and
finding a way to tell what he understands generally from the pieces
he has translated.
The development
gets clear on the third and final page of the excerpt. Almost all
the language has shifted to his own. He has worked through
translating the ideas and language of the text for long enough; now
he can work with it more freely. Overall, this is the point of the
kind of read-by-fire methodology I've been talking about. Working
with what you can – swinging between one clear point and another –
pays off as the student has clearly moved from low to higher text
access and maneuverability.
