This is What I'm Talking About! Using the Annotation Reading Method to Read Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

So I just got a frantic email from an old student.  She waited till a bit late to start reading Hawthorne because she knew that she had the long Thanksgiving weekend to catch up.  This is pretty unlike her.  I'd also point out that she doesn't generally get challenged by the concrete level of the text.  So, when she encountered Hawthorne's dense prose, she freaked out.  Here's a version of my reply.  This is exactly how students can use the annotation reading method to begin to read Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, just as they can use it to read any number of difficult texts.  My sample annotations of Hawthorne are included below.  

Hi ________,

Oh yeah!  I love that Mrs. ______ teaches that novel because it challenges the brightest of the bright.  Hawthorne's prose is so hard to get used to (but once you're halfway through or so, it will just seem natural).  

Think about how I taught you to read Poe way back in the day and the lessons from 9th grade about reading and annotating, if you remember.  Reading a few lines ofThe Odyssey and then writing what was happening, reading a little, writing, etc.  The basic idea is to read a very little bit and pay attention to what you DO understand, and then write that down (that's the annotation - the writing what you do know).  With Hawthorne, it's one thing to get the sense of what's going on and another to know every single word and phrase that he's using.  That's graduate school (or at least advanced undergraduate) level.  I know that's hard for you - to not understand everything as you go because you're quite bright - but it's how reading really works.  I read on something like a 734th grade level and sometimes I have to gloss over things.

But how do you do this?  I've attached 2 documents.  One is a sample of how I think you can proceed.  The crossed out words and phrases are things that I think you might not know right off.  Learn all these words and figure out the meanings of the odd phrases, but do it on the second, third, and fourth time you read the text.  For now, you're really looking to understand what's happening.  Again, I know that you want to understand everything, but in trying to do that right away, it's shutting you down and you're not getting much of anything.  So try this.

The 2nd document I've attached is the whole text in a split version, just like the sample I sent to you.  If it helps, read it this way.  To cross things out on a computer, highlight them and press "Ctrl" and "shift" and "X" all at once.  Or something like that - I've got a Mac. so it's a little different.  Or sneak into the school library and print the whole thing off.  It's less than 300 pages . . . don't tell anyone I suggested that.  :)

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front.

There’s sad, dreary men with beards and hats. They’re mixed together with women. They’re in front of a wooden place with a heavy wooden door . . . (edifice probably means building of some kind, because it has a door . . . in Spanish, what does edificio mean?) These people founded a new colony They originally were all about happiness in the beginning Recognized a necessity some of the soil to be a cemetery and some to be a prison It’s safe to assume that the first people of Boston built the first prison near Cornhill Does this mean in the same season that they marked out the first cemetery? Nucleus . . . center, right?  Like in a cell? The center of the place was an old churchyard – King’s Chapel It’s certain that 15 years later The jail was stained and old This gave it a dark and sad look

Developing Comprehension with Increased Annotation

Another example of using annotating for comprehension from our reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-tale Heart."  Here is an excellent illustration of the way that targeted practice with annotating for comprehension can lead to greater text mastery - in fact, the real lesson here seems to be that sparse annotation can invite misreadings, while slow close reading annotations can help eliminate this type of errors.

This first illustrates the problems with sparse annotating. At first, the errors come from simple problems with pronoun attribution - who's "he"? and who's "I"? questions.  That's easier to deal with.  However, the problems in real comprehension come up when she starts to speed up in the middle of the passage.  It is at this point that she mistakenly determines that Poe's narrator is nice after killing the old man and that this caution is to avoid being caught.  

However, look at this later passage.  At this point, the student is really annotating for comprehension line by line.  This is the same passage I wrote about previously, where students competed to annotate more than their peers.  Look at the difference.  By stopping with every sentence - in many cases, with every major clause or phrase - the errors are diminished.  Of course, this is a couple lessons later than the first sample, so she's simply had more practice, but it's the practice in the method that seems to be helping.

Annotating Tell-tale Heart with Struggling Readers

Here's a fun assignment.  We were reading "Tell-tale Heart" and I had a hard time getting students to write their annotations down - the standard unwillingness to put the words on the page.  So I ran a basic reading and annotating lesson - the startup with a question asking them to review an idea from an earlier piece of the text, followed by a group reading and annotation of the short paragraph you can see in this picture.  Then, I moved into the 15 minute reading and annotating portion, where students read for content and answer a question.  But, I threw in a twist.  The student with the most correct annotations and a good answer to the question got a 6 out of 5 for the day.  It was a competition.  This is what I got from the winner, a girl who hadn't annotated more than 4 sentences on her own previously.  

The nice thing about this particular exercise for struggling readers is that it shows them exactly how much meaning they can make from a text that is otherwise above their heads (they think).  It isn't as if quantity of writing is the only thing that matters; one the contrary, students' main struggle is often to write something that they feel is truly valid.  "I don't want to just say the same thing" is a comment second only to "I know what it means, but I just can't say it."  If nothing else, writing this much illustrates that she was able to say a lot about the text without (if you look closely) much deviation from the literal meaning on the page.  After all, reading what's right there is the first thing when acquiring overall literacy.

I'm back . . . introducing Schuylerville Preparatory High School

So it's been a minute, but I have good reason.  After a lot of difficulties at my previous school, I decided to take an invitation from a former colleague to be part of a new high school startup.  It's just a 9th grade - fully public and all that, none of that charter market-driven nonsense - and it's co-located in Lehman High School, one of the last of the grand old city High Schools.  There's a lot of problems with co-location and I knew that coming in, but . . . here I am.

My program is interesting because it's truly literacy-focused.  Half of the time, I'm teaching a class on language at the word and sentence level.  The other half of the time, I'm teaching very small and very intensive English classes

These classes are sort of a mixture of self-contained and ESL support classes.  Basically, it’s a couple classes where I work with 9 and 6 struggling readers, respectively.  It’s fantastic.  We’re already showing huge gains.  I wish I had a better baseline to put up here, but it all was thrown at me so quickly, I just jumped right in with the “Masque of the Red Death” startup.  Like Jacotot’s Telemachus, I just know that it works because it’s what I’ve done . . . I don’t know that there’s anything special in it.  But it works.

I have lots of ideas . . . some are already underway.  This is exciting.

My Literacy Project and the Common Core Standards

This is an old piece I never got around to finishing.  I just dusted up what I had because I don't mind pointing out that the things the CCSS supposedly focus on are things that are at the heart of my teaching method.  But seriously, this whole edu-industry is bullshit at least as far as actually teaching kids is concerned.  Also, John King is a tool.  In my professional opinion.

            So the looming beast in all of this is the Common Core literacy standards.  Let me be clear, I think the language of the Common Core is another in a long wave of edu-speak quick fix movements.  As a teacher in NYC, I’ve seen a lot of these already.  It’s not a paradigm so much as a product – a diversion of funds and attention toward think tanks and privateering as a response to the a crisis that is hardly ever discussed in anything even remotely resembling useful ways.  It’s a gift to the world of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capital” in The Shock Doctrine.  It’s a demand for more workshops and seminars to discuss not exactly how one might help students to become better educated, but something more along the lines of how we can understand what these standards want us to do in order to ostensibly educate students in the way we’re being asked to educate them.  It’s a demand, as Diane Ravitch points out, for schools to dump more money into edu-software and computer systems that don’t reduce class sizes or provide individualized learning experiences.  They provide data that can be further analyzed for additional fees.  So I’m not writing about the Common Core because I think it’s actually always good pedagogy.  I’m writing about it because it’s a material reality for educators in the same way that state exams and standardized tests are a material reality for our students.  Finding a way to appease (or fool) the beast while providing our kids with genuine educational opportunities – the original point of this blog anyway – is my focus.  

So with this caveat in mind, the video of Comissioner King and David Coleman chatting with another edu-speak talking head is really interesting and surprisingly - to be honest - a bit exciting.
 

I’m leaving aside my doubts about their claim that the solitary focus on the text “levels the playing field” as if socio-economic influences aren’t impacting the way students interact with texts.  Keep an eye out for my comments coming up on the Common Core as a New New Criticism.

With that said, there are some bullet points that directly relate to my project here and should be emphasized to shore up working room when administrators and school reviewers come around sniffing for proof of Common Core competency. 

1)  We need to correct the trend of giving students simpler materials and “translated” materials so that they can access texts.

That’s kind of the point here.  Students – not teachers – are translating difficult texts so that they can access the texts themselves.  If I want students to read Hegel, the judge’s sentences in the Scottsboro trials, or Dave Zirin’s polemic on race and freespeech for athletes, it’s because I want them to read these texts, not just receive their content. 

            2)  Students need to see access points to difficult texts, allowing them to move up in their ability to deal with more complex vocabulary, syntax, structure, and overall complexity. 

Again, that's kind of the point.  If we assume that students can find basic meaning in a text and then fill in details or just move on, then students can tackle pretty much anything.   

            3)  Students should read and re-read texts to enhance understanding, but also to look at craft and the way that authors lay out their arguments. 

Again, that’s kind of the point.  In my lesson on “Masque of theRed Death,” readers were able to make sense of the text by pushing forward and then revisiting things that didn’t make sense earlier.  When students realized that “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” were symptoms, they could go revisit pestilence and conclude that it’s a disease, but – even better – they could recognize all the foreshadowing that Poe laces through the early paragraphs.    

So let's just get the kids reading.  My annotation method works.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Annotating Whole Novels

This is an old image - back in the early winter, when we were reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Obviously, there's a lot of problems with annotating for comprehension when dealing with novels. On one hand, a lot of the language can be clear enough that line-by-line or even paragraph-by-paragraph annotating is unnecessary. On another, producing regular summary-based notes is even more important with novels because of the amount of info that needs to be accessibly held in some corner of active memory.

Oh yeah, and writing in school books is frowned upon but sticky notes suck.

This student just paid the 8 bucks for his own copy and we worked on a version of the annotation method that worked for him. Essentially, there are two things to focus on when annotating novels: clarifying and noting important info. In conferences, this student explained that his first note was there because the sentence threw him for a minute until he reread, and determined that the first word (Calpurnia) and the final word (smack) referred to the "me" of the narrator, Scout.  It was still early enough in the book for the narrator's "me" to be unclear for him, so "She hit Scout" was a useful way to clear up a confusing line.  It also served as a way to quickly reference this section in a Socratic Seminar later, when students discussed the characterization of Calpurnia and her relationship to the Finch family. 

The second note was probably inspired somewhat by the tone of this first note, although this student didn't say that explicitly.  However, in these early pages, a student could do much worse than to note that it is Calpurnia - a black housekeeper in the segregated South - who is at least partially responsible for teaching Scout to read and write.  The final section that is underlined illustrates the continual focus on this relationship, which was at least somewhat influenced by the method of stopping and annotating to make sense of the text.  Clearly, there are details that are glossed over on this page, but that's probably true of any individual reading led by the interest of a moment.  It's imperfect, but it's a way to begin to translate this method to the longer form of the novel.        

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: The Middle Chapters

I can only say, in the most ridiculously anti-intellectual parody possible, that I don't need this kind of mumbo jumbo.  It's one of those moments where you realize you're reading something great but the task at hand is almost completely utilitarian, so the gems slip by.  I don't have any use for 45 pages on proof of the equality of intelligence, both because I already believe in it and because my task is to encourage it, not convince others of its existence.  That sounds paradoxical, but I find that the first step should never be to tell a student that she already is smart.  Getting her to do something she thought she couldn't do and then pointing it out, that's a different story.  I'm getting bogged down in method and institutional teaching questions, but I still think there's a synthesis that can be cobbled together between Jacotot,  Rancière, and myself. 

I'm going to be teaching a course that contains a component of Latin at a brand new school in the Fall.  I have a lot of flexibility in my curriculum.  I'm looking at a literal word-for-word translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, imagining an Animus fert dicere formas mutatas moment, akin to the Calypso could not that Jacotot began with.  We'll see we'll see . . .     

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: Chapter 2

I have to stop for a note on Rancière's second chapter, “The Ignorant One's Lesson.” I probably should've written something about the first chapter – something about stultification or the first mention of universal teaching maybe – but I'm not being that rigorous here.

The thing about the second chapter is that it seems to touch on my sense of a reading methodology that asks students to just read by looking at what they do understand and building from there. So often, students read a passage (we've just been working on literacy skills for science passages on the Living Environment Regents) and get to the end and say “I don't get it.” I infuriate them constantly with my stock response “Of course you do – let's look at it.” I could just as easily be saying the more brusque “Don't say that you can't. You know how to see, how to speak, you know how to show, you can remember. What more is needed?” Jacotot and Rancière agree with me - to say what is on the page is to tell me you know what it says. Meaning is strung together later out of the things you recognize. The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The Red Death is wrecking the land. What the Red Death is and how it's wrecking the land and who the story's about and all the rest of it will come later.

Even better is the big realization for students. Rancière points out that “precisely what must be discovered is that there is nothing hidden, no words underneath words” and it is a fear of this master narrative that students must be taught to forget. Just read. It's here on the page. Of course, there's context and the call and response of text to text and polyphony and whatever other way you want to put it, but to read what's on the page is the thing in question. All the rest of that is discussion of what you could say about the text. Our goal is to read without resorting to condescension.

Is that the same sort of thing that Rancière detests? The constant holding off of more meaning from the student? Is it only in the presence of the Old Master that this unveiling of connection and context can happen? Or is there something more complicated going on here?

Probably the most relevant question I have at this point is whether or not Rancière's “Power of the Ignorant” is necessary as a condition or as a position. He claims that, for the ignorant schoolmaster, “there's no risk of this master sparing the child the time necessary to account for the word Calypso.” I fall into this sometimes – pestilence means sickness, let's move on – although I'm getting better bit by bit. But that doesn't mean that ignorance is a necessary condition, maybe. I can even imagine how a knowledgeable schoolmaster could play the role of the ignorant schoolmaster – I know it but what does that have to do with you? Or am I just justifying my position or, hell, my authority?

Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster: a First Thought from One Teacher

This is how things get messy just as Spring's turning into Summer. Months ago, a former professor read a couple of the first entries on my literacy pedagogy and suggested that I read Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster a discussion about emancipation and (sort of) pedagogy, based on the teaching of Joseph Jacotot. School years being what they are, I'm just getting around to it, but it's pretty clearly important stuff. After finishing the translator's introduction, I've got to get a little bit of this out.

The thing that struck me most tonight was the notion of story telling as an antithesis to explication. Because it presumes an equality of intelligence, story telling is egalitarian, while explication is (obviously) not. I'm trying to figure out how to get my head around this on a practical level. When I first started teaching middle school, I found myself telling a lot of stories – it actually was a source of guilt – as a means of helping my students to see connections. It was certainly explication in any real sense of the word, but in a textured narrative style. It took the form of the “so you see . . .” Besides creating a human connection between myself and my students, it gave me the chance to convey knowledge as an anecdote without the presumption that I was more intelligent – just more experienced in one particular instance. In hindsight, I had much better relationships over the long run with these students than I did with students from other periods where I was less narrative (and, to be honest, less egalitarian). So there's something to story telling, surprisingly enough.

This all comes in the context of my grappling with the deskilling of teachers that is at the forefront of the effort to destroy public education and one of the last (remotely) powerful sectors of organized labor in America. I know the danger of speaking of a teacher as an equal with students because the Common Core and Danielson frameworks are being used as a cudgel throughout New York City to beat all content specialty out of the profession. The New New Criticism's insistence that students need only to read and never to take in context or make crucial connections certainly makes it seem like there's no need to have any content knowledge, but of course that quickly devolves into something ridiculous and hollow. “A Modest Proposal” without context is satire without the sideways glance – a bare call for cannibalizing infants that is both confusing and uninteresting beyond its shock value.

I'm appealing to the canon though, and that's tantamount to elitist rearguard knee jerking, right? But how would Stephen Colbert be funny without context – the awareness of the satire, given the absence of a wink? For that matter, how would his show be remotely comprehensible on any level without knowledge of external specifics? Or, to hit at the heart of what matters most to the neo-liberal education “reformers,” are really all about, how would an instruction manual be comprehensible without contextual working knowledge? A lathe worker cannot simply be handed a machine and a manual, no matter how well trained in the ability to decipher texts. A farmer cannot be dumped on a tract of land with a Monsanto starter kit and expect results. Knowledge has to accompany texts or they are at best inefficient ways to convey information; at the worst, they are rendered useless. Of course, that's not really what neo-liberal education theorists are talking about though, is it?

So I'm interested in what Rancière will add to these ideas for me. Is it merely an esoteric summer musing that I only have time for because I'm wrapping up the year? Is it a guise for a process of deconstructing education without simultaneously doing anything real about context in which that system exists? Is it just an excuse for me to tell more stories in class?

Good Luck on the Half Court Shot, Suckers

It seems like these ads just get more and more insulting (antagonistically so?) to students.

Reading Increasingly Difficult Texts

One of the students I've been tracking has moved from the prose summaries of The Odyssey to the Fitzgerald translation. Compare these annotations from the first pages of Book XXII to the same students' earlier annotations - the second student in my 2 Odyssey Sample Annotations.

The nuance is certainly improving and I don't think I see any of the character confusion found in the earlier example.

The Painkiller Before the Knock in the Jaw

Riding to work this morning, I saw this ad. Apparently, the DOE has been footing quite a bill to set parents up for the idea of their children bombing the State Exams this Spring. My camera on my phone is lousy, so it's hard to read, but it says:

"This spring, state exams for students in grades 3-8 will be different and more challenging. And test scores will reflect that at first ( . . . ) We're not satisfied with just teaching your children basic skills. We want them prepared for college and a career."

Does the expenditure suggest that the city is concerned about growing public dissatisfaction with the fetishization of standardized tests? About the growing number of parents who are opting their kids out of the tests?  Or is this just damage control, trying to seem benevolent in the face of ever-increasing separation of the public from any form of control over public education in a world where tests and corporate educational trade secrets are strictly protected while student and teacher information is constantly for sale?

Maybe it's just a warning shot fired across the bow of students, parents, teachers, and anyone else genuinely interested in this junk science profit glut.  It's going to be painful, that much is certain.  

2 Odyssey Sample Annotations

Again, here are a pair of snapshots - this time from a class that is a tracked SPED section. Instead of the Fitzgerald trans of The Odyssey used in my other classes, this section has been working largely with a narrative summary. After reading these, we work with selections from Fitzgerald.

The two students couldn't be further apart in terms of approach to work, but both images illustrate the ways that annotation could be used as a reading comprehension strategy.

The first was concerned with her ability to read the text at all, despite the fact that the vocabulary wasn't terribly beyond her. After conferencing, we nailed down the nonstandard syntax as the main source of her problems. This image was the result of a period's work.

The second is from the same day, done by another of my target students. I especially like the second note from the top on the left, where you can see him parsing out a little bit of the meaning so that he has enough to read on with. Further down on the same side, you can see him still doing a bit of copying of the wording from the text itself - I can't be sure of his level of comprehension here - and near the bottom, he summarizes with the brief "The cyclops ate Zeus people." This character misreading is potentially disastrous, even though he's able to get the general events out of the story.

What about this passage suggested that the sailors belonged to Zeus? Just a misreading, based on speed or carelessness? The mention of praying to Zeus?