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.