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.