F. Niyi Akinnaso's “Literacy and Individual Consciousness” (1991)

Here's another bit from Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook for my grad school prep.  I don't know if I've really found a solid application for the classroom, but I think there's value to my reflection on the way Akinnaso uses an autobiographical tone to talk about intellectual development.  

Learning is always an individual moment, even within a socio-historical context . . .

            I can see why this is a popular text, anthologized up and down.  After reading it, I found a pretty deep stream of posts by students explaining how much they identified with the personal narrative that Akinnaso tells.  I’ll admit that I’m in that camp.  The rise of the academic in the world of the ostensibly anti-intellectual is a narrative that I’ve pinned on myself, not vainly but self-immolatingly to be more than a little dramatic about it. 

            The questions that Akinnaso addresses are important ones, though nebulous and not really satisfactorily answered: how and why do some individuals choose to use literacy to shift their intellectual and social standing?  Is this literacy creating new consciousness or facilitating the growth of an already-burgeoning awareness? 

            The lack of a complete answer to the first question leads to some discrepancies in the second though.  For much of the essay, Akinnaso seems to believe that the answer to the latter question is that literacy creates new consciousnesses in the individual, though it seems like his story almost contradicts him – instead suggesting that the initial choice of literate practices as a hobby acted as a spark that literacy grew and shaped into a new way to view both language and the world.  His interest in literacy existed prior to the start of his pen pal relationships, for example, and even though he notes that he participated in these activities and then his “ability to read and write had transformed [him] beyond [his] immediate environment,” it seems instead that an initial motivation existed and the practice refined and reshaped his understanding of what it meant to be and act as a literate person.  In this way, Akinnaso’s autobiographical sketch seems almost akin to Mao’s description of the dialectic of theory and practice in “On Practice.”  The material conditions of colonized life put him into contact with the literacy practices of the colonials; his shift toward the intellectual sphere accompanied his rejection of his father’s place in the mode of production; this led to his changed perception of the world, which led to his rupture with local culture, etc etc.

But that’s only tangentially about reading . . . bring it back a little . . .   

            There were specific assumptions about reading that Akinnaso clung to though, ones that rile me both intellectually and autobiographically.  He describes four levels of reading, each building on the previous one, but always in terms of response.  With each reading, the metaphorical implications of the text become more clear, but not the initial reading of the text.  For Akinnaso, the first reading is at the literal level and therefore is missing important elements of the text (no argument there) but there is never a point in which this literal reading is added to.  It’s as if the initial reading is clear but must be seen on further symbolic, socio-cultural, or archetypal hues on later readings.  For Akinnaso then, reading is very much like looking at an allegorical religious painting – the literal depiction of a shepherd fending off wolves from his flock is inherently clear (which in reality is often not the case if the image of the shepherd isn’t already familiar) while the association of this image with Jesus’ protection of his followers from Satan isn’t acquired until later when the viewer learns the tricks of applying other codes to the text.  The literal content is clear from the first reading and further investigation is only about uncovering other deeper and more sophisticated readings.

            This is where I split from Akinnaso (and where I would venture to guess that his narrative splits a bit from reality).  Every memory I have of acquiring literacy involved incomplete readings of the most literal level of the text – what I later described to students as swinging on a vine blindly through a jungle, groping wildly for something else to grab.  Eventually, I would find something solid.  In Goethe’s Faust it might’ve only been a few lines here and there while Milton’s Satan usually provided me with rebellious and angsty sentiments in amidst obscure Old Testament tirades.  However, I continued through the texts, reading incompletely but progressively. 

In the classroom . . . sort of concrete . . . still a little abstract . . .

            Akinnaso raises the important issue of choice though, one which we dismiss as nebulous or wild at the cost of both ourselves and our students.  For me, choice was always easy to inspire when I was a 7^th and 8^th grade teacher – they’re such little kids at that point that it’s easy to get kids excited about anything – and less so in 9^th grade and beyond.  Universally though, I’ve seen that engaging kids with texts that seem too difficult works if you set it up as an almost-insurmountable challenge, then show them ways to make meaning from those texts.  I remember having that experience with Poe and Shakespeare in my early years teaching, using the annotation method I was developing to help struggling readers make meaning out of texts that seemed totally inaccessible, then having that experience again teaching Hegel and Marx to upper-classmen.  It’s much easier for students to choose to engage in intellectual work if they choice seems like a viable option.

            Of course,  the colonized choice that Akinnaso made is arguably different than the choice that students make to engage in literacy practices – his was a preference of an invading culture over his native culture, a shift in values, even a rejection of his father’s system of logic – but as anyone who has taught students from working and lower-class communities might have noticed, the difference isn’t as great as we might think.  Although there were powerful intellectual forces in my upbringing and I’ve encountered the same in the lives of several of my students, most economically disadvantaged students are also educationally disadvantaged because to engage in certain literacy practices often means choosing an alternative culture – the culture of the bureaucrat or the manager or the teacher (an insidious authority figure in many lives) – over their own. 

The challenge, of course, is to allow students to choose literacy practices that will enable them to act as agents of both their communities and themselves without surrendering anything authentic in the process. I don’t know if Jacotot’s Ignorant Schoolmaster non-method is the answer.  I don’t know if the counterpublic writing of things like Anne Gere’s “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms” or Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn are where it’s at.  More questions than answers in this second half here. 

If, as Mao and so many others are pointing out, the interaction with the world reshapes ideas which reshapes the way we interact, etc etc, is the notion of dialectics antithetical to the notion of maintaining a sense of self while learning?

Ong's "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought" (1986)

So I'm off to grad school again - a really exciting program at the University of Michigan - and I'm trying to background read a bit on the academic side of the discipline.  I picked up a copy of Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Cushman and a few others (2001).  I'm really just trying to keep track of my thoughts here, while consistently looking for a way to link the theory with actual daily practice.  

Ong's meat and potatoes . . . 

           Ong’s guiding principal is that there is an objective difference in the language practices of cultures that have writing and those that do not.  These differences cause cognitive changes to occur, suggesting that cultures with writing and cultures without writing have an epistemological incompatibility.  Writing is used in its noun form here because, for Ong, it is always a thing, never an action.  Therefore, it is the existence of writing that changes the shape of a social mind, not the action of inscribing that leads individual minds to conclusions.  Neither does he suggest that the cumulative action of many members of a culture might shape the way that ideas are formed, understood, or critiqued.  Instead, it is a society’s (and particularly a society’s language’s) interaction with the existence of concrete texts that shapes the way the mind works.  To be general, because Ong is very general, this tendency can be seen in the tendency for oral cultures to do things like speak in parables, truisms, rhythmic structures, and in ways that preserve and conserve knowledges.  Literate cultures, on the other hand, can develop things like formal logic because of the ability to move forward and backward in time over the course of a text.  He also argues that it is the existence of writing that makes it necessary or even possible to use words to describe other words (suggesting that Derrida’s whole bit about deferment is pinned on the existence of writing and not on something innate to language). 

            So essentially, this is a socio-psychological argument akin to Fredric Jameson’s work in The Political Unconscious and afterward: the dialectic between social formations and forms of expression are clearly outlined although without explicitly recognizing the relationship to means of production.  Without going too far into it, the development of abstract logics along with the development of writing seems also to mirror the abstraction of social relations as civilizations grow.  To speak in known truisms that were remembered as the roots of a stable community was no longer really an option, since the spatial abstraction that writing enables was necessitated by the greater spatial division between individuals as trade and divisions of labor flourished. 

            It is with this in mind that Ong’s slightly mechanistic title falls short, at least insofar as Writing does not act as a unified subject on thought, the passive object.  The idea that, for instance, “writing separates interpretation from data” misses the point that the rise of writing in the particular cognitive form it took might have come along with the administrative need to distinguish explication and elaboration from utterances -or in the terms used in today’s hegemonic corporate-style models of running things, analysis from the hard numbers (25).

A little Ong in the room . . .

            In the actual practice of teaching students to write, Ong’s essay is useful though.  In the past year, I have been adapting ideas from Judith Hochman’s expository writing pedagogy.  One of the important things I’ve taken from her work (which, I manipulate very freely – I don’t even know if anything I do still resembles her actual recommendations) is the way that writing helps students to structure thoughts.  We have experimented with conjunctions and subordinators in an effort to summarize in a way that actually thinks through the implications of the text, rather than just retelling a story.  Hochman suggests a “because-but-so” sentence formula as one way to help students structure their thoughts in writing.  These three words necessitate the inclusion of a cause, a complication, and an outcome or conclusion.  Therefore, the shaping of a student’s understanding of the text and a response to it comes in a dialectic of reading and writing in these particular forms. 

            Clearly, Ong’s text is talking about a more socio-cultural level (almost sub-species level, if I get a little cynical) when he talks about the way that “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (23).  His is a societal transformation, one that occurs at the level of grammar and syntax.  While I don’t disagree beyond the dialectical complications I’ve already mentioned, I find it hard to work this into day to day practice, even on a conceptual level for myself.  It is only at the individual level (albeit in a microsociety of a class full of individuals) that I can think through Ong’s notion of writing structuring thought, and Hochman’s method is the closest I can get to imagining that working in actual lesson.

Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, and the Hochman Expository Writing Method

My program's getting changed again.  It's the way things go.

Anyway, I've been learning about Judith Hochman and her Teaching Basic Writing Skills, along with the method that goes with it.  It's expository writing broken down to the sentence level in a way that makes a tremendous amount of sense.  So often - particularly given the NYC focus on Common Core Writing Standard #1 - we've got students writing arguments of one kind or another, going through revision processes, talking big talk, but without an understanding of what a sentence is.

That seems unbelievable, but stodgy old grammarians have been griping about it for years with a bit of sympathy from me.  Teaching students to correct - much less avoid - fragments and run-on sentences is a nightmare if they don't have words like dependent clause or even noun and verb in their active lexicons.

I'm not a disciple or anything - just doing some PD when I can - but it seems like Hochman's method for teaching writing lines up with my method of teaching students to break down and annotate texts for comprehension while reading.  The link between sentence-by-sentence comprehension of a text has always seemed glaringly related to the process of expository writing, which is how I got cover fire in the early days of the Common Core pre-rollout, using the writing standard #2 and the reading for information standard #2, which basically ask students to explain what a text means and how it conveys that meaning - lots of things about author's craft and rhetorical work.  It was good stuff before the hammer came down and everything was around the focus on a position (which used to be a claim, which used to be a thesis) . . .

So hopefully this is relevant and I can do something with it.  If any of you bare few out there reading this have any input or thoughts, it's been too long since I've heard from some of you.

A Version of an Ignorant Schoolmaster?

This is a half-formed thought, really. The child of necessity. But it might be exciting. 

I got a new student yesterday, 3 days out of DR, with almost no English. It happens. But the question is how I work him in at all, given language obstacles and the fact that we're halfway through a unit. Oh, and I found out about him when he sat down in my class.  So I started with a bit of a cop-out.  I told him that I wanted to see his general reading abilities.  I handed him the text my other students had been working with, a Spanish-English dictionary, and some looseleaf.

I'm terrible.

So I checked in with him quickly a few times while managing my biggest and most needs-intensive class and, honestly, forgot about him for bits of time.  By the end of class, he gave me just shy of three sheets of looseleaf with these translations of the first few pages of Aristotle's Metaphysics.  I was floored.  I guess I often forget that students come literate in reading but illiterate in speech, strange because I would say nearly the same thing about my own Spanish.  But it seems to me that I can work with this.

Of course, Rancière and Jacotot came to mind.  I was certainly an ignorant schoolmaster at this point, though perhaps a lot closer to the blustery fool type than I'd like to admit.  But still, the method might hold something here.  Todos los hombres por naturaleza desean aprender.  (I would've put in ser instead of aprender . . . I'm not sure if this is intonation or intention or if I'm just wrong).

Is this a student who I can work with along the lines of Jacotot's Calypso could not . . . a word by word translation to learn a language?  I feel like the pressures of a huge classroom are going to drown this.  How many students did Jacotot have?  Rancière never really mentions that, does he?  

I always assumed that I would use The Ignorant Schoolmaster in conjunction with my reading and annotation method in an English to English translation, but this seems even more in the spirit of Jacotot's project (at least as Rancière frames it).  

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.

Learning to Read Rousseau

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 2^nd 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.

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. 

Students Can Read Anything: The Romeo and Juliet Anecdote

This is part 3 of my project on teaching students to actually read.  The first post in this series was "The Problem," posted on 9/1/12.  So while I'm being held up by the ridiculous logistics of starting the year, I'm itching to get some more ideas out there.  This is just an anecdote, but it's relating one of the first times I can remember thinking about the problems with reading instruction specifically.
 

             I think I started to get the idea that students can read anything in my first year of teaching.  I was teaching 8^th grade in a small 7-12 school in the Bronx and the high school teachers said that they’d really like it if students knew some Shakespeare when they got to 9^th grade.  Wow, ok.  My classroom management wasn’t great.  My lesson plans were shaky at best.  My sleep was lacking.  The reading levels of my students, which I had assiduously measured and documented, were low.  But I went along with it, picking out Romeo and Juliet as the most obvious choice for the angst-ridden crowd in front of me. 

            To make a long story short, I taught the text.  We skipped a few scenes for time, watched clips from Zeffirelli and all of Baz Luhrmann’s films.  We acted a lot.  It took forever and students didn’t understand everything.  I came up with a speech that they really seemed to buy though.  I pointed out that, while reading, we sometimes don’t know what’s going on exactly, but we muscle through and then we get to something we do understand.  Part of the process of reading is stringing together these moments of clarity, making meaning that way.  When we reread the text at a later time, we’ll get more from it, but only because we had this initial reading in our young lives as a background.  You don’t get everything at first.  But you get something.  Reading Shakespeare, I joked honesty, is sometimes like being Tarzan – you grab a vine and swing on it, secure that you know it’s there but unsure of everything around you.  Grasping out wildly in front of you, suddenly another branch pops into your hand and you’re off swinging even further. 

Students seemed amazed by my willingness to admit that I didn’t always understand everything the first time (I was taking a class on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit around the same time and was more than happy to admit my initial impotence with regard to that text), but they also seemed empowered by the idea that they could read anything and that it was ok if they didn’t understand every word. 

Here’s the kicker though.  Once that strict demand for absolute understanding was removed, kids actually managed to understand quite a bit – most of the text, in many cases.  Of course, we went slowly and we had to piece together a lot of passages.  We needed dictionaries and Shakespearean glossaries.  And at first, honestly, I gave a lot of answers out.  But students learned to do it themselves, and by Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech, students were happily reading along and getting the gist of things, concluding at the end that this guy was completely out of his mind because they didn't know what he was talking about and they suspected that it might be the point.  Students were well aware that there were things they were missing – some even looking forward to seeing what they would get out of the play next time they read it – but they certainly got more out of the experience than they would have if I’d given them a cheapened version. 

         It’s only an anecdote.  I wasn’t using the annotation method that I’m looking at here.  I was just trying to give students the idea that they can read difficult texts, despite what our culture of reading levels might suggest.  It wasn't perfect and certainly there were things that I would do differently now.  But it was a start.