Reading Of Grammatology: Annotating REALLY Difficult Texts

So I find myself reading Of Grammatology cover-to-cover.  I've never done it - honestly, I sort of pooh-poohed Derrida for a long time and a bit of that skepticism remains.  It gives me a great opportunity to think a lot about annotating for comprehension on a really high reading level though.  I've always maintained to students that my annotation method mirrored what all competent readers actually do when confronted by a difficult text, but I didn't really have great examples.

But on the train the other day, I caught myself twisted around a particular passage, working out exactly what Derrida was saying.  The process I was going through was exactly what I ask students to do, which is annotate for what the text actually says, not what I connect it to or what I think of it.  The first thing that has to be done is figure out what the text says, and even at the highest levels of reading this is a process that has to happen first, even if only in a split-second before it can be influenced by whatever nuances my personalized reading adds.  It is, perhaps, in slowing down and just looking to translate Derrida's complex prose that I've come the closest to illustrating this step in the decoding process.

“The paradox to which attention must be paid is this:  natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor.  A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of a being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature.  Of course, this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal” meaning of writing as the first metaphor.  This “literal” meaning is yet unthought by the adherent of this discourse.  It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself “ (15).

Contradiction/paradox – exposition of a universal truth comes in the form of metaphor – of representation.  Fixation on the sensible moment is (ostensibly) literal and non-representative.  It is what it is and, in its temporality, is human/accidental/imperfect/momentary, so debased.  However, understanding types of writing in this representational form is (contradictorily) making “literal” writing into a metaphor while descrying its poverty of representational texture.

Of course, there's a clear sense of irony here.  Looking to see what Derrida "actually says" is loaded to the top with implications - speech vs writing, a unified meaning in the text, etc.  However, those considerations come second to the moment of perception for me.  Filtered through my own biases as it may be, I think these annotations of Derrida illustrate the way that the process can be used to decode or translate or productively paraphrase the reading.  At very least, it helped me to understand what Derrida was writing, maybe through an accidental visual example of deferral.  

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

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.

Gathering Data

This is part 8 in my series on trying to teach students to use annotations to read. The first entry was posted back at the beginning of September, titled “The Problem.”

So, a discussion of tracking and data is probably long overdue. Stupid, meaningless words. “We’d like to see some data on your kids.” Measuring student development in something as complex as literacy is like living perpetually in late November or early December and trying always to make a definitive statement about whether or not it’s winter. Of course, there’s an objective marker on a calendar somewhere that tells you the answer flat out, but even in the face of that kind of absolute idea, day to day experience kind of contradicts it sometimes. You’re pretty sure you’re in a state of becoming winter though. Some days more than others. Measuring literacy is kind of like that, I guess.

With that in mind, I decided to try to track some target students using a more narrative style. It gave me a chance to reflect on what was really happening for each student, day to day, but also to look explicitly at whether or not it seemed like this reading and annotation method was helping.

I focus on three categories – frequency of annotations in general, the extent to which the student's notes are reflecting central ideas in the text, and the potential for moving these notes from a simple summary level to a more explicative level. It's just a basic Word document with some columns, but it's easy enough to quickly throw some thoughts into or to print off for the odd administrator request or student conference.

In my English classes, I've been tracking a handful of students – mostly students with IEPs or who are ELLs, but a couple who self-selected by coming for individual help with reading comprehension early in the year – and I've just been finishing up scanning in a bunch of their work. Unfortunately, there's going to be a big gap in work because we started reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe I'll get a chance to scan in some annotations or sticky notes from students later on. Maybe I'll sleep a little bit or finish another Game of Thrones book or something.

I've been trying to keep up with these narrative trackers on each of my target students. For the most part, I've been successful – it's not so much about taking the time to write in the 30-80 words per entry, which is pretty quick and painless. It's actually collecting the texts so that I can make copies. As I pointed out in the overall description of the method a while back, using student annotations the way we do is nice for real-time assessment as students are actually reading.

So, for instance, these annotations from early in the year might indicate that the student is able to decode the text on the most basic level, despite relatively high complexity. However, less central details – the description of the architecture, for instance – are left unmentioned. The student could use these annotations to summarize the story or talk about things like theme or characterization, but close-reading discussions like tone or author's craft would require a strategic rereading.

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.