Reading The Odyssey

So this is just a quick snapshot, literally. We've been reading the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey, using my annotation method of focusing on what you understand in a text in order to provide an entry point for comprehension.

This is a few pages of annotations from a student who has consistently told me that she doesn't understand anything. However, by continually asking her to read a little, stop, and summarize what she does know, this student has been able to complete readings far above those that she felt comfortable with previously. I don't claim to know how this works, but I can suggest that lowering the amount of info a student has to hold in their short term memory seems to make acquisition of new content easier.

The passage was from Book XXIII, where Penelope is testing Odysseus by talking about his bed.

A Serious Ommission in the Common Core Standards

In exactly the way that they do during the school year, things've gotten away from me.  I'm backlogged on great stuff I'd love to put up here.  Sample annotations and proof of development in a couple of really exciting case studies . . . thoughts on how to get this to work with novels . . . a bit on the Common Core in its full ridiculousness.  But after a harrowing month prepping for a quality review in my school and a jump directly into midyear final exams and scoring state tests, any time I have left isn't exactly spent thinking about the classroom.

One thought though - not sure what I make of it yet.  I was prepping a unit for my philosophy class and I was trying to align it to the common core standards so I didn't get stuck going back and doing it later; but I realized the standards are missing something really important.  As a preface to what I'm working on with respect to this pseudo-movement, I'll just say that I think the Common Core represents half of everything that's wrong with education, even while I look for ways to make it applicable to genuine learning in my class. 

But when I looked for a standard to match with my unit on applying Freudian language and thought to pop culture texts, there was nothing to be found.  None of the standards suggest that legitimate reading or writing can be done by bringing a particular critical view to a text.  Numerous texts can be used to discuss a topic, but the texts themselves remain dominant.  The assumption here is clear: that our students are blank recipients of texts they encounter. 

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.