But many of our student aren’t as skilled at reading, and need to annotate to process what they read. This tends to be what I do with difficult non-fiction to get through it (like that Bakhtin guy that popped up in virtually every class I took in graduate school.)īecause English teachers are darned good readers most books won’t give us a problem. I write a comment off to the side about what I think the passage means, or why it matters. I can find myself in the weeds with some difficult reading sometimes, and annotation helps me process what I read. Annotating helps you understand what you read. Annotating helps keep my focus on the task at hand instead of on other enticing ideas. Annotating helps minimize the usual distractions (should I work out today? Are we out of milk? Can I just think about how great that episode of “Modern Love” was?) I can easily read a book or article and think that I’ve read it, when my mind was actually elsewhere. I have an easily distracted mind and sometimes I need to force myself to pay attention even while reading something I’m really into. So here are five reasons from my own experience where annotation has been a useful tool. We want to empower our students with a reason to annotate. And even when we entered into the chat, I had my pen in hand once again ready to annotate as people said things I wanted to remember and called attention to passages that I might have missed. I was reading it in part for a discussion group, and wanted to be prepared to contribute. I read The Ninth Hour strictly for pleasure, but with White Fragility I had a different “why.” For one thing, I actively read this text to be able to refer back to it. While I read McDermott, I studied DiAngelo, and that meant I had my pen in hand for White Fragility, underlining important quotes and writing occasionally in the margins. However, the way I read them was completely different. The other was White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. One was T he Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott. Here’s an example I read two books recently. And to do that, we need to give them a reason why annotating is important. But in order to do that, we need to make annotation something that students do for themselves, and not for the teacher. Not everything they read, but those things for which annotation is an important part of the process. Of course the answer the question in the title is YES! We want our students to be able to annotate. I don’t always make our bed, even if a NAVY Seal tells me to. After all, if you’re just going to get back into the bed at night, why bother making it at all? Fair enough. Annotation is something they do because someone in charge tells them to do it, not because it makes sense. Any good insight is worth keeping because it may make for a good essay or research paper later on.For many of our students, annotating is like making their bed. That’s fine: it’s all about generating insights and ideas of your own. If you are annotating properly, you often begin to get ideas that have little or even nothing to do with the topic you are annotating. If you met the author at a party, what would you like to tell to them what would you like to ask them? What do you think they would say in response to your comments? You can be critical of the text, but you do not have to be. When we annotate an author’s work, our minds should encounter the mind of the author, openly and freely. What are YOU responses to the author’s writing, claims and ideas? What are YOU thinking as you consider the work? Ask questions, challenge, think! You can view it online here: Īnnotating a text or other media (e.g., a video, image, etc.) is as much about you as it is the text you are annotating. \)Īn interactive or media element has been excluded from this version of the text.
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