Photos from the Classroom: What’s Happening Here?

Photos from the Classroom: What’s Happening Here?

Annotation.

One of the biggest points of conflict when I am teaching a text is that I require annotations. Students tend to hate being required to annotate a text as they read. Our Director of Studies recently shared an article with the English Department about the purpose of reading a text as a class, for the purpose of learning. The article is High School Reading as an act of Meaningful Aggression.

Generally speaking, the 6th graders I teach are much easier to convince and persuade. They are still at an age where they completely trust adults, and they believe that everything I tell them is in their best interest. Teaching them to annotate, on a very simple level, comes with a little bit of uncertainty, but they come around rather quickly.

My 7th graders are the ones who push on me the most. They push back about most everything, but the topic of annotation is particularly triggering for them. Recently, I wrote this quote from the article I mentioned above on the board for my 7th graders:

I want my students to see reading … as something combative, vulgar, assertive—a constant back-and-forth between reading and rereading, moments of stepping outside the text then coming back and battering at it with questions. Something better done in a flak jacket than pajamas.

We talked about this quote, and the difference between reading book for fun, and reading a book for school. There is certainly a time and place to read in your pajamas. And, there is a time a place to use a text for something more, and that place is in the classroom.

7th grade is an interesting year where students start moving from learning to read to reading to learn. These annotations, and the act of annotating—reading, rereading, thinking, and asking/writing questions—contributes to this process.

Annotation is a skill that is new, and giving students direct instructions for what to annotate, especially in these early years, is important. I give mini-lessons on a particular skill—poetic sound devices, for example (we are reading Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, which is written in verse). Then, I assign a section of reading in the book and require students to annotate the particular sound devices they find. In the discussion of the text in the following class, we will interrogate the why behind the use of sound devices.

As we move through the text, I will require them to go from just finding and labeling these devices, to writing a question or a deeper meaning in the margins of the page next to the passage.

The discussion comes from their annotations. I might have them get into small groups, compare annotations, and come up with discussion questions about how the sound devices create images, and how that impacts our experience of the text, for example.

This act of comparing annotations also has students see the text through other eyes. It gives them new perspective.

Additionally, annotations they write may later provide more ease for finding evidence for arguments in discussion and writing.

Finding meaning in what we read and learning how to responsible talk about it is one of the skills we teach throughout the years in English and Language Arts. The hope is that through the years, annotating a text to interrogate it will become second nature.