Daniela+Journal

Daniela Journal Page

I read Kelly's journal entry this weekend and it followed me after a not-so-good experience with my 111 classes this morning. Students had to prepare two texts about gender for class--one was a chapter from Norah Vincent's book _Self-Made Man_ (the one where she joins an all-male bowling team) and the other was a very short essay titled "Herstory" by Jan (formerly James) Morris, a British writer who changed her sex from male to female in the 1970s.
 * Mon, 4 Feb. 2013**

I had asked students to work with the annotation system I had gone over early in the semester, and once in class, I asked them to work alone or in pairs to make connections between texts. This totally tanked. The connections and overlaps that were so obvious to me sort of eluded them--they were Super Bowl-damaged and quiet, and some had not even printed the complete text. One student in particular refused to move beyond a personal response best summed up by "well, she [Vincent] shouldn't have done it [dressed as a man]." Hrmph. The next class was a bit better, though there were several unengaged students there as well. They did, though, on the whole see some of the connection the other class had not seen, but I still had to do too much prompting.

Disheartened, I am deciding (I think) that I am going to have them do a bit of reflective writing about reading for connections. In particular, they need to make connections between one of these texts and the tv show in which they are supposed to analyze gender portrayal. Yes, the more I think about it, the more I want them to reflect on this.

Two weeks have passed and as I re-read the above entry, I realize that I have not asked my ENG 111 students to reflect on the connections they made as they read. On the bright side, I spent a lot of time in draft conferences this week, and many students who had an at least half-finished draft had made connections, sometimes great ones, between their tv shows and two of the readings. I will need to emphasize this more as we move into the next unit, which is on advertisement. Before we get started on that, I can still assign some in-class reflective writing about the connection between their reading and writing processes.
 * Wed, 20 Feb.**

In the meantime, we (a colleague and I) tried something new in our ENG 090 class (this is the 0104 equivalent; a developmental course that carries no transfer credit and does not count towards graduation). Will have to explain this in more depth some other time, but essentially reading a set of five texts served as the starting point for writing an essay. Each day a text was due, students had to prepare for class by typing and printing out (or uploading) "reading notes"--a list of unknown words they had to look up, a section with notes on passages they had marked with a *, a ? and an !, and two sentences per text they had to explicate--i.e. offer a close reading. Students who did not have these notes either uploaded prior to class or ready to hand in when they arrived that day were asked to leave class and catch up in the library. This preparation resulted in more animated classroom participation (small groups in particular, but also whole class) than I typically see, so this was a success! I actually want to try this in ENG 111 next.

Ohgodohgodohgod I'm starting to panic. Breathe! I should have posted more often, taken more notes, oh dear, now I sound like my students. Of course it occurs to me that we are not done yet, we are smack in the middle of the semester,
 * Thu, 28 Feb.**

In ENG 111, I assigned a reflective piec e to my students after they turned in their Esasy 1. Here is the writing prompt: ==== For your Essay 1, you had to read quite a bit, and now I want you to reflect on the connection between reading and writing. What is the connection between you, the reader, and you, the writer? How, as we have moved through our Essay 1 unit, has one process influenced the other? ==== I looked at the first submission (this is an online submission so they trickle in one at a time), and it was awful. No other way to say it. Instead of the thoughtful reflection I had hoped for, it was more of a general "explanation" of how readers and writers connect. Basically, the student did not address the prompt. Since this was submitted very early, I messaged the student and asked her if she wanted to take another look at her write-up. We'll see.

More of the reflective pieces have come in, and except for one, they have all been much better than the early one that caused me to panic a few days ago. Those who can articulate it clearly see a connection between reading and writing, and in some cases it is a very pragmatic one: students realize that if they want to write good papers, they need to do the readings. This is hardly newsworthy, but it relates to my earlier findings from last semester's reading surveys that many students had this very pragmatic approach to reading. In this reflection, a few students also wrote that they don't really like to read and while that has not changed much, they found that they spend more time with their texts than they used to and they realized that they got something out of this time investment, so to speak.
 * Sun, 3 Mar.**

On a different, though related note, I am now looking through the "Reading into Writing" surveys I collected at the beginning of the semester.


 * Tue, 12 Mar.**

Note to self (and Cyndi)--can we change the initial questionnaire to ask a question about annotating a text--perhaps what do you do when/how do you annotate/mark up/prepare a text for class?

Daniela: I think that is a great question to add. I am reading through Cris Tovani's __So What Do They Really Know?__ which contains some truly insightful comments on assessing annotation for understanding -- not for a penalty but for assessment to inform instruction. We have taught annotation before, but assessing it for good purpose was frustrating. The kids just seem to be going through the motions. What is your experience with student annotation? In my experience most high school students do not voluntarily annotate, even if annotation has been taught, required, or sold as a panacea for all that ails you. Personally, I found annotation to be an essential tool when I was a college student. Is student aversion to annotation developmental? -- Alicia