Say/Do 6 Close Reading

Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading - Kylene Beers and Robert E Probst

"The Sky is a Landfill" - Jeff Buckley

Yeah he did more songs than "Hallelujah," crazy.

Say

Notice and Note got my brain jogging up a proverbial hill thinking about the place reading has in my life.  I wish I could sit still and read for novels like I used to when I was 14.  Oh and textbooks and articles?  Nothing could be more of chore than chugging through anything Probst has touched.  The text has a practical approach (Thank you Kylene Beers, thank you.) that I appreciate, but a lot of the charts are so similar that I question the need to fill up a fourth of the book with them.

Today most of my reading takes place digitally, however, I prefer to read print still.  There are some drawbacks to the page.  I for one despise having to mangle the spine of a book whenever I am writing an essay (or blog) for instance.  For whatever reason I was not graced with owl eyes, and cannot read in the dark.  Yet, with reading on computers, tablets, phones, and other devices has a degree of eyestrain not present with traditional print reading.  Not being able to chuck a digital book across the room in a fit of rage at the death of a favorite character sucks as well.  I doubt it will be long before physical books are a hipster relic akin to vinyl, but until then I prefer to read and teach texts that can be held, marked up, and destroyed if need should arise. 

Question 10 on lifelong learners resonates with what I want to accomplish in the classroom.  A large part of who I am today originates with books that I read in middle and high school.  More often than not, these books were not things I read in class.  They were books I picked out from one of the three ubiquitous shopping mall bookstores or from the library.  The importance and practicality of becoming a lifelong learner needs to be communicated to students.  Lets face it, a lot of the canon is not particularly inspiring or life-changing.  Students need intrinsic motivation to seek out texts that speak to them in some fashion.  As a teacher I have to figure out how to foster that need to learn.  Somehow.

Also holy **** were the 2007 graduation rates depressing.  I knew the statistics for minorities (aside from Asian Americans) were bad, but seeing them lined up together speaks to how ethnocentric the school system here really is (pg. 63).

Do

When I read the Again and Again lesson, I immediately thought of using this to teach motif, albeit less directly than throwing weird word (motif? mo tif? more teeth?) at students.  I feel like it would be pretty interesting to bring in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming into the classroom.  These spy stories all share a metaphorical excrement bucket of motifs.  The digestible nature of the text also lends itself for analysis.  Paired with clips from the film of some of Bond's "love interests" could also be a tie into the series' misogyny.