Annotation: a Metacognitive Reflection in Reading. As a person who has had a lifelong experience with reading, I never thought about

Transcription

1 Michelle Joy Carbajal English 715: Reading Practice Post-Secondary Professor Mary Soliday 2 March 2016 Annotation: a Metacognitive Reflection in Reading As a person who has had a lifelong experience with reading, I never thought about examining my reading process and specifically my annotations. I read for entertainment, and if I did make meaning out of the text I read, I would not do it purposely. Reading in a more academic setting would change the nature of the way I read. Since I am more obligated to read for academic purposes, there are is more at stake, and I would make an effort to make meaning in the text. This entails interacting with the text by writing thoughts on sticky notes and attaching them to the page of a book or directly marking a PDF with underlines and marks in the margins. Note, however, that I do this with a novel or a work of nonfiction in either book or electronic form. When I have to read poems, I must do more since sometimes I tend to wrestle with them more, which is the case of my annotations in The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck. After looking back at my annotations, I have to admit that there are not that many scribbles around the poem as I had expected. There is a reason for this. While I read the poem multiple times, I need to discuss my first two read-throughs since they were the basis of how I was going to annotate. The first read through was to have in mind the poem s content and details; that is, what is the poem vaguely about? During the second read through, I began annotating as much as I can. Afterwards, I did outside research, which made me shape and change my annotations. Looking back, it was the research that made me remove things, but at the same time tighten whatever marginalia I had already written. Before I annotated for my second read through, I had to contextualize the poem in order to

2 Carbajal 2 produce what I hoped would be the best annotations and reading. One of the things that I notice when looking at my annotations is the text surrounding the title and author. I looked up some information on the internet about the author and found that she had a thing for Greek mythology and nature. In fact, I even wrote above Gluck s name, What is the relationship to nature? I looked up the title on the internet as well, and one of the results included an unofficial interpretation of what the poem represented, which was the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. I admit looking at other interpretations, and while one said that it was an illustration of Persephone s relationship with her mother Demeter, I was for some reason drawn to the Hades-Persephone relationship. Then, something clicked in place because of my past reading about how the mythology came to be, which I notated, According to Greek myth, Persephone was picking irises before she was abducted. I had placed this next to the title. I then used the context I formulated from information with the author and the intertext from my knowing about Greek mythology to drive my interpretation of the poem in my annotations. In fact, with the intertext and context working together, all of my annotations say something about the Hades-Persephone mythology. I had a hard time making meaning and interacting with the poem in the first read through, but the intertext I used and context I developed gave me a really solid foundation for subsequent readings. When I read novels and nonfiction, I am used to not having to struggle with understanding the text. I am one of those students who, when faced with a poem, see it as something to decode, that the meaning is hidden. I think it is because of the lack of words running from one side of the page to the other side that create the gaps in my reading; there is just so much more detail in a fictional novel or nonfiction work I do not have to think too hard to fill in those gaps, create meaning, and make sense of the text. My coping mechanism to fill in gaps created as I read poems and achieve closure with the poem is creating context and the pulling from my intertext. My practice shows the difficulty and tediousness of reading a poem that some students do

3 Carbajal 3 not want to go through. They want to instantly be gratified by understanding a text and not have to deal with it so they can go about doing other things that are not obligatory. I had to do additional work in order to reach an understanding of the poem work that also meant an extended interaction with the poem, more annotation, refining or removing what I already said. For students, this also entails running into understandings of a poem that challenge ideologies, beliefs, or set values that students have lived with for their entire life. Reading a poem might mean having to let go of and rethink what they already know and feel about the world around them, which I imagine can be a struggle for a college student at any class level. Once a reader copes with their discomfort in their own way that is when they can begin understanding a poem and make meaning. With all the gaps in a poem and the struggles that come with reading them, I think poems are one place where student learning takes place. Annotation as a tool reading poems serves the student by helping them cope with the struggle and aid their learning. I can see where annotation can help me, but that is because I am used to annotating, and I love reading. In the perspective of a freshman composition instructor, I can also see where students hate annotating or reading in general. We know that annotating has an academic purpose, but I wonder how we as instructors of composition or literature can make it so that annotation can appeal to students and make them more grateful that they annotate.

4 Michelle Joy Carbajal English 715 Professor Mary Soliday 17 March 2016 Adventures With Annotating: Working With Expository Prose I read lot of different genres in school and outside of it, and I would treat them differently. I would not say that I read poems outside of school, but when I do so it would be for an academic purpose. This scenario is the same for scholarly literature, but after working with this genre in the course of my graduate tenure I know that I will be faced with some difficulty since there will be concepts that I will not be able to understand immediately. Therefore, I need to annotate, and I think these annotations serve as illustrations of my thoughts and show the cognitive and critical interaction I am having what is sometime an abstract text. I noticed that when I read scholarly prose, I do not feel compelled to read up on the author to create context, which explains a lot because with the scholarly literature so far, I have not notated anything about the authors; with poems, I do research and write around the authors. Doing this would probably be a smart thing to do to see if there is a common thread in what the author tends to write about. However, I am unsure about whether or not creating this context for me will be helpful for scholarly literature. In my conquest to understand expository prose, I find myself asking questions. While this is something that I also do when I read poems, I think my questions lean more toward analytic inquiry rather than reading comprehension, which is the nature of the questions I ask for poem annotating. I would say, I wonder and try to apply theories to the classrooms of today. For instance, in the Carillo article where she says, it compels them to actively draw on a repertoire of reading approaches they have been cultivating in first-year composition (15), I ask, But what about those who

5 unfortunately don't have a repertoire of reading approaches? What s interesting is that I insert myself into the annotation by connecting my own reading experiences to put Morris s theories in perspective. Sometimes, something would set me off in the literature which would make me ask a question in a manner illustrated in the figure 1. I think it looks a little silly, but it is my attempt at inquiry with respect to issues in the field of composition. Depending on the article, I seem to do a lot more highlighting rather than marginal comments. I think this occurs because I am looking for theories, pedagogies, and praxes that can inform what I want to do in the classroom. Highlighting functions as tracking and signals that a piece of text is really worth looking over, commenting on, and maybe wrestling with. I do not highlight as much, if at all, when I read poems because I think the entire poem is important. My habit of highlighting in expository prose might be showing that I agree with what authors are trying to articulate, but other times I highlight because I want to challenge an author s claim, which is what I am doing in the figure on the right. If I challenge the text, I think I am complicating it and making it difficult, but it makes my reading experience a little richer, and my interaction with text is complex, which is good. I will be honest and say that I notice that I not a very heavy annotator or highlighter.

6 Looking back at the expository prose I have read so far, I am still trying to figure out why that may be so. Perhaps it is because I am pressed for time, and I just cannot comment on and highlight everything that I come across. First year students will find that they have a heavier load of reading to do in college compared to high school, so I am assuming that if instructors find that their students are not annotating enough or at all it might be because they do not have too much time to work through the text. On the other hand, an empty PDF or print out of expository reading material might also suggest that they have not read whatsoever. If that is the case, there must be a clear purpose for them not to besides time constraints. The trick is to find out what is preventing students from annotating and interacting or performing a mindful read of the text.