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5 Steps to Great Annotations

May 29, 2018 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Annotation is a valuable skill, but it’s not one that comes naturally. It has to be taught. Most of our students come to us used to reading books for pleasure without a pencil in hand (that is, if they read at all.) And if reading is a lifelong habit, this is what we should be doing with books 90% of the time.

But in an academic setting, we might be asked to do something else with them: writing a paper, participating in an online discussion, or many other tasks that require us to think differently about the book than if we simply read for pleasure.

Here’s an example. This summer I’m reading Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao for an AP summer reading club. While it’s basically a pleasure read for me, I’ll also be discussing it with other teachers in a few weeks. In order to contribute to the conversation I need to be making some notes along the way so that I have something important to say.

Annotation is thinking made visible. However, students may not know what they should be thinking about when they read, or need some help making those things explicit. Here are 5 things that we can ask students to do while they annotate and why those strategies are important.

1. Ask Questions.

Students can ask questions like the following: Where are you confused? Where might you have to reread? What guesses can you make about what will happen next?

Why this is important: at a really basic level, this strategy allows students to come to class with something to contribute: pose your question and get an answer. This can be a powerful strategy to bring to class the following day. What questions do you have about the text? Are these questions we should know the answer to? What questions do you have that prevent you from going further?

Asking questions also teaches kids to pay attention to when they get stuck and what strategies they can then use to move forward. Sometimes answering questions is essential for understanding what’s going on. Sometimes the author doesn’t want you to know. It’s important for students to know the difference and be able to hold uncertainty as they read.

2. Add personal responses.

What does this text remind you of in your own life? In other texts? In popular culture and current events? What are your opinions about what the characters are doing and what happens to them?

One of my favorite annotations of all time was one from a student who wrote “What a bitch.” about Caroline Bingley in the margins of Pride and Prejudice. Here’s someone who connected so deeply with the story that she thought of her as an actual character. And her use of what would commonly be called profanity and she never would have used in a paper, indicated that she saw this as a place where she could speak freely in her own voice. That’s what we want.

Why this is important: If students ONLY did this for annotation, we would be in good shape. We would know they were actively reading and making the book their own by fostering deep connections to their experiences. When students read Frankenstein we want them to be thinking about all the different ways that science can cross moral and ethical boundaries. When they read To Kill A Mockingbird we want them to be outraged at the injustice while also recognizing that it still exists today. This is a record of the ability of reading to enlarge our world and get us thinking.

3. Draw pictures and/or symbols

Annotations don’t always have to be words. Quick sketches can be a great way to annotate, and a system of symbols can be a quick way to have kids annotate certain things that they will see repeatedly. Plus, it’s fun to create a secret code that no one else will understand.

Why this is important. It can be a fun way to engage in an activity that many students find to be a burden. It can be appealing to people like me that are naturally hard-wired to draw things. But it can also be a way to get kids to think differently about a text. What would happen if you told your class that for the next chapter they can only use pictures to annotate? They might find some great new insights that way, and it can be a good way to add some variety when they are halfway through a book and need something new to make annotation fresh again.

4. Mark things that are important.

Being able to instinctively know what is important is a hard skill to develop and one that requires a decent amount of reading experience in order to be able to do on the fly (This is why I never tell students to annotate examples of foreshadowing because most of them don’t have the ability to see it.) However, here are a few things that authors do in order to tell the reader that something in important. Students can look for these as they read:

Repetition: If you keep seeing it, whether it be a word, a phrase, an idea, or a character, it’s important.
Similes and metaphors: If an author wants to emphasize something, they may use an especially striking simile or metaphor (or a series of them) to explain it.
Lots of detail: If something is explained in great detail it’s important. If you see a large paragraph describing a turtle crossing the road in minute detail (especially if it seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the passage), there’s something going on there.
Opposites: One way to show that something is important is to juxtapose it with something that is completely opposite or out of place with the rest of the passage.

5. Summarize what you’ve read.

Summarizing is an underrated skill, and not as easy as people think. Can you summarize the events or a chapter or the main points of an article in a sentence?

Why this is important: Summarizing is the best way to really process something you’ve read to really prove that you’ve understood it. Furthermore, if you’re reading a long novel it’s a great way to review what happened in each chapter before you take a test or write a paper. It’s a great bread crumb trail of what happened. If you’re reading an article, summarizing the main points is a great active reading strategy that prepares you for class discussions. However, you have to be careful with this one, because I find this is the one that students find most tedious. If students are getting bogged down in annotation, this is the first one I would drop.

Final Thoughts

We don’t necessarily want students to be doing all of these things at once because we want to be careful that we don’t turn students off from reading. Getting kids to love to read is one of the most important things we do as ELA teachers. But we also want them to develop a set of skills that they can use for different occasions. I don’t annotate books I read for pleasure, even though there are some people out there that do. But if I’m reading an article that I am going to use in a paper for a college class, you can bet I’ll have a pen and highlighter close by. In a previous blog post I wrote about how we can rethink our annotation practices so students will find it meaningful. I’ve also written about why students hate annotating and what we can do about it.

It’s also important to model annotation. I don’t give students something to read that I haven’t annotated myself. And if I teach the class a couple of times a day, I can show them how reading something multiple times leads to new insights.

Another helpful strategy is to give them a poem and a non-fiction piece, have them annotate both, and share how they annotated each one differently while still using the above five strategies. You can also have students share what they annotated. Anytime that we can get kids thinking about what they are doing – and more importantly how they were better off for doing it – we will start to build value in a skill.

David Rickert is a high school English teacher in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. He has been teaching for over 20 years and has taught virtually every grade and every subject. David is passionate about developing lessons that make difficult language arts subjects fun and engaging. He is also an author on Teachers Pay Teachers.

A Workshop Approach to Essay Planning

October 28, 2015 By David Rickert 4 Comments

One of the biggest problems my students face with writing essays is that they don’t do enough planning before they sit in front of the computer to begin writing. Also, even though I tell them that I’m willing to look at drafts before they hand in the final copy, most students don’t take advantage of it. I suspect that many of them wait until the last minute to begin their essays and don’t have a draft ready. Either way, I’m not interested in grading a bunch of bad essays from kids that don’t know how to plan or manage their time.

A workshop approach to planning an essay solves a lot of these problems. I tell them once they are done with the workshop they should have 85% of their essay written – all they have to do is type it. All the hard stuff is done. Since I’ve been doing the workshop, their final essays have been much better.

So what goes on in an essay workshop?

The workshop lasts two days, and the students have four stations they can visit to work on different parts of their essay. They don’t have to go to all of them, and they can spend as much time as they want at any particular station. I do this in our media center where we have large tables that I can use for the stations. It’s important to keep the stations distinct so that students know that when they are at that station, they are to work on that particular task. This allows them to collaborate with anyone else that happens to be there.

The essay they are working on in the photos requires them to show how a character of their choice either does or not represent the ideas that Mary Wollstonecraft set forth in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. So they are all working with the same two texts, but they can choose which character they’d like to write about.

The Stations

Here are the stations that I used for this paper:

The Wollstonecraft Station: This station has a few laptops where they can research Wollstonecraft and find additional quotes from A Vindication of the Rights of Women for their paper.

The Organization Station: Here’s where they can plan out their essay. We have large marker boards in our media center and that’s what I used for this station.

The Thesis Station: Students here can work on crafting their thesis statements.

The Quotation Station: Students find quotes from the novel to use as support.

For these last two stations I put butcher paper on the tables for them to write on. That way as they rotate around the tables they will see the work that others have done before them and it’s a truly collaborative process. I save them for the next day so they can pick up right where they left off.

I’m going to be using this method again soon for a paper on Emily Dickinson. This time I’ll have a station where students can kick around what the poem means, a station where they deal with the “how” of the poem (word choice, rhythm, etc.), the organization station, and the thesis station.

Minilessons

I also led minilessons while students were working at the stations on introductions, conclusions, and organization. Each minilesson lasted five minutes and were held twice during the workshop so the students had some flexibility with when they came. They also didn’t have to attend. They could just pick up the handout.

Have questions about the workshop approach I used? Or the Pride and Prejudice assignment? Send me an email using the link at the sidebar.

Don’t Hate! Annotate! How to REALLY Annotate a Poem

September 18, 2015 By David Rickert 1 Comment

We all want students to know how to annotate and automatically do it when they are handed a piece of literature. The trouble is, for most students annotation is something they do for the teacher, and not for themselves. They don’t take any ownership of the process and don’t see any payout at the end.

I got a harsh lesson on the value of annotation this week. I was teaching “Ozymandias” and after I printed off the poem, I read it over, said to myself, “I got this,” and proceeded to teach a very mediocre lesson on a great poem. I thought I knew it, but I hadn’t internalized it. This is the value of annotation. If I had taken time to annotate, I would have extended my knowledge beyond what I thought. And I want my students to understand the value of this activity for reaching a deeper understanding of whatever they read. However, they need some strategies they can use since it’s not a natural task for them.

The next day I was teaching “I Wish I Could Remember That First Day” by Christina Rossetti and the night before, I annotated the heck out it. I thought that this would be an excellent time to think about what I do to annotate and help them with some strategies. The nice thing about poems is that they are short, so you can go over and over them in a short amount of time.

I threw down the gauntlet and took a picture of my annotations and projected them on the screen. I told them this is the amount they should strive for when they annotate (the picture was small enough that they couldn’t really see what I wrote.)

So here’s what I do when I annotate:

Read the poem a couple of times without doing anything. I’m just getting the lay of the land.
Recreate the poem in writing. This is when I start to write. Read the poem and retell it as best I can. There will be parts that don’t make sense, but I’ll leave them alone for now. With this reading I establish that the speaker is in love with someone and wishes they could remember the first time they had met. I also determine the tone: she is very regretful that she can’t remember this.
Ask questions. In this reading I begin to play devil’s advocate and see how far I can push the poem. I came up with questions such as these: Why does she want to remember this event? Will she be better off if she could? What were her options for preserving this memory at the time? I might also start to answer these questions.
Think about the larger significance. I pondered whether or not it was easier for us to remember all of the events of our lives because we are able to record so much and actively do so. At the time Rossetti was writing, you could write stuff down or hope you remembered it. Today, we actively curate our lives with photographs and social media. Or perhaps this puts more pressure on us if we miss something because we have so many ways to capture it?
This can be done at any time, but I like to find words or phrases that I find interesting. Sometimes they are phrases that are great description, or an interesting word choice, or something I can’t quite figure out because it seems so puzzling.
Finally, I go back and look for literary devices or the rhyme scheme and see if I notice anything that strikes me. I f I really want to analyze the use of them, I’ll dig a little deeper. I’ve got a good understanding by this point, so now I have a context for the use of them.

In my mind this seems like a better way to approach annotating a poem that the more pedantic approaches I find online. Most approaches start with identifying words you don’t know, looking at literary devices, finding things that stands out or confuses, and so forth. Content seems almost secondary – you’re just encouraged to label everything you can. But I find it helpful to just dig right in. You can look at the construction after you have analyzed the poem and have better luck finding out why the devices are used that way.

For some great comics about great poems that you could annotate, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

What Makes a Book Great?

August 30, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

If you’re a high school English teacher – especially of the AP variety – it’s easy to get smug about books. We believe that some books are better than others and that every student should believe that Hemingway is a better author than Sparks or Rowling. We may not believe that “at least they’re reading something” holds true, and we look in horror at the proliferation of adults reading YA books. At one point or another, I’ve held all of these positions.

However, my view over time has softened quite a bit as my criteria for what makes a good book has changed and become more inclusive. My dad loves Clive Cussler novels. For him they are good books. Enough said. He’s not interested in me telling him he should read something better.

But how do we reconcile that view with our role as teachers? We want students to love to read, but we also want students to read important books that they wouldn’t otherwise, and we want them to think they are great books too. Is there a definition of a great book that teachers and students can both live with? I believe there is, and we can ask two questions to arrive at that answer.

How well does the book achieve its main goal?

According to Thomas Arp in Sound and Sense, the primary goal of all literature is to entertain. Personally, I would broaden that definition to say that the primary goal is to provide a significant experience, because I would never call a book like Elie Wiesel’s Night “entertaining.” But there are plenty of books whose main goal is to provide escape. If the book provides you with a respite from your otherwise boring life, then the author has done what he or she set out to do.

Of course, some books want to do more than just entertain, which brings up the second question:

How significant is that goal?

And it is at this point that we can distinguish between books that merely provide entertainment value and those that provide additional value through giving us a lens into human behavior. We can then claim that Huck Finn is a more significant book than The Hunger Games because Mark Twain has a more significant purpose in his story.

We don’t want to tell our students that the books we read in class are better than the ones they read outside of school (if they read at all) because they never respond well to that. But we can tell them that we are reading books that are more significant, and that will continue to enrich their lives in a second or third reading. As I’ve written in a previous post, Harry Potter has become that for a lot of our students – a series that is entertaining, but also provide a great deal of wisdom as well.

Some of this has been adapted from Thomas Arp’s book Sound and Sense.

For resources that make great works accessible for students, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

What Should I Do On the Second Day of English Class? Read A Poem!

August 7, 2015 By David Rickert 2 Comments

There are a lot of suggestions floating around out there about what to do on the first day of school. But what should you do on the second day in Language Arts? I already did a post on using a short story to establish how you approach the task of reading. In this post I’m going to do a similar activity with a poem.

The poem I’m going to use for this activity is “Mindful” by Mary Oliver. It’s a pretty easy poem, but there’s just enough in there the students will find difficult that will get their brains working. Also, Oliver is a very inspirational poet, and I find that students like the positive, contemplative aspects of her work. Poetry can be a tough sell for kids anyway, so starting off with Sylvia Plath or John Donne is probably not the way to go. So let’s stick with Oliver.

Here’s a link to the poem.

This is what I plan to do with the poem:

1.Where do you get stuck?

This is a poem where kids will go along swimmingly until they get to the middle, I’m guessing right around the “nor.” A lot of poems work this way, and I find that I have to train kids not to bail out too quickly because the heart of the poem is often in the last few lines.

So the next question is: what tools do you have at your disposal for when you get stuck? Obviously you can reread, and that’s almost a requirement for any poem to be experienced fully. Are there any words that you don’t understand, like “acclamation” (which is different than “acclimation”)? Anything that’s worded in a strange way? Most importantly, do you need to know what that word or phrases means to understand the poem? Sometimes you don’t.

2. Who is the speaker?

Obviously it’s important to train kids not to assume the poet is the speaker, but in this case it doesn’t make much difference if they do. What we’re getting at with this question is not just inferences but textual support. If this were the only poem you read by Mary Oliver, what could you tell about her and how do you know? What are her character traits? What does she like to do? Where does she like to be? And where do you see it in the text?

3. What’s the main idea?

The dreaded question! Kids don’t like this one because it gives them the greatest chance of being wrong. But this poem has a pretty easy message to figure out: there is great wisdom to be found in everyday experiences if we simply allow ourselves the time to see them.

This is a great message in a world in which we are overly reliant on technology, but I think it’s a particularly important message for my seniors, many of whom have spend so much time chasing after grades and activities that them have left themselves very little time to pause and figure out who they are. I know several students from the past that graduated and found themselves adrift for this very reason.

A bonus activity!

I’m going to do a Mary Oliver unit later in the year and this will be one of the activities that I’ll do, but it would be a good second day activity as well. I would have them look at something they find for much longer than they would have to see what they notice and take a picture of it. It could be anything – a flower, the front yard, anything that you see on a daily basis that you don’t give much thought to. Here’s an article about how to take mindful photographs you could use. You could even have them write a poem that accompanies the photograph, or create a bulletin board from all the pictures that people have taken. What fun!

If you’re looking for a fun way to review the Parts of Speech during the first week of school, check out my set of comics and activities called Grammar Comics: Parts of Speech.

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