secondary education Archives

Annotation: Why Students Hate It (And How To Fix It)

September 20, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Annotation is a common reading strategy used to promote active reading. Annotation is a skill that helps students comprehend what they are reading and leaves a trail of “bread crumbs” for students to follow if they have to respond to the text in writing. Ideally, it will help students make meaning of what they are reading.

As language arts teachers we want students to be good readers and also learn to love reading, and in many ways the two go hand in hand. However, for many students annotation promotes the first goal at the expense of the second. Many of my students who like to read tell me that they hate to annotate. It takes away from the pleasure of reading and makes a chapter of assigned reading that much more time consuming. And as nice as it for teachers to know through annotating that kids have read the book instead of reading Sparknotes, it’s apparent that for many students annotation is something they do for the teacher and not for themselves. They don’t find the value in it and consider it busywork.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we change the way we present annotation to students – and change our expectation of what the end result should be – annotation can be a valuable tool that won’t seem like so much of a chore.

Here are some ideas:

Don’t give students too much to manage.

In the past I have required students to look for literary devices, ask questions, and do chapter summaries. I required them to have a certain number of comments per page. In short I was asking them to do about five different things when they annotated.

What I had to learn was that annotating is essentially multitasking – they have to read and do whatever else I asked them to do. When they were looking for personification and characterization and setting details all while asking them to comprehend what they read at the same time, they were not likely to do any of those things particularly well.

The solution? Give students one thing to focus on while they annotate. That way students can read for comprehension but focus on an important part of the assigned reading. Maybe they can look at setting for one chapter and examine the use of literary devices in the next one. This way they can really build the skill of annotating without becoming overwhelmed.

Have a purpose.

Annotating works well when students have a reason to do it other than “to make you better readers.” I try to tie annotation into a final product, whether it be an essay or a presentation. If they are writing a paper on a particular character from Pride and Prejudice I give them the prompt and tell them what to look for as they read. I don’t want them to have to reread the book again, and I don’t want them going online to find quotes. I model this myself – the books that I teach are heavily annotated so that I don’t have to reread every time I want to find a particular passage. In some cases, I don’t even have to read the book again to teach it – I can read my annotations and go from there.

If students know that annotating will benefit them in concrete ways, it will help them see the value in it.

Give them a break from annotating.

There’s nothing wrong with letting kids read a chapter or two without annotating. Let them just enjoy the book with no strings attached. Better yet, incorporate independent reading in your classroom so they always have an opportunity to read for pleasure.

Do an annotation on the second read.

Something that has worked well for me is to do a simple light annotation the first time students read the book. For struggling readers, it does help give them a way in to a text they might find difficult. But I find a tremendous amount of value in doing a second annotation of what they just read on the following day. The students aren’t spending time keeping track of what’s happening, so they are free to look closer at how the text is put together. This is a great way to address foreshadowing, for instance.

In conclusion

The best thing that we can consider with annotating is to think about how much of the reading task should be taken up with it. It’s not something that many teachers I’ve talked to have ever thought about.

I think a good ratio is annotating should only take up 10-20% of the total time spent reading. That way the vast majority of the time, students are simply reading. The annotating won’t add what is perceived as an unreasonable amount of time, and you can still accomplish a lot.

Annotation is a valuable skill, but the love of reading is even more valuable. We don’t have to sacrifice one or the other if we employ sound strategies for both.

Suspenseful Story Writing in Language Arts: Model Texts

October 11, 2015 By David Rickert 6 Comments

Students love to write suspenseful stories, especially around Halloween. They can be a fun diversion in a secondary Language Arts classroom which can sometimes be dominated by essays. But if done properly, they can also teach students a great deal about how stories are constructed using suspense and imagery to create a particular mood. In this post I will address how I teach students about the technique of creating suspense and some of the texts I’ve used to model it. In the second post I will explain how I use writing suspense to teach literary devices. In the third post I will cover how we write the story.

First off, I allow students to write a suspenseful non-fiction story about something that happened to them, or I let them write a fiction piece. However, I tell them they cannot write a horror story. There should be no blood or violence, even implied. Too often students fall into basic horror story tropes that they don’t do particularly well. Also, as you’ll find out in a later post, they aren’t writing a story that is a piece of flash fiction (or three-minute fiction) rather than a full length story. You can certainly do that; however, I find that students need some boundaries or they’ll write too much. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but many students tend to lose control of their writing that way.

The Basics of Suspense

You can do a search for “how to create suspense in writing” and find a lot of good handouts like this one. But the idea is pretty simple: you make your reader wait for something they want to know. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Slow the story down. Many young writers get to an exciting point in a story and speed up the action. The trick is to slow it down by adding details. One way you can do this is to get inside the character’s head and describe what they are feeling. You can also describe in great detail the setting, the slow walk to open the door, and various other things.
Withhold information. Don’t immediately tell your reader what was in the box. Make them wait. Linger over the person’s expression first. Send them out of the room and out of the house. Have them scream “thank you!” or, “Why would you think I would like this?”
Put in a hard decision. Give the character a tough decision to make and have them weigh in their mind what to do. Too many students give the character a choice but then solve it too quickly. Make them weigh the pros and cons by getting inside the character’s head. Better yet, give them two undesirable outcomes and have them choose from those.

I have a couple of model texts that I use with students that get them thinking about suspense. I try to use several different genres as well to help them understand how suspense can be used in a variety of settings. The links to the stories are at the end of the post.

“The Listeners” – Walter de la Mare

This is a frequently anthologized poem with an air of mystery about it. Suspense is created because the traveler knocks on the door a couple of times and receives no answers, and there’s some ghostly listeners as well. Why is he there? What’s the deal with the cryptic message he delivers?

“The Storm” – McKnight Malmar

I love using this story to teach suspense. For one thing, it’s the type of story that students would like to be able to write. A woman is home alone during a storm and believes that someone is looking in the house. She goes to the basement and finds a dead body. I have the students read and annotate looking for examples of the ways to create suspense described above. The part where the woman goes down into the basement and discovers the body is a textbook case of how to create suspense. I usually ask my students what would happen if we simply read that she went downstairs, opened the trunk, and found the body. There’s an awful lot of great imagery in the story as well.

“The Ravine” – Ray Bradbury

This story is a part of the novel Dandelion Wine and describes an older woman taking a shortcut across a ravine to get home, all with the threat of The Lonely One lurking in the background. This is another example of a story that kids would like to be able to write and works particularly well with middle school students. I tend to use “The Storm” over this one because to be honest, it’s a little corny and a little too long. But it would still work well. The chapter that makes up the story is on page 124 in the link. There’s also a pretty cool radio adaptation of the story here.

“The Dare” – Roger Hoffman

This is a nonfiction piece about a boy who is dared to jump in between the wheels of a moving train, stay there for a minute, and roll out the other side. It’s a great example of how you can create suspense as we find out whether or not the narrator will succeed. This is a quick newspaper article.

These selections are the ones that I use in class as models for suspense. In the next post I talk about how to use these works to teach literary devices.

Why Read Books?

August 23, 2015 By David Rickert 1 Comment

This summer I had two wonderful experiences reading books. The first was reading War and Peace, which took me the better part of the summer, but was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had. The second was The Importance of Being Earnest, which I read in an afternoon, laughing out loud at many parts. Completely different works, but both rewarding experiences.

I have done some posts on what I do on the second day of school: read a story, read a poem, or look at an image. But on the first day of school I like to set the stage for the study of literature and why it’s important. (Keep in mind, I’m an introvert and ice breakers and get-to-know-you games are pretty high on my list of things I despise, so this is what I do instead.)

Many of my students don’t like to read, and many of them – even in an AP class – claim to have gone through their high school education without reading a book in school. Since we will spend our year exploring both classic and popular works of literature, here are the reasons I tell them why everyone should read. A lot of parallels can be drawn here to the Harry Potter series, so I will do so.

1. Books are the containers for the wisdom of the world.

For a long time people have used stories to teach important lessons: Aesop’s fables, the Greek myths, and stories from various religions. Storytelling is a powerful way to impart knowledge because it allows people to live the lesson rather than just hear it. Some inferior ways of imparting those lessons fall by the wayside, others that combine these lessons with good storytelling stand the test of time. We can tell people “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it,” but the lesson becomes much more powerful and memorable through the character of Atticus Finch.

In a similar fashion, my students have told me that their initial reason for reading Harry Potter is to be immersed in the imaginative world of Hogwart’s. No one really picks up a novel to learn something; first and foremost we want to be entertained. However, there is a great deal of wisdom in the series, such as this quote from Dumbledore: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” My students will tell me that upon reading the book a second time, the important themes in this series become clear and relevant if they missed them the first time. This doesn’t guarantee that 100 years from now we’ll be reading Harry Potter or To Kill A Mockingbird, but the lessons that those books impart will appear in literature forever.

2. Books allow us to be part of a community.

I would imagine that everyone that has graduated high school in the United States has read (or at least is familiar with) the story of Romeo and Juliet. Knowledge about Romeo and Juliet isn’t particularly useful, but it’s something that we have as a cultural touchstone for all of us. Regardless of the subject matter, there is a great deal of value in having things that all of us know that is part of our shared knowledge.

We also form communities around books in the form of book clubs. Some are more serious than others (some I know of are more about drinking wine and gossip rather than about discussing books.) However, The foundation is based on the premise that creating books and building a community around a shared experience is worthwhile.

In a similar fashion, those who have read Harry Potter have formed their own communities that keep the stories alive and relevant. They post listicles and memes, plan pilgrimages to the theme park, and write fan fiction about the novels. I would imagine that for these groups of people, anyone who claims to be into Harry Potter who has only seen the movies (or worse, only read the summaries) would be tagged as an impostor by those members of the community. You have to read the books or you’re not a TRUE Harry Potter fan because you haven’t really experienced it. We can say the same for any book that we read.

3. Literature allows us glimpses into the human soul.

Everyone is probably familiar with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” or at least the last few lines. Here’s the summary of the poem from Gradesaver:

“The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing. After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one day in order to try the other road. However, he realizes that it is unlikely that he will ever have the opportunity to come back to this specific point in time because his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and other decisions). The narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he chosen the other path.”

Not only does this take just as long to read as the poem, but we also can’t argue that it’s the same experience as reading the poem. We haven’t lived the poem like we have when we read it. The summary doesn’t connect to us emotionally.

The study of literature is basically the study of an art form that people use to work out the world’s problems. I recently talked to someone who suffered for bulimia for twelve years and one of the ways that she worked through it was by writing daily in here journal. She wasn’t working math problems or doing science experiments.

There’s a difference between learning ABOUT a work of literature and experiencing it. We could cover a lot of ground in English classes if we simply read summaries of the great books and memorized why we should read them. But there’s no substitute for immersing yourself in the work and letting it touch your soul.

There’s no question that Harry Potter has affected readers in this way. Our hope as educators is to find works that will encourage this same level of engagement. They may need some help along the way from us, but as guides we can show them what great literature has to offer them as they go off into the world.

What All Teachers Can Learn From Yoga Class

August 3, 2015 By David Rickert 1 Comment

Over the summer I do as much yoga as I possibly can. I would do it every day if I could, but usually four or five times a week is all I can fit in. I consider it to be part of the rejuvenation process that I undergo during the summer before I return to my job as a high school English teacher.

I’ve been practicing yoga for about eight years, and there’s always something new to discover. It’s not just good for your body; there are things that every teacher can learn from the way yoga classes are led. Here are a few lessons:

1. Everyone is welcome.

I go to a lot of different classes at different levels, and I’ve never heard a teacher say to a student, “you’re not ready for this class.” Instead, the teacher makes sure every student is able to practice. They model poses, offer adjustments, and offer modifications for students that are able to handle more advanced poses. It’s differentiation in action.

I have taught honors classes for a number of years, and it’s easy to get into the mindset of: “This person does not belong in an honors class.” It’s tempting then to make sure that those kids know that they made a wrong choice. I have found this position to be exhausting and frustrating and never did much good. Those kids should be in your class because they are in your class. And you’ll get more mileage out of accepting that fact and finding ways to reach every kid, bringing everyone up to the level of the most advanced students. Will they all get there? Of course not. But the point is you treat every student as if they’d like to get there, and maybe they’ll catch the bug and become a serious student of your subject matter.

2. An environment that encourages you to do more than you thought you could.

The photo above is me doing crow pose, a pose that I never thought I’d be able to do the first time I saw it. However, with enough practice and the encouragement of teachers, I was finally able to do it. The sense of accomplishment I felt after nailing a tough pose was tremendous, and made me feel like I could do just about anything a teacher threw at me. I can’t always do it, but I always try.

Currently I’m working on holding a handstand. My “summer teacher” told me recently, “You have all the core strength to do it. You just have to practice and you’ll get it.” Ever since I heard that, doing a decent handstand has been a goal of mine, simply because I was told that I could do it.

This type of encouragement is what all classroom teachers should strive to create in their classrooms. Many students come to class not believing they can be successful. They believe that your subject is to hard for them. Part of the teacher’s job is to unlock this type of thinking, which many times doesn’t reflect true ability but rather a faulty belief system. The simplest words can really help a student belief they can do more than they can. I recently saw a quote: “My teacher believed I was smarter than I was. So I was.”

3. Play

My favorite classes are vinyasa classes, in which the teacher crafts the sequence of the class so that it meets the needs of the students while also focusing on specific areas of study that the teachers would like. Also, you are encouraged to improvise if you feel inspired to do so. As a result, vinyasa classes are always fun and creative and take you on an interesting journey.

How great would it be if we could inspire our students to think of class as a time to play and be creative with their minds?

4. Breathe. Relax. Have fun.

This one is just for teachers. A great thing to remember!

Read Part Two of this series here.

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