A screenshot of the Genius site for Salinger’s novel.
A Kind of Ingenuity
We’ve talked before about why we write and why we read. Look back on those discussions as we start our work on The Catcher in the Rye.
Note: AP students will start this unit on Monday, February 26. Everyone else will begin on Monday, March 5.
From our first day on, this has been a course about experience and experimentation. Based on AP student feedback here and in class, the next experiment will be in how we read and interact with canonical literature.
Here is J.D. Salinger’s “album” on Genius:
The direct link will be sent through Google Classroom, too, when it’s time for your class to start reading. You’ll click through to find folks of all ages and backgrounds contributing to a collective annotation of The Catcher in the Rye. They ask questions, offer insight, unpack symbols, and share personal experience as they move through the text.
Note: If you want to read a paper copy of the novel, let me know. All of you are required to experiment with this online mechanism, but you are not restricted to it. Far from it. I’ll sign out copies to you upon request, and you are encouraged to give yourself a contrasting experience. That’s excellent fodder for metacognitive writing.
The essential questions here are about how we read, why we annotate, how we talk to each other, etc., in addition to what we learn about ourselves and our world through the novel. Remember that analysis has its place, and it can add to the experience of a story.
As an example, here’s the director of Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, on how we created a scene in the movie:
Each of his choices is deliberate, and watching him unpack them doesn’t lesson our enjoyment of an action scene. It adds to that enjoyment.
It helps when the author is the one telling us what is happening. There’s an explicit level of trust when the artist tells us what each element means. It activates the white matter in our brains to create the “hooks” that Paul Graham talks about. That’s what adds to the depth of experience.
Whether we have the author’s expertise or not, this kind of analysis is one reason to go back to films and stories and songs again and again. The experience deepens with repetition. We find surprises.
In our classroom, we’ll read The Catcher in the Rye without taking quizzes and tests, without essays on symbolism, and without deadlines, because we want the experience. I want you to use Genius as a collaborative site where regular folks try to break down Salinger’s writing.
Another reason to experiment like this: You need to learn how to use the Internet for learning. It’s not going away. And that means figuring out how to focus on a single tab or text, not just how to learn in the ramiform way most sites encourage.
That Vanity Fair video is an example: You can’t click anything until the end, so any distraction is caused by you, not hyperlinks in the text itself. You have to invest in learning what Ryan Coogler is teaching you, or make the very deliberate choice to turn away.
The Genius site for Catcher will have links, too, and you have to figure out how to bounce through them and back to the text in a meaningful and purposeful way. You need to learn how to focus on what you are learning. That’s the metacognitive piece in this: You need to figure out how you read online, and then you need to get better at that skill.
Again, if you want a hard copy, and you don’t want to buy your own, I’ll sign one out to you. That, too, should be your choice, not one forced on you.
All right! Let’s dive into this annotated copy of Salinger’s most famous novel to see what we find there. The link again:
Watch Google Classroom for more information, and ask questions about this experiment in the comments below.
I really like how the video was placed in this post. It adds another level of direction that helps explain what we are supposed to do as readers. Like the director was able to tell us, there is a lot of extra stuff that goes into an action scene. Hearing these different stories and creative ideas helped me to better understand what we are to do while reading the book. Using the Genius website will give us the ability to see some possibilities as to what the author wanted us to find in the book. Using a collaborative website is a way of making the reader better understand what is going on. Someone may be seeing something that others may not have noticed. This type of collaborative learning will hopefully add to my experience reading the book.
The video about ‘Black Panther’ helped me visually see what you mean about an author telling us what’s happening. It made me understand and enjoy the movie more. It also helped me understand why an author telling us what’s happening is important, it guides us and gives us as readers a better understanding.
In the video about blank panther the director talks about how there is a lot of other things that have to go into the scenes just like a book has many thing happening at once. The genius website will allow us to better understand the book and can use that site to help guide us in the right direction and keep us on task!
Given that there are videos of directors explaining a scene in a movie, are there videos or copies of an author annotating/explaining a scene in there book? It would be interesting to actually hear from the author what their scenes in book was supposed to/actually means.
The reason the video was added was to make the way you read online less difficult. If you were able to focus on the video you are more or likely to focus on an online reading program. This will help most of the people who decide to read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ online. Being focused is the main part of learning and being able to recall information, especially important information which is why we are reading this specific book.
i liked the video and it explains a lot about how much thought goes into the production of scenes.they bring all the important aspects of the culture and way the wakandin people are into that one scene which means alot to a marvel and black panther lover since i was about 10.I agree with Akshay on the stance of wanting to see the author what their scenes in book was supposed to/actually means.