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.