Below is a set of five discussion-driven prompts based on a video and article. The prompts are most often assigned to students through Edpuzzle. The article has been reformatted below.
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Tag: reading in the makerspace
March 3, 2020
Ongoing List of Required Instructional Reading
- Project Home Page
- Senior Projects Overview
- ✰ Self-Prescribed Book Project
- ✰ Research-Driven Essay
- ✰ Commencement Address
- ✰ Pareto Projects and Senior Talks
- Final Obligations
- Final Assessments
- Statements of Purpose
- Occam’s Razor Wire: IX–X
- March 2, 2020
- Leveling Up: TL;DR
- Leveling Up
You Must Read
You wouldn’t usually see two of these update posts in a row, but this one has just one message: You need to read everything posted, copied, or written on a whiteboard.
To help, one of those whiteboards looks like this today:
We’ll use that space for a few weeks, mostly as a visual focal point. Your immediate focus is what you should have read. You’ve had all seven project posts for a month. There are modified handouts and printed copies, too. If you haven’t read everything, start reading now.
Then focus on the updates from yesterday:
Those three posts must be read. They reiterate the same information with increasing detail, so you can work your way up to the main post over the next week or so. You should immediately read the March 2 and TL;DR posts, however.
The related essay excerpts have been posted in several places and photocopied. Make sure you’ve read them.
Finally, you’ve had a formative assignment on statements of purpose since February 13. If you haven’t read it and watched its video examples, you have until Thursday:
As that Classroom posts says, you’ll have photocopies to annotate. The more you’ve read before Thursday, the more productive your work will be.
Ask any questions in the comments below.
Self-Prescribed Literature Project
A Little More Wisdom, Goodness, and Sanity
This project uses the word prescribed, not assigned, to describe your reading choice, which echoes this metaphor:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
This quotation also appears in our makerspace’s reading guide, where the key word is tool, as in a tool for our makerspace. Literature is a way to solve problems and create meaning. Reading is perhaps the best tool we have for learning in a Humanities makerspace.
Reading in Practice
What to Do
The post on the reading process is itself a practical guide, and even a philosophical question about reading leads to actionable answers. The fault response in a makerspace should always be: How can I use this?
The following list, however, covers all instructional posts on what we do with what we read.
Additional Resources
These last posts deal more specifically with analysis, literary analysis, and traditional ELA assignments. There is also an older but still useful version of the post on choosing a work of literary merit.
Choosing to Read [2018]
Note: This protocol is for longer works of fiction and nonfiction. Essays, poems, and short fiction and nonfiction are required to be read in full.
The Invitation
In his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt explains his approach to reading as follows:
I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.
We can use aspects of this idea to navigate the first 30-40 pages of any novel or longer work we read in our makerspace. Each time, we can use a specific protocol to learn more about how you read, what that means for your learning, and where the threshold lies between forcing and inviting you to read.
Ultimately, you will decide to continue any longer text that is assigned to you, or you will decide to choose another work of equal literary merit. You must read, but what you read will be your choice.
Making an Informed Choice
After the first 30-40 pages of an assigned text, you must answer these three questions, which will posed to you most often through discussion and writing prompts:
- What does it mean “to get [a] story going,” and how has that happened here?
- What does it mean to care about what happens to a character, and which character(s) do you care about so far?
- What does it mean to enjoy a story, and to what extent are you enjoying this one?
These questions center you, the reader, and invite us to discuss the assigned text as a group. You can see an example of how this looks in the 2018 unit for A Long Way Gone in English 10.
After answering these questions, you must then carefully consider how the assigned text meets the criteria of a work of literary merit. To do this, you must work or have worked your way through the following post in its entirety:
Any assigned text will meet these criteria in full. That is why it is assigned: It will do all of these things for you, and it has been vetted by teachers and students repeatedly. An assigned text will be a good text.
That does not mean it is the right text for you. This is the choice you have been given.
To make that determination takes tremendous self-awareness and careful thinking, however, starting with a clear sense of why we read. Your choice must be deliberate, either way. You must study or have studied this:
Then you can begin to go through the criteria for literary merit. You can load the post or use this printable, two-sided PDF:
In brief, your choice must
- teach you something about how you read;
- serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
- be well-written enough to teach you how to write.
If you are able to find, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, a suitable and more interesting alternative to the assigned text, you should read it.
You will always be required to justify your choice in the kind of reflective and metacognitive writing that supports the best decisions, and you will always have the freedom to change your mind, if the first 30-40 pages of your choice don’t pan out as you expected.
This is about choice. It’s also about assiduousness — about persevering to read something that takes time, takes focus, and rewards both.