Blog Post:
- “Pretty much from birth, people are “actors.” They have personality traits, they interact with the world, they have roles to play—daughter, sister, the neighbor’s new baby that cries all night and keeps you up” (page 7). At this moment on the seventh page, it made me reread and think a little bit more. I never thought about people being actors since they were born. I think about people being an actor, when they are in a play or acting out something in order to be another person or thing. Personally, I do not agree with this statement and that is why I had to reread and fully understand what it was trying to tell me.
- “It is in the late teens and early years of adulthood that story construction really picks up”. This quote from the text really stood out to me. I reacted as a believer because I think that at young ages you do not understand what your own definition of a narrative is and how you tell your stories. Also, at a younger age the brain is still not developed, so I believe this is not a good fit to make your own narrative.
- “Life is incredibly complex, there are lots of things going on in our environment and in our lives at all times, and in order to hold onto our experience, we need to make meaning out of it.” I reacted as a believer because I think that different situations can make people view things differently.
Learning Outcome 3: Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
Annotated Pages and Informal Reading Response Evidence
Framing statement:
In high school, I was never introduced to annotations for the essays and books that we read. I came into my freshman year of college with a very basic understanding of what annotating was. As I learned more about how to annotate in class, I was able to expand the ideas they were talking about into my own words, so I could get a better understanding of the text. Instead of skipping the parts I did not understand, I was able to put all of my thoughts together and understand the text. Susan Gilroy is a Harvard professor who wrote “Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard,” which talks about how annotating can connect you to the text and how the annotation process works. She says, “It’s also a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself as you move through the text and to record what the encounter was like for you…. Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases: ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with the class discussion or course themes”. This is saying that you are engaging with the text as you read and paraphrase what the article says in your own words. This quote really stuck into my mind because this is how I learned to annotate. When I annotated I would underline things that stuck out to me, highlight things that I was not sure about, I paraphrased confusing parts into my own words and circled words that I was unsure what they meant. After I read through the essay once and marked these things, I printed another copy of the essay and wrote my thoughts and explained a lot of the essay in my own words, so I had a better understanding of the text. For example in the annotation pages above, I do not believe that people are born as actors because actors are people who play another role to recreate a show as a play of a book. If you read my annotations and blog post you will see that I argue with the text. After we read and annotate the essays, we would get into small groups and fill out a worksheet with questions that reflected what we annotated and read. In our groups, we were able to find the answers quickly because of the annotations we made previously. Overall, as we annotated throughout this semester I was able to use techniques of critical reading, active reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking.
