Weekly ReCap

We started the week catching up! On Tuesday we worked on our cold reading of J&H's "Texts of our Institutional Lives..." Doing the cold reading in class took up nearly all class time, but it was a good gauge for us. Reading, re-reading, and fully engaging in complex texts, no matter how short or lengthy takes time.

For homework on Tuesday I asked that you begin reading J&H's article completely, annotating, taking notes, and jotting down any difficult, complex and/or confusing words. If you couldn't get through all of the article, that would be ok. I'd give you time on Thursday to finish reading.

On Thursday we looked at Edgar's Cold Reading and the feedback I engaged him with. We discussed what my feedback was like, and what it was prompting Edgar to do.

My Cold Reading Feedback will almost always:

Focus on 1 Q&A from the cold readings.
Guide Student through the Q by breaking it down to fully understand what it is asking of us.
RE-direct student to his own answer, and where it came from.
Offer alternative options for looking for answers by focusing on different parts of the text to read over and evaluate.
REframe the orginal Q, and prompt student to answer again.

We discussed what it means to be "adamantly critical," as well as problems we faced with defining these terms. We discussed describing works (adverbs and adjectives)  as well as our "meat" words, verbs and nouns. The verbs or nouns are the words that really tell us something, and that give us majorly important information. For example

The Big House

If you were given the word "Big" alone you would not have a complete idea. A big what? You might ask. The House here is our major idea.

While discreption words sometimes come before our "meat" words,  with verbs( action words) they can also come after. Example:

She ran quickly.

If I omitted ran, and said simply: She quickly. You would be missing some really important info. Ran, then, is the important idea.

Let's go back to adamantly critical. In class we took some time to figure out which word was describing the other. WE decided that adamantly was describing critical, which meant that the word critical was really the big idea we had to define and pull apart.

We began to define critical, comparing it to our understanding of other words such as 'Movie Critic" or "Critique" and decided it mean "to judge negatively." Based on that information alone we agreed that it described the group of students in J&H's study that thought reading was "Bullshit."

Adamantly was difficult for us to define, but we finally came to idea that stubborn was a good defined, or stubbornly.

 We did all this to figure out and re-examine the  phrase: adamantly critical. While we really got into the nitty gritty of it, it's a good strategy to keep in our back pockets when we come across other difficult phrases to define. :)

When we were done we took thirty minuetes to read in class, taking note of any words or phrases that were difficult to understand. After our thirty minuete reading session we hit google docs up to  begin filling out our Vocab in context Journal. We didn't get to finish so we'll pick up on this Tuesday.

Before we finished we discussed some strategies we all use to help us get back into a reading: I re-read the 2 paragraphs before where I left off, Isaac just starts over again, and Edgar makes a small summary where he leaves off.

We liked Edgar's strategy the best!

For homework this weekend: finish reading J&H's article.

ReCAP:
Tuesday:
We worked on and complete J&H COLD READING in class.
Began reading J&H Article for homework.
Thursday:
Went over Cold Reading Feedback.
Asnwered Q about students being 'adamantly critical' in class, and discussed how to tackle defining and understanding difficult to understand phrases.
Read J&H's article for 30 minuets. Took note of difficult words and phrases.
Began our new vocab in context journal entries.
Discussed strategies for picking up where you left off in a reading.
Homework: Finish reading J&H's article.