My Tall One, who is entering middle school in the fall, has her first annotation assignment this summer.
I don’t know if I knew how to properly annotate a book when I entered college, much less middle school, but I guess that’s human evolution for you.
Anyway. She is a good student and is plugging through the assignment (which happens to be Walter Dean Myers’ Bad Boy) but she’s not loving the process. The annotation is interrupting the flow of her reading. Her notes are thoughtful and critical and insightful, and I’ll bet the discussion in those first few Language Arts classes will really be something. But the actual reading? Bumpy.
And here’s when I start worrying that the pleasure of books is going to be undercut by the next 7 to 13 years of school. I’m pretty sure that’s not the ex- or implicit point of these assignments, but we all know it happens. So, my current hope? That she finishes this in the next few days so she has time for a few good beach reads before school starts. I might try to fit in a couple myself.
tanita says …
Oh, that’s rough. But the thing is, she’ll get better at it, it’ll get easier, she’ll find strategies which work for her, and enable her to still read for fun, and get the work done, too.
We bookish girls are stubborn, and where there’s a will…
tanita says …
Oh, that’s rough. But the thing is, she’ll get better at it, it’ll get easier, she’ll find strategies which work for her, and enable her to still read for fun, and get the work done, too.
We bookish girls are stubborn, and where there’s a will…
Poor kid.
My son will be a freshman, and all high schoolers have to read three books from a specific list and take tests over the material prior to school starting. I understand the desire to keep kids reading over the summer, but wish at least one of the books could be a book the student chooses.
Poor kid.
My son will be a freshman, and all high schoolers have to read three books from a specific list and take tests over the material prior to school starting. I understand the desire to keep kids reading over the summer, but wish at least one of the books could be a book the student chooses.
i guess it is different here in Canada. I have never heard of a kid at any level of school getting an assignment to do over the summer!!!
i guess it is different here in Canada. I have never heard of a kid at any level of school getting an assignment to do over the summer!!!
I was really worried about my little sister starting to hate reading when she got into middle school. I just kept giving her books- discussing them at dinner and reading aloud. Being in AP classes helped when they started up independent reading assignments, but in the end it was the glorious YA authors who saved her.
-Kelsi
For those who are interested in the teaching/education aspect of these assigned books and how we teach reading I highly recommend both “Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It” by Kelly Gallagher and “The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child” by Donalyn Miller. Very inspiring!
-Diane
If you can convince her to do this, the best way to keep the possibility of enjoyment with those assignments is to read the book once to read it, and a second time to do the pesky assignment. S absolutely refuses to do that, and all the joy has been sucked out of reading for her. M does it the way I suggest, and is much, much happier for it. (And you know she’s still an avid reader.)
Yeah, it means you go through the book twice. But you get to read it once as a reader, and to appreciate the big picture. If you do just the annotations, sometimes you miss how the whole story goes together. No lie.
Elaine M.
Having been a teacher for more than thirty years, I’m wondering what the educational purpose/reason for this assignment is. Might it not have been better to assign the reading of the book–maybe chapter by chapter–during the school year? I think the students might get more out of reading the book as the teacher led in-depth discussions of different sections of the book while they were still fresh in the students’ minds. It would also provide students with the opportunity to make thoughtful predictions about the story and the characters–and about their motivations. It might be a better method for teaching children how to become more critical readers…and might even help to encourage enthusiam for reading the book.
Kelly’s idea about reading it twice sounds good to me.
I was just talking about this kind of thing with my high schooler yesterday, except that we were discussing it re: poetry. She said that she doesn’t believe there is one “right” meaning for a poem, so she doesn’t really like it when teachers tell them what a poem “means” (on the rare occasions that they actually study poetry). I agreed, and said that I thought it would be good if they read a poem every day and didn’t necessarily discuss it at all (or at length). Just so they could hear one on a regular basis. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could figure out the curriculum?
Tabatha