2/27 Blog

I think Bean's chapter offers a many potentially useful strategies for getting students engaged with a text (despite, perhaps, taking the fishing metaphor a bit too far). Recently, students in the Foundation course have been frustrated over the reading quizzes. They are multiple choice and should be fairly easy for anyone who has read the whole text. There are, however, a number of students who read the whole text (and I'm inclined to believe them), mark it up, and otherwise thoroughly engage it, but they are still missing one or two questions on the quiz. These students are already making a commonplace book for the class, but I think I could incorporate some of Bean's other strategies, like margin notes or having them "translate" a text (we're thankfully beyond the middle English portion, but the texts don't get that much easier for a while yet).

My primary concern is with reading-to-write, not because I think my students are failing tremendously, but because I think they may be doing a bit too much. Foundations also has them doing a number of short close readings. I think students become so focused on choosing specific small passages for their commonplace books and their upcoming close readings, they loose sight of the whole text. I'm not entirely sure what I can do beyond the reading quizzes and the discussion section that will break them of this. Obviously I'm pleased they're foresighted enough to be thinking about their papers, but I do think it has been detrimental to their comprehension of the whole text and they often rely on the professor or me to fill in the gaps (which they later use in their papers).

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