*Picture: students examine: what goes through your mind? (students write it down)
Students then probe deeper: they examine the picture again and come up with more reasons for the circumstance. They need to use a bit of inferring, by using their background knowledge.
Students then probe some more for even more information.
*Cartoon: Students examine: what does the text say? (write it down)
Students read it again: write your thoughts. "How does the text say it?"
Evaluate Meaning: what is the purpose of the cartoon? funny, not, drama, why or why not?
*Short Text: students read through and take notes,
Students read again (teacher did this) break it down to sections. Helping for closer examination. This helps when answering questions easier to tell where something might be at a quick glance.
Students then would read again for final question and answer. These tips help when taking tests. If a student learns a close read they are less likely to have to retake a test because of a low score.
Tuesday: Lab
Wednesday: this is what we will be using for the close read.
How to Do a Close Reading
The process of writing an essay usually begins with the close
reading of a text. Of course, the writer's personal experience may occasionally
come into the essay, and all essays depend on the writer's own observations and
knowledge. But most essays, especially academic essays, begin with a close
reading of some kind of text—a painting, a movie, an event—and usually with
that of a written text. When you close read, you observe facts
and details about the text. You may focus on a particular passage, or on the
text as a whole. Your aim may be to notice all striking features of the text,
including rhetorical features, structural elements, cultural references; or,
your aim may be to notice only selected features of the
text—for instance, oppositions and correspondences, or particular historical
references. Either way, making these observations constitutes the first step in
the process of close reading.
The second step is interpreting your observations. What we're
basically talking about here is inductive reasoning: moving from the
observation of particular facts and details to a conclusion, or interpretation,
based on those observations. And, as with inductive reasoning, close reading
requires careful gathering of data (your observations) and careful thinking
about what these data add up to.
How to Begin:
1. Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text.
"Annotating" means underlining or highlighting key
words and phrases—anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or
that raises questions—as well as making notes in the margins. When we respond
to a text in this way, we not only force ourselves to pay close attention, but
we also begin to think with the author about the evidence—the first step in
moving from reader to writer.
Here's a sample passage by anthropologist and naturalist Loren
Eiseley. It's from his essay called "The Hidden Teacher."
|
. . . I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider. It
happened far away on a rainy morning in the West. I had come up a long gulch
looking for fossils, and there, just at eye level, lurked a huge
yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of
buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her senses
did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she inhabited.
Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that delicate
structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the flutter of a
trapped moth's wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon of gossamer
on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey.
Curious,
I took a pencil from my pocket and touched a strand of the web. Immediately
there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to
vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against
that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I
could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil
point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed.
Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe.
All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I
proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized
that in the world of spider I did not exist.
|
2. Look for patterns in the things you've noticed
about the text—repetitions, contradictions, similarities.
What do we notice in the previous passage? First, Eiseley tells
us that the orb spider taught him a lesson, thus inviting us to consider what
that lesson might be. But we'll let that larger question go for now and focus
on particulars—we're working inductively. In Eiseley's next sentence, we find
that this encounter "happened far away on a rainy morning in the
West." This opening locates us in another time, another place, and has
echoes of the traditional fairy tale opening: "Once upon a time . .
.". What does this mean? Why would Eiseley want to remind us of tales and
myth? We don't know yet, but it's curious. We make a note of it.
Details of language convince us of our location "in the
West"—gulch, arroyo, and buffalo grass. Beyond
that, though, Eiseley calls the spider's web "her universe" and
"the great wheel she inhabited," as in the great wheel of the
heavens, the galaxies. By metaphor, then, the web becomes the universe,
"spider universe." And the spider, "she," whose
"senses did not extend beyond" her universe, knows "the flutter
of a trapped moth's wing" and hurries "to investigate her prey."
Eiseley says he could see her "fingering her guidelines for signs of
struggle." These details of language, and others, characterize the
"owner" of the web as thinking, feeling, striving—a creature much
like ourselves. But so what?
3. Ask questions about the patterns you've
noticed—especially how and why.
To answer some of our own questions, we have to look back at the
text and see what else is going on. For instance, when Eiseley touches the web
with his pencil point—an event "for which no precedent existed"—the
spider, naturally, can make no sense of the pencil phenomenon: "Spider was
circumscribed by spider ideas." Of course, spiders don't have ideas, but we
do. And if we start seeing this passage in human terms, seeing the spider's
situation in "her universe" as analogous to our situation in our
universe (which we think of as the universe), then we may
decide that Eiseley is suggesting that our universe (the universe)
is also finite, that our ideas are circumscribed, and that
beyond the limits of our universe there might be phenomena as fully beyond our
ken as Eiseley himself—that "vast impossible shadow"—was beyond the
understanding of the spider.
But why vast and impossible, why a shadow? Does Eiseley mean
God, extra-terrestrials? Or something else, something we cannot name or even
imagine? Is this the lesson? Now we see that the sense of tale telling or myth
at the start of the passage, plus this reference to something vast and unseen,
weighs against a simple E.T. sort of interpretation. And though the spider
can't explain, or even apprehend, Eiseley's pencil point, that pencil point is explainable—rational
after all. So maybe not God. We need more evidence, so we go back to the
text—the whole essay now, not just this one passage—and look for additional
clues. And as we proceed in this way, paying close attention to the evidence,
asking questions, formulating interpretations, we engage in a process that is
central to essay writing and to the whole academic enterprise: in other words,
we reason toward our own ideas.
Thursday: We will continue with close reads: handout
Friday: Close reads: handout
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