Annotations from Julie Beck’s Life’s Stories.
Informal Reading Response for Julie Beck’s Life’s Stories
Blog Post 12
While reading Julie Beck’s “Life’s Stories”, one of the things that jumped out to me was “But just as there are consequences to telling, there are consequences to not telling.” By keeping a story to yourself because you are scared of how other people react or you are ashamed of that part of you, you are just hurting yourself. By missing out on an opportunity to have a conversation with someone about the experience you are hiding, you are missing out on an opportunity to grow as a person. I personally never thought about it like this. I have had points in my life where I have had things that I have kept inside and never told anyone. I still haven’t told anyone about some of them, and now I look back and I just wonder how relationships could’ve been different and how my outlook could’ve changed if I had just opened up. I found the study Kate McLean did with the adolescents very interesting. When she interviewed Josie, the 17-year-old, she said her self-defining memory was when her mother had broken her promise to her. This just left me speechless. Her self-defining memory was the moment she decided that the only person she could trust was herself. The end of Beck’s text was about our past and how it shapes the future. This kind of made me mad. The text was saying that you can rewrite the past as you progress forward to your future. You can’t. You will never be able to erase your past, ever. You can change your view on it but you can’t just “rewrite the history” as it says in the text. Although I’m sure some people would love to rewrite their past and start over again, you just can’t do that. The only thing you are in control of is the present and your decisions moving forward. You learn from the past. You can’t rewrite the past.
Framing Statement
Learning outcome three is students should be able to employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking. My approach to active and critical reading is to go through the essay or article once and mark up sections and take notes. Then I go back and read it again. The second time around I go back through with a different colored pen and make different comments now that I have read the full article and understand the deeper meaning the author is trying to get at. As you can see in my annotations I attached above, there are marks of a pink pen and marks of a blue pen. One color was my first read and the other was the second read. When I go through and read I like to underline the things that stand out to me. Sometimes if it’s a lengthier section I liked I put a little blurb summarizing what I liked on the side so when I go back through the article when writing I know exactly why I underlined that section. A lot of the times things are underlined with no words. When I go through the first time, I underline the quotes that really stick out to me and made me stop while I was reading. That way while going back through the second time I can take more time understanding the context around the underlined section. In the annotations, to understand the text better I write down questions I have about the text, and I look up words, places, events or people that I don’t understand. In my annotations above I looked up James Joyce to understand Beck’s comparisons better. In Susan Gilroy’s Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year In Harvard, she emphasizes the importance in asking yourself questions as you read. Asking questions of the text like “Why am I reading this?”, and “What does this mean?” further develops your understanding of the text and lets you dive deeper in the conversation with the text. The informal reading responses help with my critical reading because they ask questions that I otherwise wouldn’t have thought of on my own. I think of the article in other ways and get to talk about the material with small groups and then again in the class to hear how others interpreted the essays and what they picked up on.
