- We also discussed the value of having annotations in books when you buy them, even if writing in the book ruins its resale value (but everyone rents books now, right?).
- A text that's already been annotated is like a blog, but it's hard to get a system working where students actually annotate a text in a blog rather than respond to it.
After some time talking about summary/response in blog posts or assignments, we realized that none of us are really sure how to teach something that we do every day. Mike mentioned students already know how to do summary, annotation, rhetorical analysis and many of the other things we teach in 101, but they don't have the language or the keys to explicitly pointing out that's what they're doing. The questions/flow charts on 265 & 267 are handy, but they probably won't blow anyone's mind. In order to blow our students minds, we discussed different ways of
- Always doing something new, partly because the last attempt wasn't as successful as we wanted, partly because we can end up summarizing ourselves without teaching anything new (meta).
- We give a task to practice summary, present it to a group or the class, then question what makes it an effective/ineffective summary. (We also do the same with other texts that pretend to summarize, like Netflix plot synopses.)
- We try to give a good explanation of why writers in all fields do summaries in the first place.
- Sarah pointed out that she tries to find really good examples and ask students to summarize the types of texts they already summarize often, like movies.
- We try to draw attention to the ways we use summary in daily life, rather than just work.
At this point, we realized reflection was an important part of the summary/response process, which means we have to teach two important modes of writing that everyone does every day without second thought. (A Venn Diagram was made, but we did not fill in many details before moving on.)
None of us used the charts in Academic Writer very heavily (referred to them in the past, will probably draw attention to them in the future; they are not a cornerstone of our summary/annotation lessons), partly because we are still trying to figure out where these skills fit in. It's hard to teach annotation because it's something we expect everyone to be able to do already, and we don't want to start at too basic a level and lose our students' interest.
Our conversation branched into discussions of how important summary is in the final portfolio as an explicit objective, rather than a part of other projects. Mike Hilbert said something profound, but my laptop's battery died before I could save the notes. We discussed ways of relating projects to each other, so students would summarize themselves several times over the semester.
I think Mike's deep thought had to do with a research paper assignment sheet he had his class create. They had all the freedom to make whatever kind of project they wanted, but in the end, the assignment sheet was exactly as he would have made it because the class just summarized his previous handouts and responded with more of the same.
