These past weeks were all about annotations. Not a whole lot of joy to work on, but definitely quite interesting. I realized that annotations weren’t all about “talking to the text”, but also about analyzing what the text means. For our first read through of The American Dream by Edward Albee, I didn’t realize that there were so many innuendos, sarcastic remarks, and hidden meanings. I also didn’t quite find all of the symbols in it, such as the hat. It’s quite a time consuming process, but I felt like the results are worth it! Who would have thought that Grandma was really the sane one in the play during the first read? I sure wouldn’t have.
Although I felt like doing these annotations as a class was useful, I think doing them in small groups and then presenting is much more time efficient; we spent a lot of time discussing the issues as a class, but as groups, the issues were solved a lot faster. However, the discussions were much more in depth when talking to the class as a whole, so I felt like I had learned much more.
Overall, I quite like the idea of annotating a text because it provides for a deeper understanding, which at least for this class, is quite important to have! I just hope that the time used to annotate a work will shorten up once I get more acquainted with this process…
The first read isn't meant to pick up on the bigger double meanings. I was also torn between the different styles of annotating in groups, but I definitely like working in groups better than alone. Alone I just feel insecure about what I'm saying.
ReplyDeleteI love annotating in small groups. I agree that it is much more time efficient and guides me through the text. I completely agree that talking as a class is much more informative but can be a bit difficult at times. There are many times when I annotate alone and I'm not sure what to say and if I'm annotating enough and correctly.
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