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Student Example
After reading the essay “How to Get a College Education” by Jeffrey Hart, there was one point that he made that truly captured my attention. He stated that as students in college, or even high school, we are not educated enough in areas of academics that we should be, such as History. “The Mayflower Compact” and “The Magna Carta” are important documents that we are supposed to know about (127). We should know why it was created and who was involved, etc., however, many of us are not even able to answer these simple factual questions. The funny thing is that we were taught this information sometime during our elementary and high school careers. The question is: If we were taught this information, then why don’t we retain it? Why do we not remember these important events in history?
There are many different answers to these questions; however, there are two very logical reasons that I came up with. Sometimes we find the subject at hand boring, so we don’t pay attention to the teachings. Other times we just flat out forget. We study the information for tests and quizzes, and then when all of the testing is complete, all of the information that we studied goes right out the window. I can state these reasons with such ease because I have found them to be true for myself. There are many topics/events in history that I have no recollection of, I just don’t remember what they were about. There are many other students who could easily identify with me.
II. Summary-Response Entry
Students summarize the essay first, then respond to it–usually to the aspects they’ve just summarized.
Student Example
Summary of Brandt’s Essay
Brandt questions if children need religion and if parents should force it upon them. If we have morals, values, and basic trust for one another, than we should not have a need for religion. Religion is longing for a meaning, the feeling of being a part of something, and having faith in life, but not everyone needs to find that. Parents cannot deprive a child by giving him religious training or the background, but morality can stand-alone without religion as its foundation.
Response to Brandt’s Essay
I could relate more to Brandt’s essay than any of the others that we have read so far. I don’t exactly relate to what his experiences are but the opinions of one of the parents he mentions in his essay. He really tries to examine and research this question of religion among children. He talks about a secular society, which got me a little confused. It sounded as if he just through in the word to make the essay sound more intellectual. He really does not stress that phrase as much as he should have. There was a part in the essay where he says the parents who are religious are able to answer their children’s questions about religion. My only response to that was is it so wrong not to know all the answers to your children’s questions? If it is not religion they are asking about, then I am sure they will ask about something else the parent doesn’t know about. In the one story about the parents who sent their children to Sunday school when they never practiced that religion and they still don’t attend any church, I did not quite understand until I read two pages later. Another set of parents who also send their children to Sunday school even though they do not attend church themselves made a really excellent point in which I absolutely agreed with. Brandt said, “he thinks that if they don’t give her a religious background they will be depriving her of a choice later on. If she had the background, she can always reject it when she gets older, he says; if he doesn’t, there will be nothing to reject but nothing to affirm, either.” This statement should have summed up the whole essay for Brandt. This quote should have been placed toward the end or he should have at least referred back to it at the end. He seems to agree with it but still never refers back. Perhaps he did not read into it as much as I did. The fact that Brandt also mentioned famous people also caught my eye because the only people he mentioned were psychologists. This is interesting to me since I did take psychology this year and recently I am taking sociology. As I learn more about these people they are more considered scientists and I know people that study things like that do not take religion into consideration when searching for scientific answers.
III. Double-Entry Journal (DEJ)
There are various ways to use the double-entry journal. What they all have in common is the goal of getting students to record something they notice in a text–or an immediate impression–in the left-hand column and then to step back and reflect in some way in the right-hand column. The purpose is to help students find ways into a text, connect their own experiences and thinking with the text in ways they may not be used to. The example below shows the reader in the first column simply “pointing” to various places in the text. Double-Entry Journal #2, shown afterwards, is slightly different.
DEJ #1. Students write in the first column items more or less literally from the text they are reading; in the second column they comment on the item in the first column.)
Student Example
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Excerpt from duPlessy’s Essay
First paragraph
“I gasp for air.”
Second paragraph
“Pathetic Dribble! You call that a story!”
Du Plessy says she writes out of revenge for reality.
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My Response
I sat and read the Du Plessy essay and found myself really into the story. The first paragraph really let me in. I like how she starts off with this image of her dream and makes you feel like you are right there with her in this dream.
This line makes you see how scared and terrified she was at that moment. I think starting off the paper this way took me into the story and made me want to keep reading. I feel this is very important in writing. Grab a readers attention in the beginning by starting off with a bang and they will want to keep on reading. Start off boring and they will not want to continue. This essay did indeed grab my attention.
I did not understand the second paragraph at all. I don’t know if it was just me but I became very confused. In the beginning we have this image of a nightmare about Du Plessy’s friend and from there she goes into talking about her father interupting her whenever she tried to speak. Also, a question mark was added after the sentence and it was not a question at all nor could it be made out to be a question. I did not get this.
At this part of the Du Plessy paper, I feel as though I am right there with her father. By quoting what he says we see exactly the mood he was in and understand the tone of voice he was speaking in. She was reading him a story she had written and he is saying that it is dribble. This shows how he did not give her a chance and was so quick to say her work was bad.
This paragraph really grabbed me. In this paragraph she is saying that she never had a chance to speak her mind or let her thoughts out as a child. She was somewhat trapped. Now that she is older she writes out of hate for not having freedom to let her thoughts be shared . She brings up a strong point that she writes out of hate for all the men who have humiliated her. This shows that she has gone through a lot of pain in life and is now letting it all out.
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DEJ #2 (from Seminar in Teaching and Learning, The Philadelphia Writing Project, 1992)
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Collecting
Making notes on what stands out while reading, listening, or observing
immediate responses
questions
observations about the writer
memories called to mind
specific words, phrases, or quotes
fact, concepts
summaries
speculations
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Connecting
Comment on your own notes
questions
interpretations
elaborations
arguments
relationships to other texts, experiences, media |
Example of using DEJ to move students toward an an idea
The following is an entire exercise which both shows what the double-entry journal is and illustrates one way it may be used in class. The “student text” included in the example is actually the writing during a faculty workshop.
Outline of activities
- Read Ascher, “On Compassion.”
- DEJ Column #1: points that draw you into the essay
- DEJ Column #2: agreement, disagreement, experiences and observations that connect, what you don’t understand
- Write the main idea of the essay.
- Write informally (focused freewrite) to integrate the comments in Column #2 as a way of moving toward a thesis (idea).
- Tentative thesis (idea).
Double entry journal on Ascher’s essay:
| Column #1
Example of woman who gives black man a dollar bill
Example of shop owner who gives coffee and bread to old man who smells bad
Question of whether these New Yorkers are motivated by compassion, pity, fear, or annoyance
Ascher says there’s a balance of between our urges to escape the problem and to empathize.
She says “compassion is not a character trait”; rather, it is learned.
Comparing the street scene in NYC to Greek drama that taught compassion |
Column #2
I like how Ascher raises the question she does using the two examples. They seem genuinely ambivalent, but neither of them persuades me that New Yorkers won’t have exactly the opposite reaction to seeing so much homelessness. In fact, I remember reading an article in the NY Times several years after Ascher wrote this piece, and it discussed how the continued homelessness, especially in the form of street people who were very in-your-face or who smelled really bad, seeemed to inure other New Yorkers to the suffering of the homeless. They cared less and just wanted the problem to go away.
I disagree. I think compassion is inborn, in that we all naturally want to care about those around us, about those who suffer. I think that compassion gets beaten out of us. As for what might help us learn to become compassionate, I don’t think the mere presence of suffering people brings out the best in the rest of us, though it does in some. Maybe articles like this help us remember that we can be compassionate.
I think there’s something profoundly different between drama and a street scene in real life. For one thing, you never smell how bad a homeless person really can smell in the theater. Its easier to be compassionate sitting in your comfortable seat in the theater than standing jammed up next to a homeless person on a crowed train at rush hour. Main idea of Ascher’s essay: The obvious poverty and homelessness in New York may be what “finally give[s] birth to empathy ” among other New Yorkers. |
Focused freewrite
I notice that, despite my general sympathy with the subject of Ascher’s essay, I wind up disagreeing with her about a number of things, and I wonder what that means. I think it means I’m annoyed with something about the essay seeming too simple. I like her question about whether we’re empathetic or not, but she doesn’t really give me any reason to believe that New Yorkers are becoming more empathetic; she just pronounces it. Not every essay on the homeless has to talk about the larger social conditions that make homeless possible, but I notice that the solutions to homelessness in the essay show up in the form of fairly useless handouts.
Tentative main idea for essay
In large modern cities today, where homelessness is increasingly a problem, the solution to the problem may lie less in whether individual citizens are able to perform individual acts of kindness than in whether we’re able to take the political steps necessary to provide housing and jobs for all, especially women and children.
IV. Paired-Essay Responses
Ask students to respond to a pair of essays (because of the relationship you see between them: one contrasts with the other, one extends the other’s idea, one is a counterexample, the ideas of one resonate with those of the other, etc.)
Student Example (in this case, the class had previously discussed Frankenstein, so the summary just focuses on Bishop’s essay)
Summary:
In Bishop’s, “Enemies of Promise,” he is very concerned with the human knowledge of scientific triumph. He supports science and how it has improved human welfare, but fears it is under attack. He says that the majority of the people in the world are creationist and science is very mistrusted in our society. Science is distrusted because it breaks things apart and is said to be fiction and nonsense. Most people are ignorant to the benefits of science and complain how it causes social problems and has done little to improve the past, so the future is definitely not in science. But Bishop says that the blame is misplaced because critics blame science for the failures or our society to use knowledge provided by science. In dealing with tobacco, scientists have found the harms of it, but our government still spends money for the tobacco industry. Also Bishop says that the success of science is misunderstood because it cannot be dictated and is the art of possibility. People expect too much from science, so when scientists do not find a cure for aids they are condemned since they did not meet these huge expectations. Science has many triumphs, but it is neglected because it is poorly taught and most people are ignorant of what science deals with. So Bishop feels that it might be the scientists’ responsibility to spread the knowledge since others have done a poor job in the past. He feels that there may be some conflict in accepting science, but it definitely offers hope for the future.
Response:
The contrast I see between Frankenstein and Bishop regarding science is that I think that they both totally oppose each other’s thinking on science. Shelley deals with science in “Frankenstein” and it has to do with bringing the dead to life. I think that Shelley regards science as something unnatural like bringing dead to life but does not really believe in it. When the monster came to life in Shelley’s story, it was regarded as evil science and no good. So Shelley basically, regarding science, does not seem to think it can help out in the future or whenever because her story represented the disaster involved with dealing with science and does not feel any responsibility in spreading knowledge of science. On the other hand, Bishop is a scientist while Shelley is just a writer. So Bishop is very involved in science and is confident in it’s success for the future. He feels science is very important and can be very helpful and beneficial to people. Bishop regards science as the art of possibility and believes it has vastly improved human welfare. Also, unlike Shelley, he feels that it is the scientist’s responsibility to spread the wonderful knowledge of science because it provides hope for the future. So Shelley seems as though she regards science as unimportant, unnatural, and is not helpful to people or for the future. She also feels it is not the scientist’s responsibility to spread the knowledge because science is unimportant and cannot be trusted. But Bishop feels that science is very important to our survival and can be helpful for the future and also feels that it is important for scientists to spread their knowledge of science for science to be affective in our society. |
