June 19th, 2013

6/19/13

In Class:
Journal--  Reflect on the importance reading and writing have played--and will play--in your life. How does your perspective relate to Alexie's?

Discussion on "The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me":

-Ÿ Summary: Impoverished Alexie, age 3, learns to read using a comic book; he admires his father’s proclivity for reading; Alexie discovers the concept of paragraphs and learns to read through inference; Alexie reflects on the deliberate failure of his culture and describes the significance of reading to survive.
- “If he’d been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity” (15). – If someone has a particular characteristic, why is it interpreted in different ways in different settings? Why doesn’t the label ‘prodigy exist on the rez?
- Why do Alexie’s peers expect to—even want to—fail in the “non-Indian world” (15)?
- What does Alexie mean by “I was trying to save my life” (15)? “trying to save our lives” (16)?
Ÿ- What is the significance of breaking down reality into paragraphs?
Ÿ- Reflect on the method Alexie uses to infer the words used in the Superman plot. Do you think the words he applied were correct? Was his decoding process bulletproof?

Lesson on passive v. active reading, including the definition of theme and the "exchange/transaction" model of reading.









 Introduced "Bloom's Taxonomy" and the process of forming good discussion questions: questions that can't necessarily be answered (How? Why?). See the above questions on "Joy of Reading and Writing" for examples.

Exit Ticket: List the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy in order.

Homework:
Read "Indian Education" and write three discussion questions.