Summer Reading Workshop 6/4-6/6/14

This is a resource I handed out today to those folks who attended the reading workshop.  I would welcome any comments from today's participants about the usefulness of the session.  Also, if you have remaining questions after today's session, comment here and I will do my best to provide you with timely answers.

Also, if you have not signed up for a session and still want to attend, you can join us Thursday or Friday after school.

Here's the handout:

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Purpose for Reading

“ Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

― Francis Bacon, The Essays

This book is one, as Bacon says, “to be digested…to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

We are reading this text because I want you to have some experience with a complex text- a highly complex text- going into AP Lang.  It is a model of skillful writing and craftsmanship and an exemplar of synthesized writing.

Read  to comprehend the content, to learn about the history of cancer and the treatment of it. Read to internalize the struggles and setbacks and the victories of the “characters” in the “story.”  There will be a test on our first day of class to keep you accountable for the reading.  It will be multiple choice and will cover significant discoveries, significant people and significant events in the history of the disease and in the search for a cure.

Read to witness the rhetorical choices of the author including his use of questioning, transitions, anecdotes, description, figurative language, in particular the rich presence of allusions, and the quotations that Mukherjee uses to enrich the content of each section.

Read to practice the strategies presented in the workshop.  You don’t have to do them all every time you read.  Choose a few per section.  Discover what works best for you so that you can make those strategies a permanent part of your reading process.

Read to track the recursive text structure and the repeated content as “medicine and science (Mukherjee seems to lump these into one entity in his quotation) has a conversation with its past.”   

Read to document the places that strike you as particularly interesting.  Keep track of them so that you have some choices when you later write an essay that uses Emperor as the “springboard” for your thinking.

 Also, here is a list of reading strategies to practice while reading:

Setting A Reading Purpose

Choosing A Reading Process

Previewing

Identifying and Evaluating Roadblocks

Tolerating Ambiguity

Clarifying

Using Context

Making Connections

Chunking

Visualizing

Listening for Voice

Questioning

Predicting

Organizing Ideas and Information

Paraphrasing

Getting the Gist

Summarizing

Sequencing

Comparing and Contrasting

Identifying Cause and Effect

Using Evidence

Rereading

Writing to Clarify Understanding

Writing to Consolidate Learning

Here are some links to a few helpful videos that we watched.

http://thestoryofcancer.org/

http://www.grossmont.edu/english/onebookonecampus/VideoAuthorBook.html