Читать книгу Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 9-12 - Jim Burke - Страница 83

Actions or events: To understand “actions” think of the verbs your students study: rebel, discover, invent; events are those landmark moments in history or any other field when things change in ways that merit time spent studying them (war, social movement).

Advance the plot: A story is a bit like a football or basketball game in that every move should be toward the goal; so with a story, every event or detail should advance the story in some useful or meaningful way toward its ultimate purpose or resolution.

Complex characters: Characters can be simple (flat, static) or complex (round, dynamic); only characters who change, who have a rich inner life that interacts with people and their environment could be considered “complex.” This is often represented as an arc: what they are like or where they are when the story begins and when it ends.

Complex set of ideas or sequence of events: Consider the Industrial Revolution during which a range of ideas and events created the conditions for a new era, or think of a specific sequence of events that led to the Civil Rights Act or Emancipation Proclamation.

Connections that are drawn: Often it is the unexpected connection the author makes between ideas, events, or characters that leads to the greatest insight for us when reading. We could not anticipate that two elements that seemed so separate could be so linked; this is the epiphany that comes from attention to detail.

Determine: This act requires the reader to recognize the different possibilities, choices, and elements available to the author, then decide what effect the author’s choice had on the text.

Develop and interact: As stories unfold, characters change in response to events and experiences—interactions with people and ideas. Through these interactions characters evolve.

Develop the theme: A theme is best understood as a phrase that expresses an idea (e.g., the hope for things unseen, being “a brother’s keeper”) the text, in whatever form, examines. The author “develops the theme” by adding details, examples, events, or commentary related to this theme; in more complex texts, there is often more than one theme.

Evaluate various explanations: In examining historical events and their interpretation, students should learn that there are inevitably competing views about the meaning, importance, or rationale of an event or action (e.g., dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in WWII). Students must learn to determine, by criteria they create or receive from others, which explanation is the most viable.

Impact of author’s choices: A text is a created or woven construction: Every choice—of time sequence, words, setting, characters, their names, the grammar and imagery—affects the reader, the meaning of the story, and the characters’ development.

Motivations: This refers to what characters want most of all; such desires are often complicated by other, often competing, motives that complicate the character whose desires may conflict with his ideals.

Performing technical tasks attending to special cases: In a science or technical subjects class, one performs “technical tasks” when they experiment in a lab or with models; those tasks attending to (i.e., dealing with or done as a result of) special cases would be the more complex tasks because of their unique conditions that invite exceptions or innovative approaches to solving the problem.

Unfolds an analysis: This refers to the author’s approach or how she proceeds when laying out and developing an argument, its reasons, supporting evidence, and other related details.

Where the text leaves matters uncertain: “Leaving matters uncertain” implies a lack of understanding or resolution in some area about what is true, what it means, why it happened, or whether it matters.