Responding to Morris and Salvatori

My initial experience with annotating could be more true. I think I was supposed to learn how to annotate during my junior year in high school when I was enrolled in AP English. However, either I did not have the mental capacity to understand why I was doing what I was doing, or the exercises/assignments weren't designed very well. I've obviously progressed as a reader and student since then, but I am curious to know when and how that transition happened. From an academic discourse perspective, I suppose I had made it from an outsider to an insider. To this day, I admittedly don't annotate that much when I read, but I will make mental notes of specific ideas that stood out in some way. My annotation process often/usually consists of a few highlights and rereads. But as for the direct process of writing notes in the margins, I never liked that. I like to think that even without the physically written annotations, I do partake in all of the core reading strategies that Morris points out. I predict, question, clarify, and summarize.

I thought that Morris's idea about purposeful annotating was echoed in Salvatori's tools of teaching. Especially the triple-entry notebook. The suggested third stage of the notebook was meant to encourage resolution and self-instruction. This last column was meant to induce deep learning. It is the notion that students should not only annotate, but also think about the annotation process that sounded so familiar with Morris.

Salvatori and Morris also emphasize the importance of metacognition. I think this is something that would have helped me during my struggles as a student. I distinctly remember struggling to figure out why I wasn't performing as well I wanted to but I could not figure out what I needed help with. Comments like "awkward" or "expand" on my writing assignments did nothing to help my understand what I was missing.