looking closer
I’m sitting in the airport right now, with about 3 hours to kill until my flight boards, which means it’s time to generate blog content.
I realized in seminar yesterday that there’s a lot of nuance in the books that we’re reading that I don’t catch on the initial read. We spent a while discussing the section in the book about the weird teacher that Lovey finds herself enamored with. It was a really fulfilling discussion in which we were able to look at how Yamanaka structured the chapter in relation to the narrative of the chapter. On second glance, it actually read like a horror movie after the kids go to see the Exorcist. Which raises a lot of questions, especially in regards to the communication between Lovey and her mother, as well as the haunting experience with the teacher. I thought this was really interesting, and I wish I had caught it when I was initially reading and annotating.
But, I’m one of those people that doesn’t find annotating necessarily helpful for retaining and analyzing information. At least with novels. I really prefer just to read it through, uninterrupted. For whatever reason I feel pressure to just put things on the page, even if I don’t necessarily read anything that I think really needs to be pointed out. I do see how annotation is a useful tool, and I would be lying if I said I haven’t made some significant connections through it this quarter, but I think it caters to a certain type of reader or student. Maybe I’m not allowing myself to look closer, and to be fair I should probably give myself the time to look closer because I often squeeze the reading into a whole day or two, whenever I’m not swamped with my other class.