Hello all,
So, I've been sitting here catching up on some reading in Dr. Kist's book, The Socially Networked Classroom, and took special interest in an activity outlined on pgs. 17-19. This activity discusses the way that sometimes readers tend to read a text in a "nonlinear" fashion; sometimes jumping around a text from the beginning to the end, then back to the beginning or the middle, etc. Anyway, the idea of doing this is to get students thinking about their own reading habits and the benefits of sometimes reading nonlinearly. The activity used to demonstrate this is having students arrange themselves in order of their birthdays without talking. Coincidently, I just did this task in another class this past friday.
The idea/question that I have about nonlinear reading is this: Can you have students read an entire book, assigning chapters in a random order? What I don't really know is if this activity would be counter-productive to the goal of doing the activity described in Dr. Kist's book. Here's another question I have to ponder... by assigning students chapters to read in an order that seems random to them, can you teach them anything about the pro's and con's of reading linearly and nonlinearly? I imagine that my idea for adapting this assignment may do more to create a disdain for nonlinearly reading since it probably wouldn't make sense to the students why it is that I was having them read this way for an entire novel.
Anywhoo, any of you out there in the blogosphere- feel free to let me know what your thoughts are on teaching an entire novel in a nonlinear fasion.
-Sam
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I think that reading an entire book out of order would be a bit confusing for students and time consuming for the teacher to teach one lesson. I however think it would be a good idea to give every student one chapter to read in a book. If the book wasnt marked with chapter numbers the students could then try to piece together the story based on what their fellow students read. This you could help the students do by asking students to give summaries of their chapters in random order, or allow students to do this on their own. I think if students did this on their own it would interest the students more. The students would have to ask questions about characters, setting and plot in order to see where their chapter fit together in the story. This assignment would also be possible to complete in just a class or two because the students were relying on others to assist them in the telling of the story.
ReplyDeleteKyle Janosch