Class Journal and Book Annotations

As much as the blog and quizzes keep you on your toes, those are really for class time participation. How do you

reflect, I hope in quiet and at length, about what our writers and film makers consider in their works?

That's why you will keep class notes and write all over your books. Bear with me: there's something about the quiet of the printed page, its blank margins, and the ruled lines of a notebook that invite adventure as surely as the broken white line on any two-lane blacktop.

image credit: Neal "Dean Moriarty" Cassady on the road, 1950s. Stolen from the Internet in true Beat fashion.

How you'll keep your journal:

• • Composition book or spiral notebook. Write down questions as they arise in class, points you, your classmates, and I make.

  • Consider in the notebook major points from readings or films, and (important!) how they might help you with the major projects.

  • Take it on your road trip. You'll use it to keep notes that won't bother people in restaurants or rest stops. You'll just look like a student working on a project. If you write down dialogue and descriptions for Project 3, others will never know.

What I will do:

• • I'm going to try my best to pick up 2 or 3 of these from you every week, and I'll have them back to you that afternoon, either at my office or in Weinstein 402, where the RhCS department's administrative assistant, Ms. Mundle, has her office. I'm going to pick up your book at the same time, to grade and reply to your annotations.

  • You'll get 0 or 1 points, plus feedback, for your notes in the journal and your book.

Annotating the books:

• • You will be expected to annotate your books. Not just highlighting, but asking questions, making connections between parts of a book and between books and films, in the margins.

  • Mark it so you can find things later. That means some page numbers and notes should go into your journal, too. That way you can find what you need later when doing a project for me. Here is an example from On The Road, as a PDF file with annotations and explanations.

How I got inspired to do this the old-fashioned way:

I have been having students work with digital stories, blogs, and even 3D virtual worlds for a few years. I'm good with all of these technologies, but they all have a few things in common: the hum of constant connection. The Road is, for most of what we read or see in the class, a lonely place that brings you into contact with yourself and perhaps a few friends. It's not a place of constant babble and multitasking, even when you drive as fast as Dean Moriarty in On the Road.

UR students often, in 200-level classes, only read fast for plot and they then forget even that when the next reading or film gets assigned. To hell with that. I want you to make the sorts of systematic connections that a road trip enables, and to slow down. Mark Edmundson's fine article, "Dwelling in Possibilities," also showed me what we all are missing in the eternal NOW of text messages, status updates, and looking down at a screen whenever we walk. I want us to chew on our ideas and the words of others in class, in the films, and in the books.

Thus our journal and annotations: old-fashioned ways of learning, but they still work. You can't multitask and do either well, so, as Kerouac might have said, "Welcome to 1950, cat."