How to read for this class
Skim once for context
Read slowly, make notes
Pay attention to what you don’t understand, and main ideas
Things that interest you or strike you.
Ask questions while you read
Annotations
Review notes to answer your questions, formulate questions or ideas for future discussions and papers
Discussions between master Tommy and Miss Jenny on reading.
Provides source text; various subjects
It was written in 1795
What do you notice?
Jenny is the one more interested in education compared to Tommy
Jenny is the one reading- Gender
Rhyme scheme within the conversation (not realistic)
Trying to give a sense of a normal conversation while keeping the conventions of a poem
abab scheme
Brackets in places that other punctuation would usually be used
Who is saying what
The stanza change also helps with this, the breaks
Mother choosing or supervising the reading with Jenny
Throws books in the fire (this book is "nonsense" put it in the fire)
Issues around adults selecting readings, they are the gatekeepers
Nonsense was fantasy, and other things we typically connect with children's literature
"race" is the idea that Tom is laying on the grass, to begin with, and this connects back to gender. The idea is that Tom is passive and lazy, and Jenny is the one in motion who wants to work, she doesn’t have time and she has lots to do and learn.
Competition
Making reading like a sport
Is Tom proposing a race where they are moving toward greater knowledge together or one where they are competing
Marshall was the bookseller
Lines 29-36 become an 8 line stanza, differing from the 4-line stanza from the rest of the story
This is the closing argument
Where Jenny convinces Tom to join the "race"
Jenny has a longer speech, which is the argument of the poem
Reading is worth doing
It is distinguished by the change in structure
How form and meaning go hand in hand
How the form can help the argument, story, etc.,
What do you question?
Italics at random places
Names
Adding emphasis
Is it consistent
Definitions:
Oxford dictionary!!!!!
Stanza: a group of lines in a poem
Quatrain- a stanza of four lines
Octave- a stanza of eight lines
Master- a young man/boy
Recap:
What we did:
Started with what stood out
Brainstormed featured and questions
Generated more observations and started to look at significance (gender and patriarchal)
What we might have done:
Used the dictionary to look at meanings
Further brainstorming asking in each case, why is that significant