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