Commonplace Books

I have asked my students to keep a commonplace book--a sort of scrapbook for language--wherein they capture snippets of language as they read it in the texts we are working with in the class and as they hear it in the lives they live and then respond to those snippets in writing. The idea is that they will be working with challenging texts and seeking to understand them by writing about them. At the same time, they will be raising their awareness of language and how it operates on many levels to affect us all as readers and as consumers of texts.

So, I thought I might offer a few commonplace book entries of my own in this blog. As I read the texts of the course along with my students, I will try to make entries into this blog about what I've read and what sense I can make of it and how it is affecting me. More soon...