As a student, I had never annotated anything while reading a comprehension passage before. So, it seemed disingenuous of me to teach young minds how to do annotations. Nonetheless, I did my best and had an epiphany the other day.
I used to think that annotation is a prescriptive approach. That there are right or wrong ways of annotating and that the right annotation method will yield my students marks during exams. However, I now realise that annotation is a deeply personal thing. It’s like having an intimate dialogue between you and the author. As such, no two annotated scripts will read the same because we all read the text with different lens and respond in different ways to the author’s experiences or opinions.
Making the effort to own down my epiphany also made me realise that I shouldn’t just jump my boy a passage and get him to do it. I should devote some time to teaching him the ropes of annotation so that he wouldn’t be intimidated when he comes across tough texts in the future.
"This resonates - I also thought annotation was prescriptive, right vs wrong method for exam marks. But you nailed it, it's personal, intimate dialogue with author. Different lens, different response. Teaching the boy the ropes instead of just giving passage is the real teaching. The PSLE framework you showed earlier (vocab, traits, devices) makes sense now as scaffolding, not rules. Thanks for sharing epiphany!"