Originally published here.
This week was much more familiar territory for me. I teach analytical reading and writing and I have been engaged in analytical reading and writing for many years. It was still interesting to go through the process and think about the steps involved in analytical reading and writing. I enjoyed the experince of being taught how to read critically. I hope that the modeling will give me insight on how to teach my own students.
The homework was to engage in a critical reading of a Wikipedia page. It was a challenge for me because it was difficult to find a claim to anaylze. I think that I did find one claim to examine and that made the exercise compelling. The work led to a “meta” project in making an argument about an argument about an argument (turtles all the way down).
It is getting close to the deadline and I have not seen any contributions made from my partner. I feel a little selfish by running with my idea on how to approach this assignment. I know that collaboration would have added a challenge but in the name of getting the work done, I just plowed forward. I did refer to my work in the first-person which seems self-centered and against the spirit of the assignment. I sent an email inviting my partner to the “conversation.” I hope that if she shows up, the first-person language doesn’t put her off.
The work that I like the best this week was by leaving a comment on our professor’s blog post. His piece is about reading and writing critically so I challenged myself to take his work to task. I believe that I made a decent counterpoint to one of his ideas. I think that my contribution adds to the conversation and is not by its nature a criticism or negative.