Susan,
   I'm using "50 Essays: A Portable Anthology", editor Samuel Cohen, from
Bedford/St. Martin's. In our summer program, we use "Across Cultures"
from the same publisher. There are a number of very good cross cultural
readers available. I use this one partly because of cost. I haven't
totally settled on the readings I'll use, but it's likely to include
work by Sherman Alexie, Alice Walker, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Langston
Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail),
Barbara Ehrenreich (an excerpt from "Nickel and Dimed"), Nancy Mairs
("On Being a Cripple"), Bharati Mukherjee, and Richard Rodriguez (from
"Hunger of Memory"). Most of these are essays I have used before with
some success. If the interest level is high, students will be willing
to work their way through it.
   In our summer program, the readings center around growing up in America
from the perspective of race, gender, ethnicity, and economic class.
Many of my students are immigrants or the children of immigrants and
all are eligible for the program in part because of documented poverty.
They bring quite a bit to the table in discussions about being
bilingual or bicultural or just surviving the inner city. Students
become better readers when the issues are close to home.

Craig
   >

Craig,
>
> What is the title of the nonfiction reader you are going to use for
> this class?
>
> I have been trying to put more nonfiction into my high school English
> class (juniors).  I am having trouble with interest level and
> vocabulary.  The essays that I think would be interesting to my
> students (Carl Sagan's "Sense and Nonsense," for example) contain
> vocabulary that they can't handle.  Do you have that problem with
> your students?
>
> Susan
>
>
> On Aug 20, 2008, at 8:56 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:
>
>> Scott,
>>    A full answer would take more than I have time for, but it's too
>> good a question to ignore, so here's a quick response.
>>    Attending to how a text means is not something that I just do
>> once in a while. I try to build it into the fabric of the course.
>> It's made harder by the fact that students aren't used to doing
>> this, especially in relation to non-fiction. In fact, a typical
>> student coming out of high school can't tell me the difference
>> between an essay and a story. We read seven essays and one story in
>> our summer program, and they continue to refer to the essays as
>> "stories" in their journal responses. You have to work hard at it
>> because they don't believe what you just say once or twice.
>>     I am putting together a syllabus for a course that starts next
>> week, a course I am now teaching for the first time in several
>> years due to the retirement of a fellow teacher. It is a three
>> credit equivalent, non-credit course for students reading and
>> writing below college level. I have ordered a non-fiction reader
>> and will assign readings in tandem with writing assignments. We
>> will start with narrative, move to present time look at past
>> experience, then to writing that includes research (very widely
>> defined), then to writing persuasively, then to writing about the
>> excellence of a text. For each reading, I will have journal
>> response questions that ask students to reflect on some aspect of
>> the text, and those become the basis for class discussions. One
>> journal assignment will be to find out what a favorite writer says
>> about writing. Another will be to look at an entry in the OED.
>> Concurrently, I will be teaching a language strand, trying to go
>> from sentence up, with a dual focus: effective sentences and
>> conventional practices. I do that on the premise that knowledge
>> about language is helpful, and that, too, goes against the grain of
>> their experience. I try to build a knowledge about language that
>> will help them understand the conventions as well as a knowledge
>> about language that will help in writing effectively.
>>    Though this is a non-credit course, I don't teach it as
>> remedial. I tell these students that I expect them to be excellent
>> readers and writers and am interested in  building a foundation for
>> excellence.
>>    I know that doesn't give you the kind of detail you need to know
>> what I plan to do on October first, but feel free to respond with
>> questions.
>>
>> Craig
>>
>> Scott Woods wrote:
>>>
>>> Craig,
>>> How do you teach a conscious attention to how a text means?  What
>>> do you and your students do in this process? How do you get them
>>> to do it? How do you know if they are doing it?
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help in this area,
>>>
>>> Scott Woods
>>>
>>> --- On Tue, 8/19/08, Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>    When I teach reading, I teach a conscious attention to how a text
>>> means. It's easier to do at the level of whole text, but it certainly
>>> involves choices at the level of the clause and the phrase and the
>>> sentence. In a very basic way, students who read well read through to
>>> the meanings, but even they benefit enormously from conscious
>>> attention
>>> to how those meanings are formed.
>>>
>>> Craig
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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