Week One: One Art

Week 1: College Reading and Writing: Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay

Annotating and Summarizing a text

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

For discussion: what are some things you read?  What are some things you have read or seen or heard that you found difficult to understand? What did you do to help yourself understand it better?

Exercise: Summarize a movie you've seen for a friend who hasn't seen it.  Let's try it with Jaws.

Exercise: Read, annotate, and summarize "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop

1. Read the poem out loud and underline any words you need to look up

2. Write any questions you have in the margins

3. Put tricky sentences into your own words in notes in the margins

4. Write a paragraph summarizing the poem in your own words, with quotations from the poem.

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.