English 101: Responses to The Classic Fairy Tales


The first three responses you'll write for this class will be combinations of readings in Mosaic of Thought and The Classic Fairy Tales.  The responses, when turned in, should be typed, double-spaced, and are likely to be around one page each. Due dates are listed on the syllabus. What I would like for you to do with these responses is the following:
  1. First, before reading the section from The Classic Fairy Tales, read the assigned chapter(s) from Mosaic of Thought. Each chapter identifies specific strategies employed by good readers when they are in the process of making sense of a text. Examples are activating schema, making connections, developing author schema, asking questions, determining levels of importance, visualizing, making inferences, and so on. Choose two or more of these reading traits from the assigned chapters, and describe them in a few sentences. Evaluate how important those reading strategies are for you as a reader -- that is, does it seem to be something you think you do when you read?
  2. Next, read the assigned selection from The Classic Fairy Tales. As you read it, notice the ways in which you are (or are not) using the reading traits you identified in step 1 above. Make notes on the things you notice, and write up the ways that using those specific traits affected your overall comprehension of the assigned reading.
Please note that not all of the traits and strategies make perfect sense to each individual reader, so you may find that one of the traits you choose to focus on didn't particularly help you. This is fine -- I'd much prefer honest assessments of your own ways of reading than false praise for something that doesn't work for you (plus, that kind of writing is usually pretty identifiably fake). What I'm looking for is a sense of metacognition -- that is, a recognition on your part of what it is that you do when you make sense of the texts that you read. We all do certain things when we read, but we aren't always aware of what those things are. The more we know about how we "do business" as readers, the better we'll be able to help students become proficient readers.

Sample Response

In Mosaic of Thought, the authors spend a lot of time in the chapter "What Lies Beneath" talking about knowing what happens in your head as you read. One of the things that I found interesting was how they thought it was so important to know when you don't get what you're reading. I've had plenty of times when I suddenly looked up from reading and realized that I hadn't been paying attention for a few pages, but I never really thought about trying to focus in on when exactly that happened. I liked the example of the kids listening to the story and using their fingers to show whether they "got" what was happening. So that's what I'm going to do with the rest of this response. I'm going to pay attention to when I get lost or confused when I read the variants of "Little Red Riding Hood" in The Classic Fairy Tales.

Right from the start of "The Story of Grandmother," I'm seeing the plot and how it relates to the old, familiar Little Red Riding Hood--she's on her way to Granny's at the request of her mom, runs into the wolf, etc.: all good. But then there are some twists that throw me a little. The wolf saves some of Granny's blood and flesh, and has the little girl eat and drink it. I don't remember any cannibalism in the story I was told as a little kid! Then, to top that off, there's some smart-alecky talking cat that calls the girl a slut! So I'm confused here about who the audience of this story is supposed to be. I don't think it's fitting for little kids, really. This is confirmed when the little girl essentially does a striptease for the wolf and then climbs in bed with him before getting to the normal "My what big eyes you have" stuff. But I really like it that when she's about to be eaten, she pulls the ultimate stunt and pretends she has to go to the bathroom. This creative method of escaping is (again) different, and compounds my confusion about the audience. I think it's overall a pretty funny story, but I'm reading it as an adult, and I'm not used to thinking about stories like this except as stuff for kids. I wonder who wrote it, and who it's supposed to be told to?

Responses and "Say-Mean-Matter"

In class, we discussed the ways that reading requires us to figure out what a text says, what it means, and why it matters. Each of these steps requires a little more sophisticated thinking than the previous one, so that decoding the words is relatively simple, but figuring out what they "mean" requires inference, and determining why it matters is a part of synthesis.

When you write your responses, you are responsible for helping your readers see that you understand what the texts in question say and mean, and how they matter to you as a reader. The sample response from above is reprinted below, with the following color scheme to show which parts of the response say, mean, and matter.

say
mean
matter

Sample Response

In Mosaic of Thought, the authors spend a lot of time in the chapter "What Lies Beneath" talking about knowing what happens in your head as you read. One of the things that I found interesting was how they thought it was so important to know when you don't get what you're reading. I've had plenty of times when I suddenly looked up from reading and realized that I hadn't been paying attention for a few pages, but I never really thought about trying to focus in on when exactly that happened. I liked the example of the kids listening to the story and using their fingers to show whether they "got" what was happening. So that's what I'm going to do with the rest of this response. I'm going to pay attention to when I get lost or confused when I read the variants of "Little Red Riding Hood" in The Classic Fairy Tales.

Right from the start of "The Story of Grandmother," I'm seeing the plot and how it relates to the old, familiar Little Red Riding Hood--she's on her way to Granny's at the request of her mom, runs into the wolf, etc.: all good. But then there are some twists that throw me a little. The wolf saves some of Granny's blood and flesh, and has the little girl eat and drink it. I don't remember any cannibalism in the story I was told as a little kid! Then, to top that off, there's some smart-alecky talking cat that calls the girl a slut! So I'm confused here about who the audience of this story is supposed to be. I don't think it's fitting for little kids, really. This is confirmed when the little girl essentially does a striptease for the wolf and then climbs in bed with him before getting to the normal "My what big eyes you have" stuff. But I really like it that when she's about to be eaten, she pulls the ultimate stunt and pretends she has to go to the bathroom. This creative method of escaping is (again) different, and compounds my confusion about the audience. I think it's overall a pretty funny story, but I'm reading it as an adult, and I'm not used to thinking about stories like this except as stuff for kids. I wonder who wrote it, and who it's supposed to be told to?


This page last updated 9 February 2004