A Collection for Grade Nine: Guide for Analysis

By James Mulhern

Because analysis is a higher-level critical thinking skill, students have a difficult time understanding the concept, especially if their reading comprehension is at a lower level. Most often, students end up writing summaries of what they read, rather than explaining how a text is effective through the author’s use of rhetorical strategies. This Guide provides exemplars, questions, and strategies for teaching analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Mulhern
• Release date: Feb 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311277855

James Mulhern

Mr. James Mulhern has been teaching for twenty-six years in a variety of settings--college, high school, middle school, at-risk, and alternative environments. He has taught English, Writing, Math, History, Science, and a job skills course. Mr. Mulhern also has editorial experience working for an educational publisher in Boston (textbooks and The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition). In addition, Mr. Mulhern performed editorial work for Ploughshares, a literary magazine, for a Teacher Test publisher in Amherst, Massachusetts, and for a law publishing house in New York City.He taught writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston. Currently, he is on staff as adjunct faculty at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Mulhern also works as a high school teacher in the Fort Lauderdale area.Mr. Mulhern is a consultant for the National Math and Science Initiative and a Reader for the Advanced Placement English Exam (College Board). He also works as a free-lance editor and writer. Mr. Mulhern has published fiction in several literary journals. One of his stories was published in The Library's Best, a collection of best short stories. In September of 2013, he was chosen as a finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction. Mr. Mulhern was awarded a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom during the summer of 2015, where he participated in writing seminars at Oxford University's Exeter College. In September of 2015, two short stories received Honorable Mentions for the Short Story America Prize. Nine short stories/adaptions from his novel "Molly Bonamici," a dark comic mystery set in Boston and South Florida, have been accepted for publication by a variety of literary journals. Two of those short stories received awards. The Missouri Review, considered one of the premier literary magazines in the United States, wrote that his novelette, A Prayer for Home, "impressed the editorial staff with its well-written, complex characters, themes of the piece, and its fantastic voice." In March of 2016, Mr. Mulhern was shortlisted for the InkTears Annual Short Story Contest.Mr. Mulhern published a short story collection, a novel, a novelette, and four individual short stories on Amazon.com in January of 2016. He is also writing a teacher guide for the AP English Language and Composition class, and other curriculum materials. He publishes lesson and unit plans that are available on Amazon.com. One hundred percent of the proceeds Mr. Mulhern earns from advertising revenue on his education website, bestsite.us, as well as all earnings from curriculum materials that Mr. Mulhern publishes through Amazon.com, are donated to the scholarship fund that he established in his father's name or a charity.Mr. Mulhern can be contacted through [e-mail].

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A Collection for Grade Nine: Guide for Analysis

By James Mulhern

Copyright © 2016 by James Mulhern

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

For my students

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

This Guide was inspired by the essays in the new HMH Collections Textbook series. Mr. Mulhern does not work for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt or Holt McDougal Online, and his writing supplementary resources for their textbook is in no way an endorsement by the publishing house.

CONTENTS

Rituals of Memory

MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech

Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect

Love’s Vocabulary

Is Survival Selfish?

The Real Reasons We Explore Space

Analytical Reading Strategies

How to Take Notes on Fiction

Poetry Explication Skills

Important Terminology

Teaching Methodology

INCLUDED IN THIS GUIDE

Because analysis is a higher-level critical thinking skill, students have a difficult time understanding the concept, especially if their reading comprehension is at a lower level. Most often, students end up writing summaries of what they read, rather than understanding and explaining how a text is effective through the author’s use of rhetorical strategies.

All standardized testing requires that students possess facility with both reading and writing analytically. The sample analyses in this Guide are meant to help educators teach analysis through exemplars that model that skill. More in-depth reading, better class discussions, and a nuanced understanding of literature will result. The new HMH textbook series contains wonderful high-interest readings that students enjoy.

I have included strategies for analytical reading that are generic enough to use with any text selection. There are also suggestions/prompts to teach students the skill of note taking for prose readings, and there are directives for explicating poetry. At the very end is a list with elements of my teaching methods. Additional lesson and unit plans are available on my website, bestsite.us.

RITUALS OF MEMORY BY KIMBERLY BLAESER

(COLLECTIONS, 21)

Kimberly Blaeser, in her essay Rituals of Memory, argues that memory is a vital part of our being, perhaps our strongest link to the sacred center, the pulsing core. She weaves together the varied themes of memory, culture, rituals, family, education, and religion to posit that all of these strands create the important stories of our entangled identities.

In the opening paragraph, Blaeser uses the story of her friend Mary and her hair hopelessly captured by the curls as an extended metaphor for memory itself. Just as Mary tries to tame her hair and cries because the spirals defied her attempts, so does memory loop never broken to create the consciousness of who we are. We, like Mary’s fingers, are entangled in the loops of memory. The metaphor is a perfect way to express the abstraction of memory through the concrete and the tangible.

In paragraph two, Blaeser comments on her metaphor, explaining for the reader the aptness of the imagery in her introductory paragraph, connecting Mary’s hair to the looped relationships of family, place, and community, the innate pattern of ourselves that always keep us returning to that center of our identity, our spirit. Memory, Blaeser implies, is the path to our being; without it, we would be disconnected and broken. Blaeser’s repetition of diction (words) connoting circularity—spirals, curls, loops, back into it, entangled, and center—point to the weight of memory in creating our identities. She effectively uses diction to reinforce the centrality (pun intended) of her argument.

She assertively states her argument: I believe we belong to the circle, and for our survival, we will return in one way or another to renew those rhythms of life out of which our sense of life has emerged. For Blaeser, returning to the circle is a matter of survival; not merely a leisurely exercise in ritual or memory, but something vitally necessary. This strong declarative sentence speaks to the strength and conviction of her argument about life. Whether we return to a physical place or what Vizenor calls the ‘interior landscapes’ of our imaginative and spiritual lives, Blaeser is arguing that the return is essential to our being. Her argument is ontological: without a return, we lose our essence, the pulsing core of being. And for Blaeser, it seems that storytelling and ceremonies are intrinsically connected to our lives; they feed it. In this paragraph Blaeser’s mode of discourse is strongly argumentative, but in the next paragraph she