Aim: How can the use of annotations aid in analyzing the figurative language, tone and conflict in “My Name,” by Sandra Ciseneros?
Do Now: (class discussion) What does your name mean? If you don’t know, look it up. Do you feel any connection to this meaning?
Our class today would be focused on the text “My Name” which is why we were asked what our name meant. My name meant “Jehovah’s Exalt” which has little to no connection to me as a person . Seeing what a name means can be interesting, especially when one’s character is so similar to the meaning of his/her name, and the same can be said if one’s character is drastically different from the meaning of his/her name. I found out that Ayah’s name means miracle or verse from the Quran. What was also interesting was that Fiona had a name that had scottish origins, and Andy is a shortened version of a greek word that means warrior or man-like. The discussion continued as I learned more interesting origins and meanings of my classmates' names.
Annotating--Purpose & Techniques
After the do-now, Ms. Peterson tells us students about the importance of annotating and shows us a video on annotating. The video gives us a lot of useful ways to annotate as well as describe the definition of annotating, which is to note. Annotating allows us to take in the text and analyze it better. Annotating also slows down the pace of reading, keeps you awake and stops you from sleep-reading, which I am sometimes guilty of. The video also talks about methods you can use to annotate. One technique she mentions is to circle words that you don’t know the meaning of. Another technique would be to put question marks right next to uncertainties that you encounter while reading. That is a technique that I haven’t heard of before and one I will be exploring. A third technique would be to put stars on important parts of the plot or the book. A fourth technique would be to mark where a new character enters the story. Another technique would be to keep a list of characters and their traits. A fifth would be to summarize each chapter in a book. The video goes on to discuss more like titling each chapter and using different colors. The title and the list of characters are some things that I learned from this video that might be helpful to me when I have my own texts to read. The narrator of the video also makes the point of not highlighting the whole text and calling it annotating, which is something I am sometimes guilty of.
After the video Ms. Peterson introduces us to a technique that she likes to use, which is chunking. If we had to read 5 chapters of a textbook in college, chunks of texts should be read and then we should stop summarizing the text that we just read in a few words and repeat. This way if we are studying using 5 chapters which is a lot of pages, we can just look at the notes that we made. Looking for common themes is also another technique that Ms. Peterson mentions. This way if asked to provide evidence for a theme present in a book, you have all the notes you need taken because you were looking for common themes in a piece of text. She then discusses another technique which is to mark what point of views are present. Point of view was something that we also learned about last class
Team Discussion
After learning about different annotating techniques, we went into breakout rooms with the people in our teams and we were given 3 minutes to talk about who and how our names were chosen. My parents chose it because they saw Tom and Jerry on TV and wanted me to be like the mouse that was able to outmaneuver Tom every time they met. Basically they wanted me to be smart but I don’t think that really happened. Anyways, I also learned that Hao’s name was chosen because Hao in chinese meant good, so Hao’s parents probably wanted to have a good child when they were thinking of a name. I kind of thought of this when we started to get to know each other but it wouldn’t be confirmed until now. We would soon learn that most parents either used a name generator or chose a name that just sounded cool and didn’t really care about the meaning. Ms. Peterson would tell us that her name was chosen because during her time, Jennifer was a really popular name. Her parents didn’t want her to be Jennifer but liked the J sound so they named her Jessica.
Reading and Annotating “My Name” by Sandra Cisneros
Once the discussion was over, we were told to read and annotate the first chapter of the book The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. While reading “My Name” (which is the name of the first chapter), we were told to look out and annotate for figurative language as well as, diction, syntax, tone, and anything else that might stand out to us.
Diction, syntax, and tone were all things that we learned in previous lessons, but figurative language was something new that was introduced to us this lesson. Figurative language is the use of language where the meaning that was intended differs from the literal meaning of words that is said. Examples of figurative language include similes, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, etc.
We then continued with spirit reading of the text. Spirit reading is where people can choose to read whenever they want, and they read as much or as little as they want. When they finish reading, a person can pick up where they left off, and this continues until the text is done.
After reading “My Name”, we would have to use the annotations to answer the following questions.
How does Esperanza describe her name using figurative language? Refer to your annotations and cite some examples from the text.
What is Esperanza revealing to us about her feelings about herself, her life and her dreams for the future through the discussion of her name?
How does she establish a conflict of identity?
Ms. Peterson then gave us some time in the breakout rooms to answer and discuss the 2 questions. For the second question I described how Esperanza carries the name of her grandmother, but she doesn’t want to suffer the same fate of staring at a window in the corner that her grandmother endured. I wrote how she wants to be herself as shown in this quote, “I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me…”. Asdaq in my group states that Esperanza might not have much confidence in herself.
Individual Activity
We would then proceed to do the individual activity which was:
Using the text as a model, write a paragraph about your name. You can try to mimic Cisneros’ style and voice. Think about the following questions as you write and be sure to include use of:
What is your whole name?
What does your name mean? Share what your name actually means and define what it means to you by using figurative language.
Are you named after someone? Who are they and how do you feel about them?
What does your name remind you of?
Does your name reflect who you are?
Do you wish you had a different name/have you ever wanted to change your name?
I would proceed to write about Tom and Jerry as I mentioned earlier, as well as how my name meant “May Jehovah Exalt”. I also included how I didn’t want to change my name and that Jerry will stick with me forever.
Reflection
During this lesson, I first started learning about what my name meant. This is not as important as what I learned next in the lesson, which was annotation and the different techniques that I can use. Techniques like making a character list, making a title for every chapter, and chunking pieces of information to easily get the gist of a large piece of text are some of the techniques that I felt were most important to me. Annotating is something I despise, and it is something I will always not like doing. But the techniques, while not improving my point of view of annotations, will help me get through this, and probably will give me higher quality notes. It’ll also help me better analyze text that I am reading. The 1st chapter, “My Name”, made me give a little more attention to my name and showed me how a name can give a person an image of one’s character and also how important a name is to a person. Reading this also provided me with a lot of good examples of figurative language as Sandra Cisneros provides many good examples of this in her book. Figurative language is something that I have known for a long time but this is the lesson where I thought I had the best definition of figurative language and really understood what it means. It also helps that “My Name” has so many good examples of figurative language.
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