Learning Outcome #3 Active Reading:
With the active reading assignments, we had to do for class, I believe that they helped me understand and comprehend the texts better. In our first unit, we had a very long, somewhat difficult reading by Kwame Appiah. I often found myself rereading a lot of the pages because it was difficult for me to understand. For my first annotation I made it was about Chinese foot bindings and how it was a cultural norm for them. I annotated this as exploring relationships. When I read that it made me remember my sophomore year of history class, which we learned a lot about that. This helped me understand more the abomination of foot binding, and I was able to figure out and understand more of what Appiah was talking about in other paragraphs.
Another annotation that I found myself using a lot was the questioning. For example, in the Appiah reading, I questioned about how standards started and if it’s because men wanted control. Being able to question what the author is writing allowed me as a reader to look at it from different perspectives. On the other end of questioning, I also found that if I had a question about the content and what something was it helped if I looked it up. In “Does the Internet Make You Dumber” by Nicholas Carr, I questioned if social media increased ADHD test scores. I then looked this up and found that social media does in fact increase ADHD scores.
At the end of this semester, I found that I was actively reading almost everything, and that it significantly improved how I comprehended the texts. It made me also slow down as a reader. I was able to participate more in class discussions, and it helped me with in-text citations. With that I was able to make my papers more in-depth and make my analysis of texts better.
