Working With Alex

This week, for our 3rd literature circle on Charlotte Doyle, I worked with Alex. The benefit of working with a classmate was having less work than usual, because we shared the same amount. Usually, it's 2 of everything on the literature circle. But now, it's 1 of everything with a classmate, which is the least a real literature circle has ever been. There's also the feedback, you can get feedback from your classmate a little quicker than Mrs.Narsiman and more than once. Mrs.Narsiman has tons of literature circles to grade and she has to read a literature circle last so you might have to wait until midnight for her to give you feedback. Your partner has plenty of time to grade on your work.

The challenge I tried to overcome was writing a 3/3 passage. Alex has experience and knowledge about getting full marks on the literature circle because he sends his literature circles in for feedback, I've barely gotten any feedback. It takes me at least 30 minutes to write 6 sentences in a passage. But this literature circle, Alex gave me feedback and put in his expertise a little too much, I told him to stop editing my passage.

New understandings about the novel I gained were about Hollybrass and Jaggery. Hollybrass seems to hesitate a lot but never disobeys.  When he finally disobeys Jaggery, his existence is gone. Everyone may hate Jaggery but don't dare to speak up to him about their hatred for him. Plus, the crew did what they were told for their jobs. Hollybrass is used for the cruel orders.

A Charlotte Doyle Literature Circle

The discussion went fairly well today, as we had all listened, contributed and participated in our group. We all had a good understanding went we came, all fully prepared as well. As we went around, sharing our passages, questions & responses, connections and vocabulary, we had small talks and advice for each other. We stayed on topic and were able to get an excellent understanding of the book. We got ideas to do better responses for our next literature circles. We asked each other questions and interrogated each other.

We made connections to our groups' responses, sharing our thoughts and ideas about it. I had seen that Natalie had written about the same thing as I had on our passages. Our connections were mostly based on ourselves and other types of media we had seen similar things in. We made connections to each other as well about how well we knew the book and how we interpret it as.

I predict that the future discussions with my group will be much better due to us having a great first discussion. Discussions usually get better through each discussion, as we learn to get better at participating well.