YouTube videos about study skills? Also, beginner literary analysis for the "literature-scarred"?

[JumpyTheFrog]

Some time in the last year a Hive member posted a YouTube video about how to take Cornell notes. The useful part was that they didn't just talk about it. They had someone show what they wrote down as they listened to a short lecture. Does anyone remember the video?

Also, does anyone have any good YouTube videos or channels for study skills in general?

I'd also be interested in short videos or books about beginner literary analysis. DS is almost done reading The Odyssey. I'm having him annotate (his choice of what), but we haven't really done any analysis. I had a negative experience with literature analysis in high school that turned me off to classic literature. I've been thinking it might be better to have him read classics and miss things (but hopefully not learn to hate them) than have the same "kill the book experience" I had in AP Literature in 10th grade.

[cintinative]

Was it maybe this?  

 

This is another one I had bookmarked: 

 

This website on Cornell has a bunch of links. http://lsc.cornell.edu/how-to-study/taking-notes/

We watched some of the Crash Course study skills videos.  They did not have the kind of detail you are talking about though. 

I'm afraid I can't help on the second bit--we used Teaching the Classics and TPS and Angelina Stanford and none of them use annotation really.  TPS does have them take some notes for papers, but not what I had customarily thought of as annotation.  Windows to the World (a high school product of IEW) teaches this. 

 

Edited March 19, 2021 by cintinative

[Lori D.]

Ug. Sorry to hear about the AP Lit. class turning you off of reading/discussing classics. Literature does NOT have to be like that at all! Read a bit of background info about the author/times of the work, and compare with current culture / books / films while driving around in the car or as dinner time discussion. Or, compare a work of lit. with a good film version. Or, for the Odyssey specifically, how do some of the characters compare with their strengths and choices/consequences to some of the super heroes in the Marvel and DC films from the past 15 years? Or, what did you learn personally from Odysseus and his choices? Fun stuff!

I LOVE the Garlic Press Discovering Literature guide: Challenger level for The Odyssey. Very meaty, so DON'T do all of it -- pick and choose just a few questions here and there that are of high interest to YOU and to your STUDENT to springboard some discussion. Do read the short (1-2 page) "strategy" sections, as those give you great info on literature topics that will give you more ideas for things to talk about, such as:
- Homer's Mythology
- references & allusions
- "The Hero's Journey"
- plot, character, and theme
- literary elements such a irony and foreshadowing

Just to encourage you -- reading/discussing/analyzing literature should NOT be about nit-picking it to death, or trying to force everyone to see what the teacher sees in the work. Instead, it should be about joining in the Great Conversation that are classic works that still speak to us, with ideas that are universal. It's reading and having wonderful moments of personal revelation -- "Wow! What's happening here, or this character's choice, is so similar to my own experience, or something I'm seeing happening in current events, or in the history period I'm covering right now!"

BEST of luck in finding what helps you both really ENJOY your literature adventures! Warmest regards, Lori D.


ETA -- PS
And while I do teach/show my Lit. & Comp. co-op class students what annotation is and what it is for, I don't require it, because not everyone "thinks" that way. And having to stop and mark things and jot notes in the margins really kills the enjoyment of the book for some people. You can still have great discussions without having annotated a single time. 😉 

Annotation is just marking things that stand out to YOU the reader in some way. And, I'd be very careful about how much annotation you require of a student, out of concern of killing the book. For a poem, you might have 6-10 annotations. For a short story, maybe 2-3 annotations per page. For a novel-length work, maybe 1-3 annotations per chapter... Or, only 2-3 annotations for an entire work. Really, it will be very individual. 😉

Edited March 19, 2021 by Lori D.

[PeterPan]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/155Jba91zgHW6V-nXt46sAg1utbsNd0C82yQwNwWsV48/edit  These are videos keyed to the signposts from the Notice and Note Fiction book. https://www.amazon.com/Notice-Note-Strategies-Close-Reading/dp/032504693X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=notice+and+note&qid=1616114796&sr=8-1

There's also a nonfiction notice and note, and for that they suggest using youtube clips from CBS Sunday. 

I've been working through the signposts with my ds this year. It would definitely be a nonscarring approach. 

[RootAnn]

I really liked the Great Courses lectures with Vandiver for The Odyssey. Thought provoking, extra insight, good to talk about after.. We listened, not watched.  There are questions after each lecture in the guidebook if you want further discussion. See if your library has them for free.

I thought Roy Speed ( hscollegebound . com ) did a great job teaching "close reading" in his Shakespeare seminars which, IMO, was as important as taking notes. If you can swing the cost, having your kid take one is worthwhile. Roy is spool enthusiastic & knowledgeable. The class is very low on output so easy to fit in a busy schedule. (If I was as amazing a lit. teacher as some of the ladies here, I wouldn't need to outsource, but I'm more engineer than inspiring English prof.) 

[mlktwins]

If you want to add some poetry to the mix, I recommend CAP's Art of Poetry!  We are not poetry people in this house, but we started last week doing 1 chapter per week.  We just completed our 2nd chapter.  Everything you need for discussion, etc. is in the teacher's manual.  I got each of my boys their own student books too since we are reading aloud together.  It is going surprisingly well.  No written output for us (although there are activities and quizzes in the TM) -- just time together and good discussion.  Highly recommend.  We are breaking the chapters out (as recommended by several people) to cover everything over several years.  Very nicely surprised!

[Miss Tick]

9 hours ago, RootAnn said:

I really liked the Great Courses lectures with Vandiver for The Odyssey. Thought provoking, extra insight, good to talk about after.. We listened, not watched.  There are questions after each lecture in the guidebook if you want further discussion. See if your library has them for free.

I thought Roy Speed ( hscollegebound . com ) did a great job teaching "close reading" in his Shakespeare seminars which, IMO, was as important as taking notes. If you can swing the cost, having your kid take one is worthwhile. Roy is spool enthusiastic & knowledgeable. The class is very low on output so easy to fit in a busy schedule. (If I was as amazing a lit. teacher as some of the ladies here, I wouldn't need to outsource, but I'm more engineer than inspiring English prof.) 

❤️ @RootAnnsaid it!

We bought the videos (Amazon, probably used) That works best for us, but there is nothing special about the video, mostly her lecturing.

I also had the Garlic Press book on hand (original plan), and @Lori D.is right ve-ry meaty. I couldn't do both at the same time. Garlic Press did have a nice introduction to Campbell's Hero's Journey.

My teens have really enjoyed Roy Speed's classes, enough to keep requesting the next one and the next one... DD had really taken to annotating, DS not as much.

 

[ScoutTN]

Center for Lit has lectures about individual books that they teach in their classes for sale. I haven’t heard the one on The Odyssey, but others I have watched are good.  
 

I worked through their Teaching The Classics and also Windows to the World as a refresher for me before jumping in to high school lit. 

[Momto6inIN]

Windows to the World has been a great intro to literary analysis for my kids. It teaches the process systematically and throroughly using short stories so they don't get bogged down learning a new skill while simultaneously reading a really long and challenging work of literature. But the short stories are really high quality so they still have lots of "meat" to dissect in their essays.

So, yes, we do literary analysis. But I don't have them do it for every book they read for English. Sometimes we just read and talk about them, which is totally appropriate output for high school level English. I try to keep writing instruction/practice somewhat separate from literature appreciation for the purposes of keeping that love of good literature alive and not drowned in too many assignments.

[Lori D.]

@JumpyTheFrog: a lot will depend on how "into" literature your DS is, and what works for you and your DS so that it doesn't kill the enjoyment of the literature (like your AP class did -- again, 😩 for you.) 

So, the Vandiver videos are great, but they are 6 hours of listening all on a single work (The Odyssey). Is that too much? Just right? 

Would a gentle class (like the above recommended Roy Speed class) with live interaction with other students be more interesting to your DS?

Would a lit. guide -- either pick-and-choose through a meaty guide like the above mentioned Discovering Lit. guide, or a "light" guide be a better fit? And would it work best to do lit. together and informally discuss as you go (as little/much as works for you both? Or check in with him once a week for a regular "tea and cookies and discussion" time? Or a total of 2-4 times during reading for discussion from some prompt questions?

And finally, DON'T feel you have to deep dig with every.single.book. That's the fast track to turning literature into drudgery. Like @Momto6inIN shared above, just pick a small handful of works you want to go deeper with, some to just discuss informally and briefly, and some can just be for reading.

Edited March 20, 2021 by Lori D.

[Lanny]

OP this is not on YouTube but I highly recommend the "Learning How to Learn" MOOC course on coursera.org   I audited (free) a few months ago.  If I could remember more than 5 or 10% of what they taught, I would be a much better student. I am getting better.    I considered taking that course again, because I can't memorize and things went by so fast, but I have some of the general ideas.  That is I believe one of the most popular courses on the Coursera.org platform.  I didn't repeat the course because there are other courses I want to take, such as the American Government course from Harvard which I need to finish soon and then I want to take a refresher course about Linux and then a course about the "C" programming language. There are so many courses of interest. Again, I highly recommend the MOOC course on coursera.org "Learning How to Learn".  HTH.   Lanny

[SilverMoon]

Crash Course has a fair amount of short videos (10-15 min) based on common high school lit choices. CC videos are usually quick moving and entertaining, with a few dad jokes thrown in. thecrashcourse.com 

And both of you may enjoy the Thomas C. Foster books, like How to Read Literature Like a Professor. The chapters are small and interesting. 

[Farrar]

Seconding the Crash Course Literature videos as a nice intro to literary analysis. I often have minor quibbles with how John Green lays out history, but when he muses about why Frankenstein is so great and bemoans that Mary Shelley can write an amazing sentence as a teenager in a weekend writing contest, he's thoroughly in his element. 

[Lori D.]

Just one last thought... And not at all trying to sound like a literature snob... 😉

Videos can be a *great* gentle intro into digging a little deeper into works of literature, especially for getting some good background info on the author/times and themes/ideas that were important to that author/genre/times. And also great if a student is not fond of literature.

But watching a video of someone else's ideas about a work of literature is a passive actively, while quality discussion questions activate the brain and get a student thinking and perhaps seeing their own cool things going on in the literature and making their personal connections to the work.

So, while I absolutely think videos can be a great resource, I would also be looking for ways to engage the student's thinking and the *student* digging a little deeper into some of the literature. 😉 Just me and my approach! 😄 

Edited March 22, 2021 by Lori D.