Beginnings: Connecting Learning, Identity and Culture
Assignment for Seminar Preparation Paper #1
Due: Friday, September 28, 2007 (Must be keyboarded in 12 pt. standard font)
Read: Chapters 1-4 of Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
Plan on reading these chapters twice. Time yourself on how long it will take you to read one page, then
multiply by the number of pages assigned. This will give you an idea of how much time you will have
to budget for reading.
Read Actively: As you read the first time underline or highlight passages that strike you as important,
interesting, confusing, or simply those you want to share with others in the seminar. Try to especially
make note of passages that seem to give you a good sense about what this book will be about or what the
author’s purpose is. You can make notes most easily in the margins or you can use a separate notebook or the
blank pages in the back of the book for these reading notes. These reading notes will be very useful to you as
you write your seminar papers and participate in seminars.
You may also want to underline or circle words, terms, or names that are unfamiliar to you. In particular you
will want to try and identify major concepts that the author uses and how he labels or defines them. What
does he mean when he uses concepts like Gramatica (1), liberal education (58), “complex ties between literacy
and culture” (8), or “Reclaiming the Classroom”? If there are words you don’t know, make a list of those that
were important enough to lookup in a dictionary. Look them up and write down what you find to share with
your colleagues in seminar.
Finally, when you begin reading a new book, review the whole book, including the title and subtitle,
Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, chapter titles, Index, Notes, Bibliography, and even the back cover.
What clues about the text do you find? Your objective is more than just getting through these pages, more
than a passive read to generally familiarize yourself with the topic. Rather your purpose is to explore this work
fully to see what you can discover. To do this you need to first understand what is the author saying? What
does he mean? Why did he write this book? What are the major questions or problems he wants to address?
Writing:
 Now go back through the assigned chapters, focusing on those sections you underlined or highlighted as
important or interesting and extract at least 1 or 2 different 1-3 sentence passages from each chapter.
 Choosing one passage from each chapter, quote it exactly as it is written and include quotation marks and
pages numbers directly after each one using the MLA (Modern Language Association) format to properly
cite the quotation.
 Be ready to share these passages with your classmates on Friday. Have a sense of what you
think each passage means OR why you think it’s important OR what question you want to ask
about the passage. For this first assignment, you don’t need to write down what you think the
passage means or why it’s important, but have notes so you can talk about your passages.
 Finally, write down 2 or 3 questions that come to you as you read. A model question might be:
Why does he title the second chapter “I just Wanna Be Average?” What does he mean by this?
What point is he trying to make here?