Reding Diary: Self Assessment

For this week I am doing a review of my last couple weeks of doing a reading diary (specifically Weeks 2-8). It is my intention to begin to identify if there is something I have been over looking or could improve upon in my Reading Diaries that I have not yet done. I suspect that one of my main problems here is going to be my lack of diversity in my Reading Diary post. Over the past couple of weeks I have really started to become repetitive in the way that I structure the Reading Diaries. this is definitely something that I would like to change in my future reading diary post.

While reviewing the instructions for creating a reading diary I did notice that there is a section on sample reading diaries. I had forgotten since I first looked at the instructions that these examples were there and I think they will really help me in revising my reading diary away from my old structured method. In my reading diaries I really stick to trying to pick approximately 4 stories from the unit to summarize, this intern usually makes all of my reading diaries about the same length. While reading from the unit I try to keep track of which stories I found most interesting. Once I have finished the read ins I usually just try to think of which stories might be the easiest to summarize. Sometime I really like a story, but in the end it is not worth the amount of time to summarize the story in the reading diary. However, I always try to include in my reading diary the story that I plan on retelling in the storytelling post. I find this particularly helpful because A, you will have a nice little synopsis of the story at hand if you need it and B, in the author’s note you are going to have to summarize the original story anyways. So it seems like a common sense thing to do.

Overall, I have found the reading diary post to be pretty helpful. They remind me of what I read each week (even if it is just a tiny snapshot of what I read). I think I have done a good job with the reading assignments each week, in that I always follow the instructions completely. I have found that because I enjoy the reading in this course I actually find it very easy to remember the stories even after a couple of weeks. When I looked back at the storytelling from week 2 I could still remember much of the story. I would definitely say that in most other classes I do not remember any of the readings. In fact, for many other classes I might not get around to the reading because I sometimes find it wasteful of time, in terms of getting the grade. for many other classes the difference between and A and a B is not made by reading the chapter, but by studying the notes/ handouts. Okay, so the reading has some impact of the grades, but honestly I have never run into a course that really focuses on the reading quite like this course seems to! It is a totally foreign approach to me, but like this questions indicate I am actually taking in the information here.