All too often, this assignment has no audience other than the teacher, no purpose beyond earning a grade, leaving students with little motivation to locate quality sources and use them thoughtfully.
I used to have grades as my motivators, but in quarantine they seemed more unrealistic expectations.
This FYC-as-general-academic-literacy-inoculation encourages students to view reading as just another requirement, rather than as an opportunity for discovery and an important form of knowledge making.
Often when I read nowadays, it's for the purpose of wanting to pass the class not because I am genuinely interested in it.
Even if we want to be a bit cynical and argue that postsecondary education has become nothing more than a necessary, but burden-some, step to gaining employment, both reading and writing are still just as important.
Not only is reading and writing required for jobs, but I also think it's a skill that should be accessible to everyone simply because you use reading and writing every day. I think it's a skill as important as knowing how to cook for yourself.
When one reads, the same thing is happening. Although someone else has already put the words and ideas together, the reader interacts with those and creates meaning by bringing her perspective, personal experi-ences, and background to what literary scholar Louise Rosenblatt has called the transaction between the text and reader.
Yes, reading is just as creative, because even though we're reading the same words, we readers can be imagine different worlds based on the same words in our head.
It is a bad idea to continue priv-ileging writing at the expense of reading.
I can agree with this because when I was homeschooled, we never learned anything about annotations. All we did in English was learn about grammar and write papers. I think there should be a balance between both writing and reading in classes.