Bell Ringer: Writing prompt: Through some amazing invention, a stunning new piece of technology has been invented: the teacher machine. Students, you can now program the perfect teacher just for you. Just punch in the important features you want the teacher to have, and the machine pops out that exact teacher. What do you tell the machine? Personality? Interests? Classroom management style? What would a day in this teacher’s classroom look like?

What did you just eat?

First “Read”

This time: Look at the cookie carefully. Smell the cookie. Think about the cookie. Eat the cookie VERY slowly with your eyes closed, thinking about every bite you take. Think about the texture and the taste of the cookie while you are eating.

Close Reading Oreos Feel Look Smell Taste Texture Other

Close reading demands patience, focus, and yes… more than one read Close reading demands patience, focus, and yes… more than one read. It requires noticing details, making connections, and asking questions.

Close Reading Images: The following images are real images from the New York Times. They have been stripped of their caption and context. Tell me: What is going on in the picture? What do you see that tells you that? What else do you see? See how close you can get to the actual meaning of the image.

Hot rod and racing enthusiasts of all ages, in vehicles of all shapes and sizes, came to watch or to take part in the 65th Bonneville Speed Week, which ended Friday, at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

Hindu women worshiped the sun god Surya in the polluted waters of the Yamuna River during the Chhath Puja religious festival in New Delhi. Hindu women fast for the day for the betterment of their family and society. Ahmad Masood, the photographer, describes photographing this festival in the Reuters article, “Man Against Foam.” As for the mysterious foam in the image, he writes, “It looks like soap or a mountain of snow but actually it’s all pollution from sewage waters flowing into the Yamuna river.”

We asked the photographer, Rodrigo Abd, for the backstory on this image: I left the AP office in downtown Caracas, and I jumped on a motorbike taxi – the only way to move in Caracas as a journalist – to try to find some daily life pictures for the wire, basically trying to describe the mood of the people days before the presidential elections. Only two blocks from the office I suddenly saw this incredible situation, so I jumped off the motorbike to document the scene. It was surreal, this guy, almost covered by water, trying to fix a public tube. I spent almost 20 minutes there until the man finished his work. For me it was a symbolic image of the political situation in Venezuela, where millions are trying not to drown in the multiple problems facing the South American country, amid the fighting between the government and the opposition that seems to worsen every day.

Too much sun in London? People standing up a new skyscraper known as the Walkie-Talkie; the glare off the building’s skin is so intense that it apparently melted part of a Jaguar parked nearby. The beam of light radiating off the 37-story building “was measured at more than 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit).”

A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on September 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. The Border Patrol opened the holding center to temporarily house the children after tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the border illegally into the United States during the spring and summer. Although the flow of underage immigrants has since slowed greatly, thousands of them are now housed in centers around the United States as immigration courts process their cases.

A farmer in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, searched for his sheep after a heavy snowfall over the weekend.

When spores of a fungus land on an ant, they penetrate its exoskeleton and enter its brain, compelling the host to leave its normal habitat on the forest floor and scale a nearby tree. Filled to a bursting point with fungus, the dying ant fastens itself to a leaf or to another surface. Fungal stalks burst from the ant’s husk and rain spores onto ants below, to begin the process again.

A child jumps on the waste products that are used to make poultry feed as she plays in a tannery at Hazaribagh in Dhaka, Bangladesh on Oct. 9, 2012. Luxury leather goods sold across the world are produced in a slum area of Bangladesh’s capital where workers, including children, are exposed to hazardous chemicals and often injured in horrific accidents, according to a study released on Oct. 9. None of the tanneries, packed cheek-by-jowl into Dhaka’s Hazaribagh neighborhood, treat their waste water, which contains animal flesh, sulphuric acid, chromium and lead, leaving it to spew into open gutters and eventually the city’s main river. We have also heard from the photographer himself, Andrew Biraj, who adds that the girl jumping from one pile of tannery waste to another is a child of one the workers.

Indonesians reclined on tracks in Rawa Buaya, West Java Province, in the belief that the energy from the tracks would cure them of various illnesses.

What details might we look for in a text? Just like in these images, close reading a text is about finding the details to discover the text’s larger meaning.

Don’t just consider WHAT. Also consider WHY? Why does the author make these specific choices? What is the EFFECT of the devices/diction/syntax, etc? When reading for syntax, rhetorical devices, figurative language, diction… etc… Don’t just consider WHAT.

EXAMPLE: Mark Twain, “Advice to Youth” “Always obey your parents, when they are present.” “Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.” Loose/Cumulative Sentences - a sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) is modified by successive modifying clauses or phrases.