The Socratic seminar on the PIA really changed the way I thought about taking tests. I had never considered writing the textual evidence that I used to select my answer choice next to the question in the actual test booklet. Doing this for the seminar preparation helped me think about the justifications for why my answer was right, and overall made me feel more confident about my choices than I had before. I am definitely going to utilize this technique on future PIAs. One specific thing that was said that changed my thinking about the text of Jane Eyre was when Sasha supported her answer for the question about poor parenting with an example of how John Reed's mother pretended not to see her child's bullying. Previously I had only really skimmed through the passage and hadn't completely read this paragraph, so my view of Mrs. Reed was that she was a well-meaning but misguided mother. However, listening to Sasha's explanation made me realize that she was making deliberate choices to overlook her son's bad behavior and her own fault as a mother. This ultimately changed my view of her as a character and of the level of her poor parenting.
I agreed most strongly with Laura's idea that the theme of the Jane Eyre passage was "life isn't fair." I thought that the fact that the summary in the question directly above relates to the idea of life's unfairness was a good indicator that this was the correct answer, although I understand the concerns of my peers about the option "justice is blind." I probably disagreed most with Lina's characterization of Jane Eyre as a "small, meek girl who hides behind the curtains." I think that the text does show that Jane has reason to fear John Reed, but I would not describe her as meek, and I think that doing so belittles her as a character. Just because she is a girl who likes to read does not immediately characterize her as small and meek, and in fact the way she talks about John Reed in the text make it clear that she is a very opinionated and intelligent young woman. This also ties into the question of one thing I would have said that I never got to-- I would have liked to have a discussion about why Jane isn't just a helpless, innocent girl, but an independent young woman, regardless of which summary choice is right. Many pieces of classic literature do degrade women, but that isn't a reason to do it to ourselves even when faced with a character who is more than a cookie-cutter damsel in distress.
Again, I thought that one thing that worked well in the Socratic seminar was the depth of conversation. I thought that we did a good job, especially on the section on Jane Eyre, explaining the rationale behind the answer choices that we gave as opposed to just listing off our different answers. On many of the questions, people shared examples from the text that were not directly related but still helped support their ideas, which is an important piece of analytic thinking that too often goes uncovered on standardized tests. This might have been due to the fact that the text itself (the PIA) was not as heavy as the other texts we have had Socratic seminars on, which allowed students to think more deeply about it and give more informed responses.
Unfortunately, I felt that the "floor" was not shared as evenly between all of the Socratic seminar participants as it was in the last Socratic seminar I was a part of in English. At some points it felt as though the conversation was just going back and forth between two or three people, even though there were plenty more people who seemed as though they wanted to get a word in. In the future, I think that the role of the moderator should be not just to guide the discussion, but to ensure that every single person gets a chance to speak and that one or two people do not dominate the discussion. This might also be a reason to bring back the "halftime" where students get a chance to discuss with the people observing them, which might give them an opportunity to receive valuable feedback about holding back until other people get the chance to share their views.
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