scribbling

"how do you read a difficult text?"

throughout my education many teachers have thrown out their own ideas, tips, and fun ways to "crack the codes" found within literature. however, with all these different possibilities i found myself trying to combine them all into one... as you could imagine... this did not exactly work. i now seemed to have the whole text highlighted in the all the possible colours, pictures where drawn all over the page, dictionary definitions filled the back...etc. with this i found myself more frustrated then ever... while discussing peoples different methods yesterday in class i once again felt over whelmed with all the ideas and possibilities.

i often get frustrated when i don't understand a text, even if it is only the first time i read it . therefore in order to avoid this, i avoid the words, phrases, sentences that i simply don't understand. i actually scribble them out on the paper (with a pencil of course) until they are not visible. i felt this idea of my own to be very helpful because...

a) for some reason it helps gets rid of any frustration i may already have
b) the words are no longer visible, therefore there is no distraction (potential to look back at the words, phrases, sentences that would have caused me frustration)
c) i have had good laughs and entertainment erasing the pencil marks the discovering what i did not understand
- sometimes by the end of reading i have already discovered the meaning
- sometimes the word was so bluntly obvious and i just had read it wrong

once i have finished reading the text, there is normally a sense of success, or complete confusion. if it is a sense of success, then i typically move on and continue the assignment. however, if it is complete confusion, this is where i take the time and slowly but surely erase the pencil marks to discover the words that i once tried to avoid. from here, i typically use the many dictionary sites found in my "favorites list", and discover a meaning.

does anyone else use this method by chance?