Learn

Think about the last film you saw, or the last book you read.  Did you laugh or cry?  Did the characters remind you of someone you know?  Did the events make you think of something that has happened in your own life?  The texts we love the most are usually ones we can relate or connect to. 

There are a number of ways people connect with texts, and those connections fall into three basic categories:  text to self, text to world, and text to text.  Each interaction offers something different in terms of what we learn from a text or how we experience a text.  In this short story section of the unit, we’ll examine these three categories through a variety of different assignments, but first, let’s take some time to learn a bit more about these relationships to texts.

Text to Self

Text-to-self connections are probably the most natural and most common ways we engage with a text.  We see something or someone familiar in the story, and it feels a bit like coming home.  If we feel we understand a character because we’ve known someone like her, or we react strongly to an event in the story because something similar has happened to us, then we are naturally going to feel connected to the text.   Text-to-self connections can prompt us to reflect on the relationships in our lives, or the choices we’ve made, and ask ourselves whether we have anything to learn from the text that would apply to us.