Pondering Point of View

How the author conveys their point of view in a story is very important. The words that we use to examine stories isn't quite enough to truly examine the story. Meaning, we - ourselves are not understanding how important "point of view" is and that we because we don't have understanding AND vocabulary we don't transfer the learning to our students.

Point of view is collected from perspectives that the people presenting information to us take. The authors write about political ads, how some we agree with some and others we shake our heads at. TV news, we choose the stations based on how they connect to the stories of the day and how they report it to us. We chose newspaper articles much in the same way. We ask ourselves how the author is connected to the story and how do they present it to us. Do we like it? Do we disagree? Does the author always seem to be presenting from a negative stand point and maybe some of us like that so we watch and read. All the while still knowing that we cannot truly believe everything they tell us until we hear the other side. In literature and in life we "call" how a story is told through the writer's point of view, and in both arenas point of view is very important. And yet, as individuals we have an poor vocabulary to discuss point view and therefore we are not terribly equipped to really, really teach point-of-view.

The authors made these suggestions at the end of the chapter:

1. We have to be alert for the status of the narrator-that is, the extent to which the narrator is credible.
2. We have to be alert for how the narrator regards us.
3. if the narrator treats us as equals, we have to consider whether that's a club we want to be part of.
4. If the narrator seems to look up to or down on us, we have to ask how we feel about that.
5. We have to recognize when the narrator's judgments are explicit and when we have to infer them.
6. If the author seems to want us to believe the narrator, then we have to ascertain just how we feel about the narrator's
judgments; that is, we have to decide if we want to embrace or resist them.
7. If the narrator isn't credible, we have to reconstruct the narrative, basing our reconstruction on what's not under dispute in
the work and on our knowledge of the world.