After a brief introduction to our course, I had Josie consider the following statement: "Everything is an argument." After elaborating on this for a bit, I told Josie that this would be the mantra of our time together and the slogan underlying every piece of written work we come across. Because good readers are good writers and vice versa, I told Josie that our course would be centered around the study of argumentative/persuasive writing (as this is the most complex of writing forms which Josie will contact in college) in the hopes of bettering our critical reading and comprehension skills. Josie seemed to agree with this progression of the course, and we spent the first 30 minutes of our class reviewing introductions, thesis statements, body paragraphs, topic sentences, evidence/support, commentary, and conclusions. Josie was very attentive and asked questions on how support and commentary work within a body paragraph. We used hypothetical topics like Obesity to construct a dialogue between evidence and what that evidence reveals about the argument (commentary). Using this structural knowledge to guide our reading of Cody Delistray's "The Name Game," we previewed the text to find out these key elements: audience, political lean, author creditability, medium, and source. Previewing essentially calls for one to gather as many clues about a text before he/she actually reads the essay's content. Preliminary research like this helps to guide the actual reading of the text, as the student will be forced, in a sense, to attempt to verify his/her assumptions as they are reading. Josie had some very astute opinions about the source, medium, audience, and author creditability-all of which were verified as we read through the text. After the first preliminary reading, I sought to strengthen Josie's reading comprehension skills by having her create an Organizational Map or outline of Delistray's argument. There was some friction in Josie's identification of the author's main argumentative points (as is expected, as students are not usually taught to track the point-by-point structure of what they read). With guidance, Josie was able to discern the difference between transition sentences, topic sentences, evidence, and commentary. She very intelligently pointed out that one of the author's key points had little to no evidence to support its premise. After we were more than half way through our outline, Josie asked why such an outline would be useful in college. This was a very good question that allowed us to delve into some hypothetical situations where professor's assign a critique of an article or ask that students come to class prepared to discuss a previous reading. Creating an organizational map forces the student to become an active reader and reflect on the author's ideas, leading to retainment and engagement with the material. Passive reading creates an inefficient student who has to re-read and re-learn material. At the end of the lesson, Josie was assigned an essay. Great session. We will unpack a lot of what we learned today in our future meetings.