Chapter 6

As most of us in this class are future English teachers, we are also natural readers. With this comes our desire to predict what is going to happen next in a novel, or really any life situation. We are natural "front loaders." We are future thinkers because we want to know what happens next. Chapter 6 focused on this. From engaging students before they even read the text, to continuing to anticipate the next move, it's all about teaching kids to think in advance and hypothesize the next move. What i think it awesome about this idea is that it's not only applicable to reading, but is a valuable life skill that can easily be taught through reading.

Chapter 4

Scripted Instruction. What a terrible idea. Reading about this almost infuriated me. The concept basically states to memorize a set of instruction and to regurgitate it to your students and they will understand and to just push on. Last time I checked, education had to deal with human beings- not robots. With a human being, emotions and difference in intelligence levels come into play and the ability to comprehend comes in different forms. There is not 1 right way to teach all people in one classroom, so to theoretically "script" your classroom is as bad as having all of education become standardized. The personalization and one on one attention needed just isn't there in a classroom like that and it completely ignores all classroom management and varied teaching approaches understanding that students are all at different levels and come from different backgrounds. There is never a reason to treat a classroom like a theater and just ramble off some memorized words for the students to memorize themselves and then call it a day. That is not knowledge in the least bit.

Chapter 3

I've always been told there is a who, what, where, when, why, and how to every situation. Chapter 3 is the WHY [students can't read] and the HOW [we can help them]. The author once again used George as an example, and also talked about another student, Amy, who really hates reading and finds no interest in it. The format of the chapter was nice and started with the problems, and then gave a nice chart on ways to assess them on page 27. Using all this information we can then decide which type of assessment is best for our students.

Chapter 2

The biggest point I got from Chapter 2 was that students who can't read aren't always in the stereotype. They don't always look disenchanted and not paying attention or seem to have wandering eyes during class. Sometimes you have to think about the fact that the student who is paying the most attention, with the widest eyes and seems genuinely intrigued that may not even be able to understand the material he or she is supposed to be reading. It then talked about turning dependent readers into independent readers, which is a very valid point. A lot of students will just go look at Sparknotes for the answers, but if we can get students to actually read and comprehend for themselves, let alone ENJOY it, their reading abilities will get better from it.

Chapter 1

This chapter was the perfect way to open the textbook. Not only did the author reassure the reader of "Hey, I'm afraid of writing this textbook because I don't want it to be boring" and began to talk about the very fundamental premise of teaching reader: the ones who have trouble. She uses a student named George as her example who really struggled with reading. She used George to illustrate that there are several different reasons why a student may not be able to read and easily intertwined the "meat" of the text into her example. To me, this made it an easy read and I expect it to continue to be one. It wasn't difficult to comprehend the points she was trying to make and she wasn't using overly 'scholarly' language to try to teach us something. By bringing it down to a realistic level, it showed her care for making sure we knew what we needed to and how to apply it.

Saying Hello

This is my blog for Teaching Reading with Literature for the Fall of 2010 at Kent State University.