[PYTASH] Chapter 2

Because I'm a book worm, I was excited coming into this chapter to see how Jago would go about getting students to learn new words. While I was pleased with her instructions and the general feel of the chapter, I still felt like it didn't address the core of the problem: students don't read. She sort of glosses over that point by saying empty phrases about how kids need to read more, but then doesn't actually address how to do this. I'm not saying I have an answer, but she doesn't either. They're not going to learn if they're not interested. It needs to be more than an assignment and it needs to feel like its part of their life to really affect them. She says this, which I really liked:

"The key learning that I try to achieve is that learning new words is a natural act. So much of what happens in schools seems artificial to students; a series of meaningless assignments that they perform for the teacher or else fail."" - pg. 27

I think that is really great. Making school and learning feel natural. But that phrase is empty. It doesn't show me how to do that. Maybe there isn't a way to just be like "here's how you make learning feel natural," but I think it's a key point missing from this book and any other education book I have read. It is one thing to say "learning should be natural" and a whole different thing to actually teach me how to do that.

I also think the entire chapter oversimplified language acquisition. Having taken linguistics where we discussed language acquisition, it's far more complex than that and learning new words isn't just "read and have them talk about the words they don't know." By high school age, we've already accumulated much of our vocabulary, it's just not that simple of a process. I think it gave a few solid exercises, but it just didn't have the depth I think we, as future educators, need at this point in our (pre)careers.