Chapter 1

Hello! I am reading Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? by Cris Tovani. When I was looking through the book list, I was looking at each title and to be honest all but one of the titles seemed boring to me. Then I came upon this book title and I thought to my self, "This is exactly what I am thinking!"

So far, I have read the acknowledgement and the first chapter. After reading the acknowledgement, I noticed that there were a lot of people involved with this book. The author has a lot going on, but still manages to do everything. After I read this part of her life, I had made a connection with her. I too am doing so much on my own, that I some how make time to get everything done. At this point I am interested in what she has to say.

The first chapter is titled, Introduction: "I'm the Stupid Lady from Denver...".  She opens up with a quote from a student about his problem with reading a science textbook, because there is so much information with diagrams and pictures. To the student all of this is confusing.  Now, she describes the setting for the rest of the chapter. The author is a full-time high school English teacher, travels to do demonstrations, and writes books. Right now, she is in a California high school science classroom filled with students and twenty teachers. The teachers are at the back of the room to observe her demonstration on "modeling a strategy that will help students become better readers of science and also model for the teachers a strategy that works not only with a specific chapter, but with all kinds of reading" (pg 2).  The lesson she was to model on was about viruses. She had made up her mind that this was boring and hard to read. She wasn't sure on how to go about this lesson and when she boarded the plane to California, it finally hit her.

She was sitting next to a rather large guy and he happened to sneeze. This sneeze acutually made its way onto the author. After this incident a lot questions started to fill the author's mind. She was thinking will all of the man's germs make its way throughout the plane, does he have allergies or was a virus or was it a cold? Then, the questions went deeper. Can a virus be treated with antibiotics, are viruses alive, is AIDS a virus, and do they mutate? After thinking of these questions the author pulled out the text about viruses and started to find the answers.

Before the class session started, a female student told her friend, "Remember? The stupid lady from Denver is coming to teach us about reading. " So, this is where the chapter title comes from. When she is about to start her instruction another student asked if she was a sub, and her reply was, "No, I'm the stupid lady from Denver." So, she introduces her self to the class and starts off by showing the class colored transparencies of viruses. There are distractions, but she continues with the transparencies until one girl throws her arms up and lets out a big sigh. The author then stops her instruction and lets out a little laugh and agrees with the student that this was boring. She engages in a conversation with the girl about reasons why it was boring and reasons about why they had to learn about this topic anyway. So, the author tells the student that she was there to hopefully show her something that would help her pass this class, so that she could graduate.

Now, she has everyones attention and begins to tell her story about the man on the plane. She told them about the questions that she had came up with and explained that this was one strategy she uses to help her read uninteresting text. She did tell them that these questions have to be meaningful; they had to be questions that they cared about. The class continues with the reading and now, the students are now coming up with their own questions and are talking about how information is conveyed in images, text, or figures. The bell rings and this class is over. One teacher came up to the author and thanked her for the lesson, but had a problem about the author agreeing with the student that the material was boring. This lady goes on about how interesting viruses are and how much information is out there that's interesting about viruses. The author then asks, "Well, why don't you use those articles with the students?" I started to laugh at this point.

The author talks about her journey in learning about comprehension. There were so many different strategies! She then realizes that she she wants readers to reuse and remember the information they read. Her next point is that "learning to read doesn't end in the elementary grades" (pg. 5). When students get to the high school level, the readings become more complex and teachers need to develop new stategies and skills to help the students succeed with the readings. Tovani says that good readers montitor their reading. They know when the text makes sense and when it does not. When the text doesn't make sense they use strategies to help them understand. She wants students and teachers to master core strategy skills then to learn about every single strategy out there. With mastering a few of these strategies it can help any reader.

The next section deals with content-area teachers resistance to teaching reading. She acknowledges that there is so much to go over in a short amount of time as a reason to this resistance. The advice she gives to these teachers thinking in terms of "content-area reading" or "reading at the secondary level", is to think of it in this way: "Think of it as teaching students how to remember and reuse the information we ask them to read" (pg. 7). After I read this I almost instantly had a positive feeling come over me and my feelings about reading. Her example of this is an english and science teacher coming together to tie their lessons together. The teachers decided to start off with a four paragraph section of an essay. These paragraphs took a hold of the readers because of its "grotesque" description of small pox. Next, the students got into groups and were to read the text and highlight any words that they didn't understand. Then, highlight passages where the words were defined. The author explains that this helped the students to slow down and look for the definitions of the words they did not know. Another activity was done with a different class and they had to highlight images and draw a picture of each paragraph. The students then reread the paragraph/passages to make sure they grasp the idea well. Visualizing  is another strategy that can be used to help with reading any type of text.

At the end of the chapter the author acknowledges that there aren't many quick fixes in this book for content area teachers. She ends by saying that teaching students to be strategic readers is to help them become more thoughtful about their reading. Her last point is that "meaning arrives because we are purposefully engaged in thinking while we read."

When reading this chapter I was engaged in what Tovani was saying. I'm not a big reader of anything, but if I can help anyone to become a better reader then I will. I feel that the way she has written this text is not boring. The text is written so that I feel she is talking to me face to face. She did not use any big words or complex sentence structuring. She has made some very good points and I'm looking forward to reading more!

Renee