Chapter 4

Real Rigor: Connecting Students with Accessible Text

This chapter was probably the longest chapter of the entire book. It is dedicated to helping students who are struggling with the primary text in different classes by finding or creating supplementary texts.

"If the reading is too hard, I just get the Cliffs Notes or skim through chapters. If i can't get the Cliff's Notes, I just listen to what the teach er and kids in the class say."- Jay, high school sophomore

Cris starts off the chapter by saying that she had a task where she had to find out why most of the freshmen class at the school she worked at was flunking U.S. history. She concluded that the textbook used was too difficult for the students. She asked the social studies department head if he could help solve this problem. He snapped at her and told her that were not going to change the textbook, because how much money they spent on them. She tried to find ways in which to help out these teachers and found that they had to teach so much in such a short period of time. The only way for these teachers to get through everything was to lecture the whole time and that would not leave any time for the students to think about what they are being told to learn.

Here, Cris introduces what an accessible text is. She says that they are usually found outside of the classroom, are highly interesting, it is not "low level" or "dumb down", but it should "help students make a connection between school subjects and the real world because it helps them experience reading that is done in the real world" (pg 39). Cris also says that accessible text does not sacrifice rigor. She found out that some teachers confuse rigor with "unrealistic expectations". With accessible texts, Cris wants to have the students read something that is worth their time and will take something from it. In the classroom, we can give the students a textbook to read and they might get through it and if they don't they will most likely cheat their way through it. She tells us to remind ourselves of our experiences when we read something for the first time. What do we do when we get confused?  Her next example is of a female student who whizzed through To Kill a Mockingbird and when she saw that the student was done with the book, she asked her what part she was at and what was the last thing she remembered from the reading. The student said that she didn't get it and here, Cris decided to talk to her English teacher to see if the student could get an alternate assignment. The teacher said that if he gave her an alternate assignment he would have to give one to the entire class. Cris could not understand the logic behind this and accepted the teacher's response. The next day, Cris told the student about a website that would help her to understand the book. "If we don't begin to find accessible text for all adolescent readers, they will continue to fail, only to become someone else's problem the following year" (pg. 42).

Teachers can make "text sets" for their classrooms. It consists of a variety of texts that vary in length, difficulty, have examples of text that are relevant, interesting, accessible, has different options for obtaining the information, and provides opportunities for students to practice reading strategies and learn content information. You can put all of these resources inside a container and label them. She also created a guide sheet that would help and track the students through the text set. It helped the students make connections between the readings and their work in a different class. Cris says that we need to provide texts that the students help their reading abilities grow, texts they can practice with, at a level that is not too difficult or too easy for them.

This chapter contained a lot of information! I feel that it was a good chapter, with a lot of interesting ideas and suggestions that will help all of our students.