Chapter 5

"Why Am I Reading This?"

"I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander."- Isaac Asimov

This chapter starts off with a student she had in her college-prep English class. This student felt that her reading was getting worse and Cris was confused. She asked the student to clarify this statement for her and she said, "Everything that you are asking us to do in here is slowing me down. My reading is not getting faster-it's getting slower." "I have to slow down because everything you are asking us to do requires me to think." Cris then realized that this student was thinking that reading fast equals good reading. She did not understand that good readers adjust their pace as they are reading. Readers need to have more purpose to read, then just to finish reading the text. When they have a purpose they tend to remember it more. The purpose the reader has affects their reading speed.

Before the reader is given something to read we have to give them a purpose. Cris was talking to a tenth grade teacher who said she was having trouble with them. Cris asked what the students were reading and the teacher replied A Prayer for Owen Meany. Automatically, Cris said that the text was too difficult for the students, but the teacher replied that it was her that was having the problem. She felt that as the years went by it was getting harder to teach about the book. Cris then figured out that the teacher was becoming an expert at reading this book and was not able to distinguish what to teach and what not to teach. For teachers this is a common problem. It seems like in every chapter so far, Cris reminds us to remember what it feels like to read something for the first time in order to design our instruction with a purpose and attainable goals for the students. To help teachers through this problem she suggests using an Instructional Purpose sheet to narrow down the topic that the students are learning about.

The next section talks about who is in charge of setting up the curriculum. She feels that the U.S. history department has it bad, because of the amount of content they have to cover. She asked the history department at her school at what time periods do they begin and end. They told her that they had to start with the pre-columbian era and go through modern day. She then asked who told them where to start and they replied the Principal. She then went to ask the principal and her reply was, "I don't care where they start. They're the experts of their content. They should be the ones deciding where to begin." She went further and found out that there wasn't a district-mandated starting point and that at the state level it was up to the district or school to decide what is taught. Again, we need to give students a purpose in reading, so that they will attain essential information.

When we assign a text, we have to make sure that it will improve our students' lives in at least a small way or another, so that they will get through the text. Cris also defines what a reciting voice and conversation voice mean. A reciting voice, is the voice we hear when we are reading. It is the reader's voice that reads the words on the paper, but the mind is somewhere else. The conversation voice is the voice that talks back to the text. It can argue back or make a connection to it. If students are able to recognize what voice they are hearing, it will benefit them greatly. It is used as a monitoring device and will tell the student when the text is no longer making sense. To help students turn off the reciting voice and turn on the conversation voice, it is nice to give them some background knowledge and to give them a purpose of why they are reading that certain text.

In this chapter I liked the examples she used to get her point across. Her real-life examples are helping me to get through this text. I look forward to what example she will use next and how she will solve the problem a student or teacher has. Sometimes, after reading her suggestion, I say to myself, "well, duh that makes sense." It's just as she says give the reader a purpose or help the reader find a purpose of their own for reading texts.

Renee