Chapter 2

Hello!
Sorry, for a late second post. My time has been taken up by work and hopefully I can get my other posts up by the deadline.

Chapter 2 is titled The "So What?" of Reading Comprehension. Again, this chapter starts with a quote from a senior in high school, "It really isn't hard to avoid reading-you just ask someone what it means, or wait for the teacher to explain it". After I read this quote, I thought to myself, " this is so true!" I see it when I substitute, especially English classes. When the teacher leaves notes about the reading and I am suppose to go over the text with the class, all I hear is silence. No one knew what the text was about. I then tell them what the text meant or what was the underlying message of the text and I then see them write down every word I say. This is how they avoid reading.


In this chapter the author had a student ask, "So what" to every question or response that came from a student. At first she thought this was just the student being difficult, but after going through an assignment she gave her students, she found herself asking, "So what?" The assignment asked the students to make 2 or 3 different connections to a text, she said was hard for any reader to read at first. They were given sticky notes to write these connections down. When she sat down to go through what the students had written down, she felt like she was wasting her time, because the students connections were so "blah". The connections they were making were not the connections she had hoped they would make. It showed that they could not make any meaning of the text.

The author was also going to have teachers come into to her classroom to observe her once again, she could only think of the one student who would say "so what?" to everything. She didn't know if she should send this student on errands so that she was out of the classroom or explain to the observers beforehand about this student's behavior hoping that they would understand. She went back to reading the students' sticky notes and said to herself, maybe I should be asking myself "So what?" She said that it was her fault that their connections were so "blah", because she never showed them how to make meaningful connections to texts to deepen their understanding of the text.

So, the next day she told the class that they did do what she asked of them the day before, but she wanted it to go further. She gave her students a double-entry log with a line down the middle of the paper and told them to quote a connection from the text on the left column and on the right column answer the question, "So what?" It was funny because when she said "So what" she said it in the tone of the student who says that. Here, I started to think of what I do when I have a disruptive student in class. When a student acts like the student in the author's class I sometimes do what the author did. I mean it might sound childish, but it works; the student is no longer disruptive. The student the author imitated was no longer disruptive. Now, as the author walks around her room and overlooks what the students are writing, she sees that they are making a little more deeper connection, but she wanted them to go deeper. She guides them with questions that asks them to re-think about their initial connection to see if they can make more meaningful. One student used a personal connection to make their initial one stronger, and another student used a personal memory to connect to the text and drew up a second connection, but this student used proof from the text to strengthen her connection.

The author goes home after her work day and thinks about the two students connections, how they got to it, and how to help every student make meaningful connections. A realization came to her, that she was stopping her students' thinking too soon! So she came up with 4 principles that guide this type of instruction.
This comes from the book exactly:

Essential Elements of Comprehension Instruction

1: Assess the text students are expected to read. Is it interesting and pertinent to the instructional goal? Is it at the reading level of the students, or is it too difficult? If the text is too difficult, consider how you will make the text more accessible.
2: Provide explicit modeling of your thinking processes. As an expert reader of your content, identify what you do to make sense of text. Share that information with your students.
3: Define a purpose and help students have a clear reason for their reading and writing. Make sure they know how the information they read and write will be used.
4: Teach students how to hold their thinking and give them opportunities to use the information they've held.

For high school teachers, time is a big factor or problem for them. They are asked to teach so much information in such a limited amount of time. I agree with this because when I was looking at the state standards for math, I was thinking of how many weeks are in the school year and how much information we have to teach students. I also considered snow days or cancellations due to water breaks, no electricity, etc and there is not enough time for these students to learn everything. When the lessons get more complicated, the students then start to shut down and give up on trying to understand the content. So, this also takes time away, because we have to go over the material again which is time that could be spent on new material. So, as teachers the advice the author gives is to create a trade-off. She says, "Only you can decide whether it is worth giving up some content for the time it takes to design comprehension instruction that means something to your student" (pg. 19). She says that what she does is not anything great, but she uses "simple practices of good teaching  to design comprehension, lessons, activities, and materials. I give students models, time to practice, and time to think. It's common sense, and a lot of it comes from my own process as a reader."

To end the chapter, she lists 4 solutions, but I don't want to call them "solutions", so I guess ideas that work.
1: Ask yourself, "Why am I doing this?" and "How will it help students think, read, or write more thoughtfully about my content."
2: Remember that one comprehension tool is not more important than another. There is no specific order, sequence, or template for introducing strategies to students.
3: As an expert in your field, as your self, "Is this activity authentic?"
4: Don't isolate strategy instruction into discrete, individual activities from day to day. Plan lessons based on student work from the previous day, using student responses as a way to analyze how thoughtfully kids are approaching text.
After reading idea 4, I thought to myself how is this going to work? I mean, teachers have to provide lesson plans and have to turn them in. I'm not sure if they have to turn them in early, weekly, monthly, or at the end of the school year, but if you have to go based on the previous day then would that make you look sort of unprepared for the next day, right?

I agree with her ideas. I felt that these were simple enough to follow and easy to understand. The idea I have an issue with is the one regarding planning activities from day to day. Other than that I enjoyed reading this chapter and felt that it was very helpful in learning why I have to teach reading in my future math classes.

Renee

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

Blogging

When I first heard that we would be blogging, I thought to myself, "Uh-oh." I have never blogged before in my life. I'm not sure what we are suppose to do or say. In my mind I found blogging to be a place where you expressed your thoughts, when you did not want to tell anyone face to face. I also did not know that there were so many different types of blogs. I have not followed a blog before.  I remember I signed up for a twitter account and that same day I deleted it, because I did not understand the whole process. After reading about twitter, it was based on a simple plan/idea. It must have been to simple for me to understand, haha. The blogs that I would probably find interesting are the diary blogs, music blogs, parenting blogs, and since I want to become a teacher, education blogs can be helpful!

How long is a blog suppose to be? I feel that it should be as long as you want it to be. On some days you may have a lot to say and other days not so much. I also feel that they should have a purpose. Telling people that you were just in the restroom or you just got done eating is pointless, in my view. If its that important tell then add more details. If a thought or idea came to you in the restroom, then talk about that. If you want to support a cause or create an awareness for anything, a blog could work perfectly. If you're going through a hard time in your life, blogging could bring some comfort. Being able to talk about it with out any comments could help you emotionally. They always say that holding everything in is never good, and a blog could serve as an outlet.

The effect of blogs in school or reading or writing could be positive and negative. The students would be writing and that's what we want. They would also be reading because they are following different people's blogs. The down side would be if a blog had a certain number of characters allowed. Here, the students would be short handing every word, if possible, and if they do that constantly then it may show up on their writing assignments. I found this out about texting. I would read student's papers and some do not spell out words and use the texting abbreviations in their writing. When I saw this, it blew me away! Blogs could help our students read and write more, but it could also limit their spelling.

The only issues I find about blogging is posting too much information. I would not want to know about every single detail of a person's life. There are some things that you need to keep to yourself. I would hate splogs and the advertising blogs. These two types of blogs would bother me.

This is my first time blogging and if it sounds like I am jumping around sorry. I find it hard to find things to talk about on this first blog. Hopefully, by the time my book arrives and I start reading it, my blogs will have more purpose to it!