Daniels and Zemelman Chapter 11- Struggling Readers
I am so glad that this chapter is in here: this is most definitely one of my weaker points. I learned to read at a very young age, and read a great deal as a child, so reading has always sort of been easy for me. Emily brought up in her blog that for many teachers, reading is an easy task, and I think she's right. Many of the people who desire to be teachers are ones who had a good experience with teachers, and I think that teachers are partial to students who already have the needed skills.
I THINK THAT THIS IS A TRAGEDY AND NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED.
The very fact that reading (as well as many other school-related tasks) are easy for teachers and may be what compelled them to become teachers is, I think, extremely telling. If you had a good experience with a teacher, in a lot of cases (I won't say most) it's because you came into the class with the skills you needed to be good at it. To me, this is terrifying, and I think D&Z comment a bit on this throughout the chapter. I think their focus on effective reader strategies is a way of them reaching out to teachers and saying that things need to be changed, and that if we want a whole class of engaged, compelled readers, then we can't just focus on those who already know how to read.
I want to break this to talk about a teacher that really got me into becoming a teacher. When I started college, I had very little idea what I wanted to do with my life and my career. I didn't do great in high school, but this was mainly due to my lack of interest in completing homework and doing anything that felt like busywork. I began college as a Linguistics major (I'll bet you didn't know they even had one of those). While linguistics is still of great interest to me, I had very little idea of what I would even do or would want to do with that. My very first college class, and my very first college professor, is the person who started my movement toward becoming an English educator.
This was just a Writing 100 class, required by all students, and he is still one of the best professors/ teachers/ educators I have ever had. I took another class with him a few semesters later and he was still great, and he is definitely a big figure in who I want to be as an educator. Why I think he is relevant and important to this topic is that he was leading a class of people who were not English majors, taking a gen ed course, with a relatively basic reading level. Yet he found ways to use shorter, simpler texts to engage some really deep and thoughtful conversation, as well as some of the better and more creative papers I have ever read. I have been in many English courses since then, and while the general writing level is much higher than in this Writing 100 course, the papers are generally at the same level of thoughtfulness and creativity. I am still so impressed and moved by his passion and care for a small class of students who did not care about writing, and his ability to use fairly simple texts to spark fairly complex conversation.
We have Linguistics majors?
ReplyDeleteNathan--I had the same experience as you, in that I had very little idea of where I wanted to go with my life until I was inspired by the dedication and energy of one of my teachers (in this case, my APUSH teacher). She was a great woman with a fantastic approach to teaching, and I wanted to emulate her because she seemed to touch the lives of so many of her students, regardless of their ability level.
I'm going to agree with you here (isn't that a bit like agreeing with myself? Huh.) on the fact that we really need to address the issue of our struggling readers and writers better. We don't understand what they're going through, so a lot of the time we can't even start to give them the help they need because we don't know where to start either! And, like you, I have had teachers who have shown preferential treatment to 'better' students--students with strong literacy skills, the 'easy' students. This teacher bias is just wrong, and I hope we get to discuss its existence further.