Readicide

Readicide is a great reading to go hand-in-hand with Tovani's I Read It, But I Don't Get It. Looking back at I Read It..., that book discusses student difficulties with reading and the barriers teachers face to bring reading into the lives of students. Readicide complements that book perfectly, defining the death of the love of reading and the education system's destruction of this love of reading. Having these two books in my possession is wonderful and I am grateful for the opportunity to have read these.

As far as Readicide itself is concerned, it's a great read and provided a lot of great detail about the breakdown of reading education in the country. Being given back story, as far as the Paige theory and relation to the implementation of high-stakes testing, was nice to have. One of my favorite sections of the book was "What You Can Do To Prevent Readicide." I feel this is an extremely useful section for a new teacher; I want to be aware of these problems and have tools to address them when I start teaching. These tips go well with Tovani's advice to encourage and improve our students' abilities and attitudes towards reading.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

From the moment I saw the title of the book on the list of book I would need for this class, I was interested. Not just because it will help my future students, not just because I want to learn strategies for teaching, but because the title describes my reading history extremely accurately. Unlike Tovani and several of her students, I do enjoy reading. For me, it was not a matter of never enjoying reading or never being able to read anything well. Throughout middle school and high school I understood most of our texts pretty well. I did great on many things and comprehended most. Going into college, my struggles really increased. In several of my literature classes, I had the most difficult time deciphering what people like Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill were trying to tell me. Yes, in my defense, they wrote difficult texts. But in my class, I could not help but feel stupid when everyone else in the class seemed to grasp and understand the essays and I could barely even summarize a paragraph within their work.

The subject of Tovani's book is personal for me, and that experience is going to drive me when it comes time to help students learn how to read. I appreciate this book on several levels: for reminding me that others struggle with different levels of reading as well; for providing strategies to teach students how to read; and for giving me strategies to improve my own reading skills. I can better help my students when I can actively make use of different strategies, and then I can later manipulate, mold, and structure them as needed for the needs of my future students. As an immediate response, this book made me (further) re-evaluate my calendar for the three-week unit for ENGL493. My planned schedule is pretty heavy on the reading, and I did not take into account the fact that many students may not be able to keep up with that pace of reading. Maybe I just expected it to happen, similar to cranking through endless stories and essays for college literature classes.

Teaching Social Justice in Theory and Practice

I read an article titled "Teaching Social Justice in Theory and Practice" written by Caitrin Blake. The article appears on Portland's Concordia University website. Blake discusses social justice in context of what it would look like in a classroom, why it should be taught, and how it can be taught.

This article was a great read, especially for someone like me who is "diverse" in many ways. Social justice is something that matters to me and I believe should be taught to students. The major issue with teaching social justice is that it is, arguably, teaching morals. While I think it matters, other teachers, administrators, and community members may not. This is not to say they don't want students to eradicate bigotry and discrimination, but they feel that the school environment is not the place. I believe it is a perfect place, under the condition we are not simply doing a unit of social justice. This teaching needs to be incorporated within an existing plan. For example, if you're teaching Huck Finn or To Kill A Mockingbird, the idea of teaching social justice presents itself in a perfect way. Of course, you must still figure out how to do so, but this article presents great ideas.

First, it is important to build a classroom culture that establishes a respectful environment. Students need to feel safe to share their thoughts, questions, and experiences. As teachers, we must model what a respectful area looks like and how it works. Furthermore, we must teach students to treat each other as partners and cooperate while they navigate school. Do not pit them against each other. We must also integrate diverse experiences, material, and backgrounds into our teaching and classroom. It will be near impossible to destroy bigotry and ignorance if we do not show these students what they do not have to fear. Why would they believe us if we have no way of proving what we are saying?

At the end of the day, what we say needs to relate to them in the real world. We must put emphasis on why racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bullying, ableism, relationship problems, and any other such issue are true and real problems. And when we do that ,we need to encourage our students to be living example of social justice.

Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom

I found this text to be an interesting read. I really appreciate the author's intent and effort on engaging the students in their own education. An important section for me is "Teaching Hip-Hop Music and Culture." Connecting Hip-Hop music to a poetry unit is a great idea to get students more involved. It also gives teachers a chance to learn music they may not be familiar with and give another way for teachers to relate to their students. This opportunities encourages students to really work with the educational material and form an understanding and appreciation for it.

I also enjoyed that the use of film was done in a way to ensure educational purpose and not simply entertainment. The author, in a way, made a "lecture" out of the film and then had a discussion on it. Students are then able to truly be critical of what they are learning and engage the material.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Paulo Freire's text creates an interesting thought about how we teach our students. In a stereotypical view, I believe education is largely viewed as the banking education model. Not necessarily because it is truly that way, or because that's how we want it, but because that is an experience many people have been through and a model that can, in a generalized view, dump the most amount of information into our students. This is wrong. While it very well may be that a teacher finds it easier to pour buckets of information into their students through endless lecture and fact-spewing, this does not guarantee the students are retaining any of it.

The problem-posing model is much more well-suited for genuinely educating students. We need to make this type of model the image people have of education rather than the banking education model. Problem-posing education better ensures the involvement of the students and makes them feel like they are a factor in their education as well as a relevant piece of the classroom. Making your students feel like an object, a depository really, does nothing to encourage students. The best you may get is a students who writes down your lecture word-for-word and memorizes it. They didn't learn on their own, they didn't acquire anything, the student simply memorized a speech. If they want to regurgitate it at an assembly or conference, that's great. But good luck applying that speech to real-world applications.

Assessing and Evaluation Students' Learning and Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook

The article "Assessing and Evaluation Students' Learning" acknowledges a legitimate problem in classrooms: the struggle between different types of assessments. Some students do best with an essay test while others struggle to pass an essay test. The same applies to objective tests. The suggestions for alternatives to "'correct answer' tests" are useful and valuable. While I do agree there should be alternatives, correct answer tests have their use too. I, personally, would prefer a test that uses multiple methods. For a test, I would mix in some objective questions and some essay.short answer type questions. For shorter assessments, the recommended journal/blog writing is a great idea because it allows students to formally or informally respond to a prompt in a comfortable way. If you do a blog, it gives a public voice to the students and they are then able to share their opinions with others without having to do it face-to-face. If they prefer a more private writing, a journal works great and the teacher can later collect their work without any fear of judgment from peers.

The handbook made many good points, but I have trouble agreeing with the handbook regarding giving students zeros for grades. I do agree that the drop in grade can impact motivation and does not provide an accurate description of the student's learning. However, if a student does not do an assignment, that should not be overlooked. If a student turns in one of four assignments and gets a 100% on that one assignment, why should I give the student a 100% grade in the class when they only did 25% of the work. We must remember that often times, grades in school do not reflect learning, but the amount of work done. There needs to be a different way of handling grades if you expect to not punish students for not turning in work.

California's Common Core Assignment Template

This template was a great read that provided me with a lot of insight. It is a great reminder, and instructional/guidance piece, on how to teach reading and writing to our students. The descriptive break downs of pre-reading, reading, and post-reading are great for showing what the Common Core standards are striving to accomplish. And from personal experience, I feel these steps are great ways to teach. I remember going through these types of steps during my time in K-12 and it helped me with my reading. The same notion applies to writing;being able to connect these reading tasks to writing is critical.

There are several great ideas the template mentioned that I believe I could make great use of in my classroom include marking text with gut/initial reactions, comparing annotations, and providing revision workshops for the students. I think the best thing about this template is that it is extremely easy to read and informational that new teachers can make great use of it.