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.
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