Autumn's the Season (for Reading Instruction)

I'm not even a real teacher yet and I still ask the same question, the one that all teachers ask themselves at some point (or various points, if we're being honest) in their career: Why don't my students care? Why aren't they applying themselves? Why aren't they motivated? Especially if the content of a class is one that you have a lot of passion for (e.g., myself, Spanish, linguistics, culture, grammar... I'm a total nerd about them), it can be difficult to understand how students cannot see how interesting or important the content is for them to know. They should just... realize that, right? And yet, while there will always be those few bright and "self-motived" kids that are in it for the grades, motivation seems to be the constant struggle of education. Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas (2014) suggest that part of the issue is due to our misunderstanding of the nature of motivation. Motivation is not easily defined, nor is it easily created but rat...

So we have arrived, then, at a consensus that students need to have access to texts that challenge them to be better readers. However, we also examined the multi-faceted problem that teachers face in getting their students to a) want to read and engage with the text, and b) understand the text (and, even further, develop and apply various reading techniques and skills to these complex texts). This reading delved into multiple strategies to help students learn how to engage with and seek to comprehend what they read. The example used in the text was of a high school social studies class that was doing a unit on immigration laws in the 20th century. They spent quite some time examining various laws, poetry, data, and other relevant texts from this time period, and synthesizing them to ascertain the intent and bias behind these laws. I loved the efforts made by these teachers to ensure that the students dealt with all levels of learning to arrive at their conclusions and points of view...

There's this internal struggle that goes on in my head whenever Common Core is brought up. Many of my relatives are heavily right-leaning individuals that believe that CCSS is (a) a curriculum and (b) ineffective and making our students less intelligent and more confused. I feel like a parrot sometimes, telling them over and over again, "It's not a curriculum, it's a set of standards to make sure our students are all at the same level." "It's not a curriculum, it's a guideline that tells where approximately students should be at a certain grade level." "It's not a curriculum..." I understand that Common Core was designed to help improve education across the board and even the playing field that has been for so long wildly unequal based largely on socioeconomic status and racial considerations. The "greatest nation in the world" should not have such a disparity among its schools, and the creation of this set of standards...

I spent two years as an elementary Spanish tutor at Olivet, working with the students who were just starting out, the beginners of the beginners. Elementary I and II were my classes; they were instructed to come to me for help rather than the three native-speaking tutors that also occupied the tutoring lab at various times during the week. Why is that? I was told that they used to have them go to the native speakers, but they frequently came back intimidated and confused and frustrated, so the department decided that they needed someone that would not be so intimidating. That person was me. My Spanish wasn't perfect, I didn't have the cultural background that the native tutors had, I often had to consult a dictionary to look up the words they needed to know. At first I was confused as to why I had been placed in that position. Yet I came to understand that the benefit of having them work with me was that I knew what they were going through. I knew the struggle and frustratio...

I would consider myself an avid reader, someone who, while I don't often have the time, truly enjoys reading of all types. I devour novels in hours, I read autobiographies to get a glimpse of someone else's life, I look up histories and political data because they interest me. My love for reading has only grown since I have entered college, although I can admit to at times being one of the students that skips or skimps on assigned readings only to try and get by answering questions in class over subject matter I didn't read. That being said, when it comes to information or stories or subject matter that interests me, I will happily spend hours at a time reading. Yet I find that this is not often the case among my peers; many of them complain about having to read The Great Divorce  in their THEO 101 classes. What?  I love C.S. Lewis and would more than happily read any of his books as an assignment for class--certainly, out of all the readings we have to do in our college e...

The first thing that I noticed about this reading was the (timely) mention of the lack of modernity in education. We have not kept up with the times; we are not teaching our students the skills that they need to succeed and be relevant in our world. This chasm between what we teach and what they need to know to do well in life has led to the rise of "adulting", or what happens when students are let loose into the world not knowing how to manage on their own. I have often wondered how my life might be different if I were not dependent on someone else to change a tire, configure a budget, organize a resume, prepare for an interview; these are all things that I feel I should know but have never been taught. "Literacy" is becoming, in a way, closely related with this idea of "adulting", or having the skills to make it on one's own. It is imperative that students learn the skills they need to be competent in a modern workforce, to collaborate, to create,...