Journal #9: I Read It, and I Get It

In Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, she brings up a lot of important points about the complex nature of reading. It isn’t just about knowing how to read words, it’s about communicating with the text to produce meaning. It is true that all of us have experienced reading without comprehending, utilizing only the voice in our heads that Tovani described as the adult voice in Charlie Brown “Wahwah, wah wah!” I’m guilty of skimming or letting my mind wander sometimes, but like she said, good readers catch themselves and put themselves back on track. When students cannot derive meaning from text at all, it is our job as teachers to intervene and model good reading strategies to help students become good readers.

Tovani uses many great examples of students’ roadblocks when it comes to reading comprehension, and addresses every one she brings up with great ease. She doesn’t just have one way to address the problems either, she has lists of alternatives. These are easy to implement, but require a lot of commitment from the teacher. Teachers have to admit their own flaws and show that they don’t always know the answers, that even good readers don’t get everything the first time they read something.

This reading kept reminding me of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a book by Kelly Gallagher called Teaching Adolescent Writers. All three of these books deal with humanizing the teacher and the students. Both Gallagher and Tovani talk about not simply teaching the curriculum but teaching the student. It is much less about assigning work than it is about making sure students leave your class with practical skills that will help them in the real world. Even if you can’t get to all the assigned curriculum, it’s more important that the students have the skills they need to succeed. Students need to see the real-world connections of their school work and the intersectionality of their classes. This is why all teachers, not just English teachers, should take responsibility for making sure students are literate and able to read and write properly. We can’t just let those students fall behind and stay behind.

When I tell my family I’ll be helping students learn how to read, they often tell me that I’m going to be a High School teacher and thus, the students should already know how to read. They don’t seem to realize that there are students in High School who are simply poor readers. This book and Readicide both illustrated that a large number of High School students just don’t have the level of literacy they should. The schools are failing them because it’s expected that they should already know how to read properly. It’s been made so easy to get through school without actually reading that “fake reading” persists well into college in some cases. Tovani admitted that she herself fake read in college.

I Read It, But I Don’t Get It was an eye-opener.