Discussion Question for my Reading Class (I needed a place to share)

I have always had a wonderful relationship with books.  My earliest memory of reading is taking trips with my mother to the local library.  I loved everything about it, from the cold water fountain to the welcoming librarian who placed no limits on the number of books we could take out, and even the smell of the place.  I went back last year and it still smells the same!  We took out at least 20 books every time we visited. 

I was at the library as an early teen when I discovered the 'Junior High Readers' section, and Sweet Valley Twins books.  They totaled more than 100 books and I read every single one. 

In high school I developed negative feelings toward my textbooks and read just enough to get by.  I attempted to read chapters that were assigned but never really acquired any information from them.  As Chris Tovani says, I read it but I didn't get it.  I spent my high school years moderately successful and fairly confident about my intellectual abilities, but shying away from actually reading the texts.  I still loved reading novels and fiction, but history, science and other nonfiction texts were not a part of my learning experience.

In college I had the same attitude I'd had in high school.  I attended most lectures and took notes, talked to the professor and participated in discussion sections, but I barely gave the textbooks a glance.  I knew I had a mathematical brain, and making an outline of a text worked for me, but it was so difficult for me to make sense of 60 pages of material, so I avoided doing that too.  I finished college and joined the circus, not having any real academic interests.

Several years later I took a Reading in the Content Areas course for my certification and realized I'd never really learned how to read nonfiction.  At 27 years old my eyes were opened to the world of conventions of text, when for the first time I read titles and subtitles with purpose, and my love of science began to unfold.  Reading Chris Tovani's book changed my life.  It's meant to teach educators how to teach reading in all subjects and to promote literacy with basic modeling, but it taught me how to read.

Frustrated that I'd never been taught reading strategies for nonfiction, I incorporated modeling strategies in my philosophy of education, and I have used that in my 4 years of teaching in a very real way.  I love that I can teach a skill to students that transfers to other subjects and to the next level of their education.  Their feedback tells me that I am doing a very good thing.  After reading the first assigned pages at the beginning of the school year, I ask the class to close their books, and then for a show of hands: Who thinks they can give me the TITLE of the section.  What was it about?  Very few students can do that.  Then I ask them if they ever try to read at night and end up reading the same paragraph or sentence over and over.   They're hesitant at first but the discussion turns to one where everyone acknowledges doing this, and reading the words but not gathering the ideas.  This initial discussion opens the floor for a school year of open feelings about reading, allowing me to model my own reading and for us all to share in the experience of 'learning to read'.

I have since pulled out my textbooks from college, cracked the bindings (they were almost brand-new!) and have learned more in the past few years just reading on my own than I did in high school and college.  Being able to access information with just a few strategies has caused a paradigm shift for me.  Perhaps I can attribute that to maturity and growing up, but learning how to read in my late 20's was an exciting experience that opened my life to unlimited knowledge.