Weekly Reading: Oct. 14th

1. What was the chapter about?

DZ chapter 11 was all about specific strategies to use with struggling readers to help them learn to read and learn to love to read. It offered several examples of specific strategies, as well as mentioning specific teachers and books written by reading researchers.

BBR chapter 8 discusses ways to encourage critical thinking. It suggests strategies which require students to examine the texts more closely and think critically in a structured way. It also supports the students as they make these judgments, which can begin to seem personal.

2. What does this chapter tell you about teaching students?

DZ teaches that struggling readers need extra help, from readings at their level to strategies to prime their reading, to strategies to help them identify what they do not understand and remember what they have read. When students do not read well and do not understand how to read well, they will not enjoy reading, and therefore they will avoid reading. Unfortunately, this means that students will have far fewer opportunities to learn, so teachers must use these strategies to help students learn to enjoy reading.

Students cannot begin to think critically on their own. Like learning any new skill, students need scaffolding in order to grasp the basics before they can gain proficiency in using those skills. Students need these exercises which guide them through the process so that they can get accustomed to the process before they are asked to analyze a passage on their own.

3. Can this chapter be applied in your content area?

Students do not like to translate. When they first begin learning to translate, they do not understand how to translate – even the theory of it – and so anyone who is not already a strong reader becomes a very weak reader because all their problems with reading in English are magnified when they try to read in Latin, which is an inflected language (it requires endings on all nouns, adjectives, and verbs in order to understand how those words are functioning in the sentence). Understanding how to help these students is invaluable.

Latin students, particularly upper level students, are asked to analyze the culture and documents of the Romans. Caesar’s Gallic Wars are one of the main texts used in AP Latin, and it has a very unreliable narrator. When I teach that text, I want to be able to talk about how all the information about that war comes directly from Caesar, who has every incentive to make himself look better and his enemies – or political rivals – look worse. Without critical thinking skills, however, I will never be able to have this discussion with my classes.