“The less we depend on programs the more we depend on our own knowledge – -informed by practice and research- – the less likely we are to be controlled by politically driven mandates, expensive programs that appear and disappear from our classrooms without rhyme or reason, and federally funded (or not funded) programs.” (Beers p.37)
I like Beers’ focus on the differences between independent readers vs. dependent readers. What a concept: look at what good readers do, and then coming up with ways to teach dependent readers how to do what good readers do. Explicit instruction on specific techniques, which over time should become more automatic as the dependent readers practice doing what we are asking them to do. Read. Sometimes I wonder about my constant, albeit brief, babbles as I move about the classroom concerning the how and why of reading and writing. I am constantly telling stories, in which I try to embed what it is I do, or someone else does when they read or write. I want them to think about the process, to think about their thinking when it comes to reading and writing, while at the same time not belaboring the process nor breaking it down to such minutia that they forget about the big picture (reading) by becoming lost in the details of the craft. Yes, reading like writing is a craft. There are so many students at so many different levels. I constantly tell them, one is never finished with becoming a better reader. One of the problems I have now with my own reading is that seemingly benign sentences will send me off on tangental strands of thought (not that they are not connected, because ultimately I come back to the text and the text is made richer by the connections I am making, ala Rosenblatt); this tends, however, to cloud (trouble/interrupt?) the meaning I make of the text in my hands.
“I’m going to propose that each time a reader rereads, she revises her understanding of the text. The first read of a story, a chapter, a poem a novel, a web page, a letter – -any sort of text- – yields the first draft of understanding. Readers revise that draft through every rereading.” (Beers p. 118).
An easy example of this was when my own children were small and I would read and reread books to them nightly. I barely had to pay attention to the text after awhile, which was a good thing considering that sometimes “The Cat in the Hat” would cast a spell upon me, sending my thoughts all over the place from Joseph Campbell to people who protest certain books because of what they read into the text. It was not just me thinking about stuff I was interested in, but the Dr.Suess book that would send me to a deeper understanding of what I was thinking about. This also makes me wonder about the teachers who argue against letting the students read free choice books, because they are afraid the students will not select “difficult enough” books. In my experience students move on to “more difficult” books when they are ready to move on. Sometimes it takes a little prodding, but never very much. They get bored with the formula writer’s (all writers) use to put their texts together. Over time I noticed that I will go through periods where I read a lot of one writer: twenty years ago Faulkner and Hemingway, as a child everything by Robert Heinlein or Roger Zelazney, more recently Jim Harrison, Sherry Tepper, and Dashiel Hammet. What always happens is that I will suddenly stop, usually after I have identified common themes, tropes and plot devices. As a teacher, being there ready to make the next suggestion, kind of like Amazon’s “other books purchased by those who bought this book” suggestions, will send a student off in another direction. Even if it is only a matter of a shift of one or two degrees, in the long run it will make a difference.
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