Direction, Direction, Direction

In chapter 5 “Why Am I Reading This” Tovani has an AP student who is concerned that Tovani’s college preparedness class isn’t helping the student read faster, in fact it is making the student read slower.  When asked “why do you think you are slowing down” the student’s response is because “…everything you are asking us to do requires me to think”.  It dawns on Tovani that her student thinks being a fast reader is the same as a good reader, and that her student is thinking of it as a race. 

I would argue the student is freaking out because, as stated elsewhere in the book, in college there is a ton of reading.  Most of Tovani’s techniques are nice and all, but I would have to agree with the student a bit here, and want to be able to obtain the ability to pull out of the text the most pertinent information from an article, so I could move on to the seven other readings I need to get to this week. One strategy that Tovani suggests, that I agree with, is to give the student direction, to let the student know up front what information the teacher wants the student to pull out of the reading.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to read text in college with absolutely no clear direction or knowing what is the point of the text.  To be fair, I have also had several classes where direction was given, and I wasn’t flying blind with the text.  However, I’d rather focus on the instructors that think that giving direction to the student is “dumbing down the text”.  As Tovani points out that “we can’t expect our students to master the information in less time than we experts did”.  And therein lies the problem, we experts think the content we may be teaching is “easy” and our students should just as easily digest the information we are handing them, but we might forget that the first time we were exposed to our field content it wasn’t just given to us all at once.  It took years to gather together all of the content that we now take for granted, and unfortunately for some of us we forget how hard learning some of that content might have been to acquire in the first place.

I have done this to some extent, but after reading this chapter I am going to start adjusting my lesson plans to directional reading.  After all, what is the point of a student reading an entire chapter on mitosis when all I want my class to get out of the chapter is that cells divide, and these are their phases.

Speaking of mitosis, in one of my previous blogs I gave Tovani a hard time for not giving more strategies for science teachers, well on page 59 she does state how a science teacher used a double diary for his students to write the phase on the left side and draw an image of the corresponding phase on the right side.