I Read it but I Dont get it

While reading Chris Tovani’s text, I read it but I Don’t get it, I had to stop and think many times throughout. It made me think about the different style of reading teachings that I’ve had in the past. The book is based around different strategies that will help teachers at the middle and high school levels get their students comprehension skills up. It is both humorous and serious at times, and I feel that really helped the reading. For students, the learning never stops, there will always be different strategies to learn that will help guide their reading comprehension. Tovani really distinguishes what it means to read a text. Not just decode words but sum up a comprehension of what was just read. She wants teachers to help their students construct meaning for what they just read.

In my own experience, I got through all of my courses by what she says is “fake” reading. I found myself reading the text but not really understanding what was being read. I didn’t materialize the reading into a full understanding of “what and why” went on. She believes that if we guide our students correctly we can be a model for them to be great readers. We can help them with strategies to understand the reading better.  We can guide them using her classroom experiences and use what works and see what didn’t work and why. Overall this book resonated with me. She seems to have got the key to what it is to become a really good reader and teacher. She is really enthusiastic and believes that the classroom setting and teaching should be the same. Her strategies will not only be used in the single classroom but also in all other classrooms where they will read to comprehend the text.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pablo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is hands down one of the hardest reads I have encountered. That is not to say I was not fascinated by his stance on oppression and his take on humanization and dehumanization. Humans assume that we all fall under the humanization category and fail to see what dehumanization is. We are unable to fully understand humanization without truly understanding the latter. In order for humanization to come through, we need to get through all of the dehumanization that goes on in the world. We as humans must overcome all the bad in the world in order to really see all that is good around us. The oppressed are those who are dehumanized. People who oppress others see these oppressed people as things or objects, not humans to be treated with integrity. Oppressors also feel the oppressed are in their situation because they are “lazy” and ungrateful to the generous overtures offered by the elitist class.

One may ask, why don’t the oppressed do anything to change their state? Freire states that the oppressed have adopted the guidelines of their oppressor and they have the feeling of “fearing of freedom” (46). The oppressed are so used to being in this state that it is too easy to just stay in it. They only way they can get out of it is by working together with others who are oppressed.  The caution of the oppressed of becoming oppressors is emphasized by Freire in that oppression is what has been modeled for them as a structural situation. That is when he says that the oppressed can become the oppressors.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

     As an English teacher there are numerous ways to evaluate what a student knows about a certain text. There is not one right way to assess a student on what he/she got out of the text. Literature allows us to assess our students in different ways while still achieving our goal of allowing the students to really get something out of what they read. Some students feel comfortable writing essays, and this is a great way to get the students to analyze literature and think critically about what they read. Not all students learn well this way. A lot of students would rather take factual tests to show what they know. 

     It all falls back on how the instructor values literature. When we figure out what we value as instructors it is important to ask ourselves what it means to us to “learn literature.” What goals do we set for our students to justify if they have learned about the text? We need our students to think broadly about what they have learned. When we give them questions, there should be more than one way to answer the question and their answers should also be original. Solid or definite answers do not always work when students are learning literature. 

     In our age rubrics and criteria should be handed out to students as a basis for what they should gain from literature. Our rubrics should outline our goals along with what the students should get out of the text. As instructors, our feedback is necessary for the students. Our feedback should guide the students to the goals that we set out. We must guide them carefully and take certain steps in order for them to be able to learn literature. Once our assessment is complete, we must allow the students to reflect on what they learned throughout the literature lesson. They should conjure up a solid understanding of the text and at the same time understand how they got there.

California’s Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy

This assignment was created with the intent to use it in our classrooms. Teachers can use this as a resource. The purpose is to take the steps necessary to help students read, comprehend and respond to texts. We not only want the students to read the text, we also want them to think about what they are reading and gather a response to what they have read. There are certain steps that instructors must take in order to get them to do this correctly and with ease. Teachers should guide them through certain steps at the beginning of class.

The template is great because it has everything there to help an instructor teach the students how to actually get into a text. For example, even before a text is open, there are certain pre-reading steps that should be taken. The student should survey the text and its purpose. They should gather up all that they know about the text before they even open it. Teachers should hold activities to help the students get ready for the text ahead. Maybe talking about the purpose of the text as a whole class, then holding an open discussion about what everyone already knows about the text.

The template did an awesome job of outlining what a student should go through while reading any text. As an instructor, we need to take the necessary steps and activities to help our students feel as comfortable as possible with a text. It is important to keep the structure. There are steps to actually understanding what we read, and we need to bring these steps to the forefront. The instructor needs to be there when students have questions about the text, they will always have questions and that is a good thing. Reading the text is not all that matters, we need the students to accumulate a logical response to the text.