After reading the first two chapters of the book, I'm encouraged. Usually, books that promise help with teaching reading are geared toward younger grades and are minimally useful, and then only after some modification to the strategies. This volume seems, so far, to keep focus on high school readers. I like the opening metaphor only because I have long been a fan of baseball. I have always looked up to the players who have studied the game at its deepest levels. I suppose that as more of an intellectual than an athlete, I appreciate the thinking man's approach to games. No matter the game, I love the fact that, on some level deeper than physical prowess, there's a different game going on. So it is with reading. Superficial reading, as Gallagher calls it, is a worthwhile activity -- one that I have spent countless hours enjoying. But those of us here realize how much more there is to enjoy beyond that level.
Chapter two offered a few strategies for helping students to read more deeply. The best advice here, however, isn't an enumerated strategy at all. Gallagher reminds us that readers must be taught to read deeply. We do not need so many new strategies to help us as we need to pass on effective strategies to our students. We do this, Gallagher tells us, by sitting beside our students. I believe we must do this both figuratively (as supporters) and literally (as guides and at times, reading peers). I quite enjoy this second instance. I try each year to read something my students are reading. In this way, I have read a number of interesting books I would never have picked up otherwise. In addition, I have been able to talk with students about the books as we read. We make predictions together. We critique characters. We talk about symbols and themes. It is, as Gallagher mentions, collaboration, but it is collaboration on what began as pleasure reading. I have developed some very productive reading relationships with a few of my former students. As often as I have introduced a student to a new author, I have met a new author. I have even rediscovered a couple of authors. I believe these relationships are so productive because students get to see my passion for reading, and they get to see, firsthand, how I make meaning as I read. And all of this they see as my peers in reading, not as my students (though I'm not naive enough to think the student/teacher relationship and the mystique it carries disappears completely). So I think the trick must be to take the best bits of these more personal reading relationships and bring them to the whole class. The problem I see therein is keeping interest level. It is much easier for two people to agree that they enjoy a particular author or genre -- it's what begins the relationship. With a whole class, and one that is reading from a prescribed canon, interest is always an issue. I look forward to seeing Gallagher's answer to this issue.
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I'm thrilled that this book is geared towards the high school crowd, too. As you continue to work through it, you'll find tons of activities and anecdotes surrounding Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, "Love", etc. All high school stuff.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the best thing about this book is NOT the enumerated strategies (although those are very useful for a teacher just starting out). The most useful thing I got from this was an attitude of putting more time into hooking readers and getting them to read on deep levels. I feel like, in the past, my focus was on the breadth of reading, and now I'm starting to narrow in on the depth of reading. I think it allows me to move at a more relaxed pace and students will have more fun with it, too.