Wilhelm Chapter 5

One thing that I liked about this chapter was the author's focus on struggling students. It seems easy (at least, easier) to engage highly motivated students with their reading, but a big concern of mine has always been how to deal with students that aren't necessarily interested in reading (or, don't think that they are). Wilhelm's experiences with several of his students is just that way, they are unmotivated, uninterested, and unprepared for what they have to deal with in a reading-centered classroom. One important thing that the author did in these types of situations was to (first) give them free choice in deciding what to read and (second) how to read it and demonstrate that they had successfully made meaning from it. The activities the he employs to get the students thinking about their own meaning-making processes are artistic and creative while still allowing the students to demonstrate mastery of the material. One student was allowed to draw a visual representation of what they had encountered in the text and after starting off with a few less engaging texts they quickly moved on to more advanced readings because they began to realize that reading was meant to stimulate and connect audiences, not fluster and annoy them. Once the student was able to demonstrate their connections to the text in a way that they felt best suited them, they were more willing to explore challenging texts and push the boundaries of their own readings. I think that the importance of choice is evident in both the selection of texts and in the demonstration of knowledge gained from those texts.

Wilhelm Chapter 4

I was especially excited about this chapter when I started reading it because it focuses on the use of drama in the classroom to help students engage in the literature that they are reading. My dream teaching job would be a theatre arts position that allows me to direct the school play and teach drama/shakespeare/speech. It is safe to say, then, that my classroom will use many dramatic excercises towards the purpose of "discovering" something in the texts that my students read. Some of the activities that the author describes are better suited for my teaching style than others, and some of them I have studied before as well. The guided imagery activity is something that several students used in an earlier education classroom group project, and it seemed to go over quite well. Having a theatre backgroung means that I also have numerous books on teaching theatre and most of them have many (it is a staple of the theatre world) fun and interesting activities to stimulate the mind and get people thinking as their character would (thus, getting them much more involved in critically analyzing the texts that they are interacting with). One of my favorite activities is one where the students create a character that does not exsist and have that character interact with characters from the text that do exsist. It forces them to analyze the characters they interact with in the literature and make decisions for that character based on their experiences with them through the text.

Wilhelm Chapter 3

In this third chapter of "You Gotta BE the Book," I really liked that the author began by giving his audience a list of reading activity strategies. It seems as though this chapter is much more practical than the previous two chapters have been. Several of the activities that the author lists I have had experience with before through some of my education classes here at Western, others of them were new to me. The Think-Alouds seemed to work rather well when I've used them in the past, and I like that they are so subjective. The teacher journal is something that I haven't started yet (I haven't been in the classroom enough) but would be interested in trying out once I am given the opportunity to do so. I enjoyed the last half of this chapter as well because of the artistic freedom that the author suggests giving to the students. A symbolic representation of a story or a visual role-playing activity are both excellent activities to get the students engaged with their reading and discovering meaning from the literature.

Wilhelm Chapter 2

"Most teachers must not read, or they'd not how to teach reading and not ruin it for us," is a quote from page 34 of this text which I think does a very good job of relating how most students feel about reading for a class. For the most part, students hate reading because the teachers try to stuff literature down their throats that the students have absolutely no interest in. I understand that giving the students a wide base of literature "classics" will allow them the opportunity to discover something that interests them, but by forcing each and every student to read the exact same texts for every single class will only isolate certain students (the ones who are labeled "poor readers") and will no doubt bore the majority of your classroom to tears. I feel very strongly about the importance of choice in regards to student reading for the classroom. If the reason for reading is to find meaning within the text, then shouldn't we allow the students to also discover their own texts? Think about the satisfaction that a student could have if they were allowed to first find something that interested them, and then rather than being graded on whether or not they could answer multiple choice questions about the story they had read, they were graded on a subjective essay describing their interactions with and discoveries derived from that text? It just seems to me that students are much more apt to become self-regulated readers in their lives after school if they learn to love reading while they are in school, and what better way to promote that kind of attitude than by allowing them to read literature that directly relates to them and their lives?

Wilhelm Chapter 1

While reading chapter one of "You Gotta BE the Book" I began to get a little apprehensive about the direction that the author was going. I have never really agreed with the "bottom-up" approach to teaching and I think it is ridiculous to spend so much time and effort (as teachers) focussing on the decoding of words rather than the search for meaning. The reason for my apprehension was mainly because the first few pages of the chapter were spent discussing the reasons to teach this approach to reading. I was relieved, however, when the author began talking about the "top-down" approach and the importance of reading for meaning. Perhaps I've just been brainwashed by Western's education department but in my Teaching Literature to Secondary Students class we spent an entire semester discussing the difference between "reading" and "decoding" and why the former is so crucial and the latter is so worthless (my teacher was highly opinionated on the subject). I think that it is important, at least it will be in my personal teaching endeavors, to help students realize the benefit of reading for meaning. So many students feel the being a "good" reader means that you read aloud well and you are able to read quickly. I want to do my part to dispell this myth and create classrooms of students who are able to read for meaning in a story. The point of reading is not to time yourself and chart how many miscues you make - we read because we enjoy it and are able to find connections and meanings from the text that we interact with.