Subject Matters Chapter 12 - Wrapping it all up

Now I will try and keep what I write short, because I know not many people read my chapter reviews specifically because they're so lengthy. I begin with a story on my own experience as a child with reading.

As a younger child I never had an aptitude for reading, mainly because I didn't understand the English language well at all. In growing older and moving up through primary school and into secondary school I was taught that reading was only a means to finding answers on a quiz or test; nothing more, nothing less. It wasn't until late into my middle school career that I began to look at the texts and books I read in a subjective way. I was introduced into a classroom where the teacher encouraged us to read non-course books. From those non-course books, we would find their relation back into the study area. And from those relations we better understood the ultimate student question: "When will I ever use this in real life?"

What Daniels and Zemelman get right into is that students need to be given choices in their reading materials. Those choices should include, but are not limited, to the real-life applications that our subject areas have. And other times, reading material can just be for fun, an intrinsic pleasure. What we, as the teacher, should be responsible for, is teaching and passing on the techniques to approach any and all reading materials--how do we as readers approach our own readings. It is in this way that we can attempt to provide for our students a way of reading that is:

Informative,
Critical,
Full,
Meaningful, and
Pleasurable.

The several techniques we utilize ourselves should be taught and demonstrated in class for our students. We're the role model to our student's potential interests and successes.

I end by quoting the final section from Subject Matters:

"When students need to move up the ladder of challenge, they need teachers who don't just assign and exhort, but who show them the way. These mentors demonstrate their own content-specific reading strategies and explicitly help learners practice and acquire them. These teachers sponsor positive, interactive, and supportive classroom environments where kids regularly talk and write about their reading, and feel safe to take risks, debate, and disagree. These special teachers' signature is engagement: they infuse their courses with important, relevant issues and encourage kids to engage with both ideas and the wider community" (Daniels & Zemelman 304).