Subjects Matter Critique on Chapters 1 & 2

What we as teachers see in our students are peerless embodiment's of knowledge. How we convey that knowledge oftentimes involves us lecturing them, but what we all want at the end of the day is for the students themselves to attain whatever knowledge they need through their own means.  Thusly, it is only conclusive and through consideration that we, as educators, push and pull our students to learn what to read, how to read it¸ and why they are reading what they read. 

As Harvey Daniels and Steve Zemelman (2014) would have it:

Our imagination wasn't fired by some list of standards to be met in the first semester of ninth grade. We got into this job because we were hooked on a field, usually our college major, and we wanted to transmit that excitement to young people. We wanted students to share our enthusiasm, our fascination, our wonder at the beauty and importance of ideas. We had something powerful and precious to share: knowledge. (p. 10)

The first two chapters of Daniels and Zemelman’s Subjects Matter is not merely an introduction to the works itself, but acts as the guide to both the reading of how we as educators (and as individuals) comprehend as reading, and it acts as the guide in as to how to teach what we subjectively and objectively understand as reading.  Now, while I love that goal as an educator, as a student I find it difficult. It isn't so much the matter of what I am reading, nor is it a matter of how I choose to read what I read; it’s that last part, why am I reading what I read?

As far as I can remember I have always been that subjectively good student. Whenever my secondary school teachers assigned something to read for the class I would obediently follow suit and do so.  Whenever my secondary school teachers requested us to expand our horizons and filter through the library and World Wide Web I would, again, obediently follow suit and do so.  At the end of my high school career I ended up discovering that I, for one reason or another, enjoyed obtaining the knowledge my teachers wanted me to obtain.  And for one reason or another I had acquired the skills and traits of a proficient reader and student. It was around the transition where I had graduated high school and was beginning college that I learned that sooner or later I would have to be in charge of my own reading.  What does that mean? As a college student my professors would provide the same backbone textbook readings that my secondary school teachers would provide, but they liberally allowed (and at times demanded) that we sought out outside sources.  This was meant to do two jobs: Outside sources would help us as students understand our material better, and outside sources would help solidify our existing knowledge so that our arguments could become stronger.  But there laid the problem.  I didn't know how to extract that outside source into my existing knowledge, never mind my arguments.  I had always been under the illusion that whatever my teachers gave me was wholly and automatically the right material and that I was in no way appropriate a critique to find those same right materials.

Nevertheless, as I moved forward in my college career I learned to observe my classmates and copy their habits. From doing so I furthered my experience in what I read and how I read it, but most importantly I learned to judge, decipher, analyze, and evaluate my reading materials. When I saw that my professors were not providing what I would consider adequate or appropriate amounts of reading materials I would venture outside their realms for resources that could.  Simply put:

The definition of reading is really shifting now. The ability to get meaning from print is dependent on what we already know. Those same brain scientists believe that the only way we can learn new information is by attaching it, connecting it, [and] integrating it with information we already have. You have to assimilate the information into an existing schema or revise an old one to make the new stuff fit. Either way, you have to work with what is already in the mind; you can’t build on nothing. (Daniels & Zemelman, 2014, p. 33)

The point I come to try and get across is that Subjects Matter isolates and puts upon this existing problem that some students face. School teaches students what to read and how to read what they read, but they do not always teach students why they are reading what they read. By the time I had entered college I was far behind some of my peers who had already been exposed to this mechanism. They were better studied and learned than me, and it made keeping up more of a curse than it was a learning experience. But at this point in my (our) career as an educator it is become evident that future students shouldn't be subjected to this same treatment and environment. Similarly to how teachers of the past had taught their students what and how to read, it is an essentially building block that we should consider integrating the why to our student’s (and our) reading. The first step's first, it's time to start reading again.