Subjects Matter Chapter 9 & 10 (The "Well, duh!" Chapters)

I’m not sure about you but when I think about putting practice to good use in my classroom I think about supplementing my students with real-life representations of my subject area (ELA) as a part of their materials. By doing this it would help our students better understand and utilize our lessons in their daily and academic lives, right?

Reading towards the end of Daniels and Zemelman’s Subjects Matter I am beginning to feel that I am hitting a wall. No, I myself am not hitting the wall, the writers are. Perhaps it comes as a matter-of-fact that this entire book has tried to teach us, the educator, how to better perform and teach our subject areas, but at this point in the book I was fully expecting an “Uh huh!” moment. Instead I received an “Well, duh!” To that effect, I feel as if I can summarize Content-Area Book Clubs and Inquiry Units into a single idea “These are more ways to develop and carry out lesson plans.” Yes, yes, I am fully aware that as teachers the lesson plan is our foremost tool in teaching our students. And because of that there are plenty of variations in what type of lesson plan we can utilize for what subject area, classroom, and student audience we have, but once again these practices echo “Well, duh!”

As a to-be ELA educator I an aware of the textbooks I will have to utilize and their prompts will either be outdated and only partially applicable or will be mother-of-god-this-is-the-holy-grail-of-ELA-teaching, but whatever the case I also know that I will always have to supplement outside material to my students. Why? Students want to learn because curiosity is a psychologically normal asset of the human, and they would like to see where the fruits of their academics come to affect their real-life identities. The Content-Area Book Clubs give our students the chance to be the teacher (and is otherwise a part of the theory of gradual release of teacher-student responsibility) by having them break off into groups of no more than four and choose a book of their bidding to reciprocate our lessons on analysis and note-taking within. More often than not these books will be more contemporary than what we would normally have in classroom textbooks, but that’s a good thing because it is meant to connect the two factors for our students. And in relating forward into Inquiry Units, otherwise what I would like to call “Learning how to ask the right questions,” The Content-Area Book Clubs serve as an entity to foster community within the classroom between the students. By doing so the students will more inclined to engage in discussion orientated class-time which will propel them towards question each other and question us in order to better understand the all-important student-centric question:

“Why are we learning this?” (Every-student-ever, The Beginning of Time)

I was not a fan of these chapters only because I felt that what we had been taught and had achieved in earlier chapters was being force fed and repeated to us. I do value and understand that these concepts must be instilled and utilized as a how-to to teaching, but again I was expecting a “Uh huh!” moment opposed to a “Well, duh!” That was my perception as a student.

As an educator I realize that these chapters serve as our ding-ding-ding moment. The most important aspect to any good teaching is to set a foundation, a path, direction, and then practice. Before Inquiry Units (otherwise the “Just ask questions, guys.”) and the Content-Area Book Clubs we must construct and condition a classroom agenda on how to read. Before our students learn how to read they must learn how to take notes (whether in general or content specific to us). And before our students learn how to read and take notes they must be taught the importance of our teacher-student objectives and our expectations of them throughout the year. And even before that we must build the bridge upon which students can comfortably and safely transverse to trusting and engaging with us (the teacher) in order to learn in the first place. What I am trying to say is we must build the practice before it can be put to good use. But again, I learned that back in Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Was it really necessary in 9 and 10?