Subjects Matter Chapter 3 Response

Just the other day, my very eccentric twelve-year-old sister walked up to me and stated: “Emily, I finally figured out why old people have such bad back problems! It’s because of all their years of carrying around huge, heavy textbooks in their backpacks for school!” I had a good laugh, but then I did seriously consider the weight of all the textbooks I’ve been forced to lug around in my school years…it’s ridiculous!

This chapter really strung a cord with me, just as the past two chapters have, because I have a strong distaste for the heavy use of textbooks within the classroom. We’ve all experienced those classes where the entire curriculum is centered on this one boring, content-overloaded textbook. Each chapter was packed full of tons of vocabulary, facts, dates, and formulas that were impossible for you to just read through easily. And of course, your teachers would expect you to go home and “read” a chapter just like any old Hunger Games novel. But that’s impractical. Most students struggle to make it though just one paragraph of textbook language, much less can they absorb, comprehend, and remember every detail and fact that the text presents. It’s too much information thrown at you all at once.

Textbooks are not all bad, though. Used for their proper purpose, which is as a reference book, textbooks can actually serve students well in a classroom. Textbooks can provide concrete definitions, diagrams, and examples that will aid them in meeting their standards and expectations. However, I’d really love to see teachers incorporating more and more trade books and supplementary materials into their lessons. These sorts of texts will do a far greater job at not only engaging their students, but also making sure students are truly comprehending the material for the long haul. Students should be able to remember more than “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!”

316 

Emily 

Subjects Matter Chapter 2 Response

I found this second chapter of Subjects Matter to be oh-so-relatable. The “clunking” process that the authors describe perfectly sums up my experience with non-fiction texts and all school-assigned texts back in high school. I took a lot of AP courses where there was a lot of reading involved,
probably the most challenging for me was AP U.S History. In that course, my teacher would have us read some twenty or thirty pages out of the mammoth textbook nearly every night and expect us to take a quiz over it all the next day.

I don’t mean to offend any of my classmates with emphases in history here…but history, especially U.S history, is seriously the most boring thing on this whole planet to me. It’s all just a bunch of dates, wars, and boring government stuff to me. Also, I had very little time to complete all of the readings my teacher assigned. Therefore, my reading process usually went as follows: read a sentence, doing good; read a paragraph, yeah I got this; read a whole page…uh…what did I just read again? No joke, I could read a whole page of text and then look up and tell myself, “I have no clue what I just read. I need to read that again”.

I suppose that shows that I know how to “self-monitor” as an effective reader (p. 30). However, no twenty or thirty pages of very scholarly textbook language about history was ever going to get me interesting and motivated, and it certainly wasn’t helping me to succeed in that class. After reading this chapter and recalling my own experiences, it really makes me empathize with my future students in my math or science class struggling to read my textbook pages. I really want to make sure to teach several different reading strategies and prepare them to receive the text’s content

313

Emily 

Subjects Matter Chapter 1 Response

After reading this first chapter, I feel like I have a better understanding for why today's students have very poor skills and little interest in reading. Unfortunately, testing and standards have hindered the student's curiosity and desire to gain knowledge through reading. Additionally, testing and standards have gotten in the way of the teacher's ability to share their passion for their subject area due to their lack of time for any extra, interesting texts. This issue resonates with me personally, as I used to be an avid reader as a child, but when I entered high school I quickly became too busy, stressed, and uninterested to read. Often, I was handed a textbook and told to read several pages—which I usually fell asleep in the middle of—but I was never presented with intriguing readings that sparked any interest in the subject. The only outside of class time I had for personal reading was usually bombarded with homework, studying, or assigned readings from my language arts class. 

Essentially, I became discouraged from reading anything at all. It wasn’t until college that I began really loving to read again, and getting excited about the texts I was assigned to read. My professors have such passion for their subject matter, and have the ability to share it with their students by giving them relevant readings. I’d really like to see more grade school teachers focus less on reading textbook chapters, and try to incorporate articles that would bridge the gap between school subjects and the student’s personal interests. However, a question or concern that this could raise would be: could distancing students from textbooks produce lower competency in the subject? Although the student’s interest in the subject may increase, there is a possibility that students will not properly learn key terms, etc.  

302 

Emily