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
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
