It seems that we live in some miraculous times… We are in the midst of several cultural and technological revolutions. People who live during revolutions usually don’t have many positive things to say about it, whereas here and now, most people are oblivious to them. I have written a lot about the increasing amounts of technology on then classroom (I am even working to increase it!), but there are some things which have fallen behind the advancing changes…
I see in almost all of the schools, where I currently work as a substitute, of progress in getting more and more students to read. One school literally makes it a requirement or 7th graders to read every day. I applaud this, but it is barely the first step. In the world we have these days, to merely be familiar with the mechanics of reading is nowhere near enough to what we should be providing students.
As our world has gotten larger (or for some to say that it has gotten smaller…), is has also gotten much more complex. We are barraged by so much Media, too many advertisements, Political spin and general double talk that just reading things is a quick road to becoming ‘used’ by others. Learning to read and to listen critically, which was once an ideal for college undergraduates to aspire to has become important even for high school students.
Irrespective of what your own political leanings are, most people have some rather dim views of any variety of news organizations. With due respect to a handful of some radicals, in the 1970’s most people just took things at face value. Many places are filled with all kinds of theories of why this happened (and who is to blame…whatever…), I am interested in looking into what we can do to, as teachers; to help develop some more sophisticated reading methods.
At a minimum, readers should always be asking the “who, what, when, and where questions.” For me, in a social studies curriculum this turns into a catch-22. Most students are being acquainted with a topic for the first time and haven’t, as yet, developed the beginnings of being able to see between these kinds of lines. But the concepts are out there, and the students already know them…compare and contrast. These are words which usually create some upset for most high school test takers.
This methodology would seem to impel you to read at the very least, twice as much material (this would go over like a lead balloon in almost any class…), but there are some ‘tricks’ that you could use. As with the concepts of ‘compare and contrast’, there are also some other concepts which most teachers should be reasonably familiar with …differentiated instruction. Who stated that all the students have to read exactly the same information? In any case, there are almost infinite ways in which these topics can be mixed and matched; the important thing is that there is a need to continue working on developing basic reading mechanics into something which the average American citizen needs, not just the grad student.
