Ch 9 “Did I Miss Anything? Did I Miss Everything?” Last Thoughts

This final chapter of the book starts out with a story of a chaotic day in her classroom. This is a day where everything seems to be going wrong and it just keeps getting worse. We have students that are fighting in the back of the room, others that are sleeping, and others that are getting kicked out of their houses.  How do we as teachers go on teaching when we have a day like this? What do we focus on? The fighting kids, sleeping kids, or kids that need to be consoled. Do we just go on with our lesson like nothing is happening? How do we make these choices? What choices do we make when we decide to give up part of our lesson to help out a student with personal problems? Do we just ignore all these students and act like they will be attentive and actually retain what we are trying to teach them? None of us are perfect and we will have to make some hard choices when it comes to teaching. We have to pick our battles and pick them wisely. When we decide to punish or help out another student, how many students are we leaving to fend for themselves who are actually ready and willing to learn? Tovani states that, “ I can make good choices among all these options only when I have a clear purpose in mind.” With this in mind we have to ask ourselves what is our goal? What is the benefit for every decision that I make?

She gives a poem out to the students that is titled Did I Miss Anything? It talks about how students come in after being late or missing a day of class and ask ‘Did I miss anything?’ She says the real question should be ‘Did I Miss Everything?’ We as teachers should have every moment mean something to our students. We should always be teaching them and making every moment count. We have the opportunity to make a difference in these students lives. When a student misses a part of the lesson are they able to catch up and figure out what you taught them without holding everyone else back?

I really appreciated the last section of the chapter where she wraps it all up. It is titled We’ll Never have all the Answers. I really appreciated this section because it reminds me that we are all still learning and if we think we have all the answers and stop trying to learn we will be of no help to our students. They need us to always be on our toes and constantly moving forward with them. We can learn from them as easily as they can learn from us. Tovani talks about how a teacher had written a review on Amazon for her previous book and found another teachers review of her   book. This review said how she assumed that the book would give her a quick fix approach to her classroom problems and found instead that it forced her to re-evaluate her own instructional approaches instead. She said this was far better than a quick fix because there are no quick fixes and there is no one way that will work for every classroom.

This is the end of this blog. Thanks for reading and I hope you found my interpretation of this book to be informational and as good of a learning experience as I have. 

Ch 8 “What Do I Do with All These Sticky Notes?” Assessment That Drives Instruction

This chapter is about testing and assessment and how to successfully gauge whether the students are learning or not. She starts off with a conversation that she as having with a class of students on the first say of class. She was trying to guide them into asking certain questions to get them excited about the course. But a student asked something that she didn’t’ expect and wasn’t trying to get them to ask. The students asked about tests in the class and how many there were going to be. She then tried to veer them towards the right direction again and she realized that they were not going to be satisfies unless she went over testing thoroughly. She figured out that students are very concerned about tests and quizzes. So many teachers make the class all about testing and it usually doesn’t have a good meter for what they learned.

So how do we test? What can we do to actually test what our students are learning and how do we know? Tovani uses a lot of grading throughout the semester instead of two big tests throughout the year. She tries to assess their progress throughout the year through assignments that make them write daily or weekly things that show her that they are learning. She has one thing that she asks the kids to do in her class whether they take all the sticky notes from their text and places them on a piece of paper for her to see there thinking all on one page. She has them write what page number it came from so that she could go back to it if necessary. This is a very good idea to get not only you as the teacher to see what they have learned but to get them as a student to see the connections they have made and all the hard work they did throughout the year.

She also creates portfolios for each student and places work that she feels is essential to the progress or regression of the students learning. She is very selective on what goes in the file. She includes such things as old test scores from previous classes, previous grades, and new work to show improvement or terrible work to show where they started from. She shared at the end of the chapter how on a final test that she had once given to her class she included this question, “Attached to this sheet is the definition of reading you wrote for me during the first week of the semester. Look at your definition, and think about all that you know about reading. Compare your new knowledge of reading with what you used to know.” I find this type of question to be so helpful and can truly show the progress to both the student and teacher on what they did learn throughout the year. I fell that is not only important to note that the teachers know what the students learned but that the students can also see the progress that they have made throughout the year. 

Ch 7 Group Work That Grows Understanding

I love this chapter because it is one group work. I have always had mixed feelings about group work as a future educator and as a student. She starts off with a story about her class and a group work assignment that she gave them. As she is going around the room she realizes that the group discussion is going pretty well. Tovani was not always as enthusiastic or believing in group work. She says that they are very hard to control and had to do some outside research to see how to conduct successful group work. She watched adult groups like book clubs, department meetings, and so on to see how adult group work is successful and how she can use that in her classroom. She found that the adults have a lot of control and and tend to do better because of this. So she realized that some control has to be given to the students when it comes to who is in their groups. Another thing that she did as to ask the students what things they dislike about group work. What better way to learn about something then from the people that actually experience it. 
A lot of the comments that came back were about annoying people in the groups and group member that slack off. She then decided to show the group a demonstration of her and a colleague in a group situation. She decided that she would show an unsuccessful group instead of a successful one. So without telling the other teacher what was going on she decided to play the bad group member and not do the work and to turn around and talk to her neighbors. The students seemed to really understand the rudeness and importance of having your work done and your materials there. She also decided to give the students a way to ask to change groups. This way they have some control over it but she also still wants to have control of the class so she has the final say on any changes. Another thing that she decided was that she would grade each student individually instead of as a group in case some people slacked off. I found this to be fair but as a student has worked in many groups and has had many fellow students slack off. The thing about the good students that don't slack off is that it is a group project and they feel that all the work has to be finished. So the group members that are hard workers will do the jobs of the other members that slacked off as well. This is extremely annoying and we also don't get anything extra for picking up the slack. It is very discouraging to the good students. 
A lot of preparation is needed to have successful small group work. They can be very beneficial because they allow more students to share their ideas instead of it being the entire classroom. There are also some downfalls to this and as an educator we need to keep both of these in mind and not just write something off because we think it is too hard. 

Ch 6 Holding Thinking to Remember and Reuse

This chapter is about thinking and writing while reading. She goes through many examples of how she teaches her students to mark their pages and to write things down. Personally I have a hard time with this because I like to read as fast as I can when it has something to do with school. I am usually pressed for time as well because of school and work and such and don’t want to take the time to write things out or highlight important parts. So I really rely on considerate text so that I don’t have to read something a million times. But a problem I also have is in the rally inconsiderate texts I can read a sentence at least ten times and still not comprehend what it is saying. Those ones I really utilize the highlighters and note sheets because if and when I finally do understand something I and to write it down or underline what I understand.

Tovani tries to explain the chapter that by doing these exercises either through highlighting or having a sheet that can record their thoughts it is really about getting them to think while reading the text and then to write it down so you can remember. She goes over and over in the text how we can’t remember everything. She quotes a Mark Twain quote that says, “No one is smart enough to remember all that he knows.” This statement is so profound to me because it make s me realize that even if I know something it doesn’t mean that I will remember it. How many times do I learn something and then it is eventually forgotten. The human mind is so amazing but it does have limitations. So how can we get our students to retain the information that we are trying to give them? This idea of note taking is not profound but it is extremely important and helpful. Students are supposed to take notes during a lecture or class so they can remember the information, so why wouldn’t we have them write down what they are thing while reading something?

She also talks about the importance of group discussion and even group notes into his chapter. Through groups I am learning in this particular class that it I a huge benefit to getting the student to comprehend, If I didn’t have my group I would have been lost in most of the readings and assignments for this class. We also talked about this in depth in our class session last night and how a discussion can benefit the students even if they didn’t read the text. So in this case we had to answer if the content of the lesson was the most important thing or their reading skills. That way you can get on the students that are not reading so that they can start to participate and become better readers.

All in all I feel that the explanations that Tovani gives to the importance of why we do these note taking and highlighting strategies is very important. As a reluctant note taker and highlighter I am going to take Tovani’s advice and start to do it again. 

Ch 5 "Why Am I Reading This?"

The chapter starts out with a story about a girl that is postponing her graduation so she can take more college prep classes. She takes Tovani's course because she heard that Tovani can help improve the reading skills of the students. The student Lisa was convinced that improving the reading skills meant "speed-reading". But Tovani's purpose it not to get the students to read faster but to progress in their reading so they can understand the difficult texts. The student was upset because she thought that by taking her class her reading had gotten worse because she was reading slower not faster. She now had to think when she was reading and so her reading slowed down a lot. I found this story to be an interesting view on what is going on through the student's minds. Our purpose and their purpose may be at odds with each other. 

This leads into another story that Tovani encountered with a teacher that kept rereading a book and her lessons became harder and harder because she kept finding new things that she thought the students would need to know. She was becoming an expert and was having a hard time filtering out what was important for the readers to know. She makes up these very helpful sheets for the teachers to filter out what is the most important parts so that they are not asking the students more than is necessary. 

She ends the chapter with a piece about how some teachers feel that by telling the students what to look for in the text will dumb the assignment down and the students will only be looking for those specific things. I find this to be true but I also see the necessity of doing this. The students can read through a text and have no idea what they are trying to learn from. So they will either try to hold too much information and will get confused or they will use what Tovani like to call the "reciting voice" which just says the words but doesn't retain any of the information. I can really relate to this reciting voice. I find myself so many times thinking of other things when I am trying to read something. I find it odd that you can be reading text and having a whole other conversation inside yourself about things that are very different. If I knew what to look for when I am reading I would have an easier time with the text. I find this very helpful to understand for my future teaching if I ever have to have the students read something. 

She starts off every chapter with a quote from someone and I really liked the quote on this page. "I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander." Issac Asimov. It explains how I would like to be and how I hope my students will want to be also. If you understand things quickly you will be reading faster anyways because you wont have to re-read it over and over. 

Ch 4 Real Rigor: Connecting Students with Accessible Text

Tovani starts out the chapter with a story about how the students at her high school were failing thier U.S. History classes. Tovani then examined the textbook that was being used in that class and found the text book to be extremely difficult text. She soon went to the head of the department and asked him to order new books. He soon explained to her that were new books and they just spent thirty thousand dollars on them. He explained that they would have to do for the next ten years. So she tried to come up with an alternative to buying new textbooks. She soon introduces accessible text and what it is. It is text that fits or matches what you are trying to teach. You can find these in magazines, newspapers, or anywhere else that is short, well written and easy to read. Some people think this reading is dumbing it down and Tovani assures us that it is not. A teacher in her English department meeting exclaims to Tovani that he doesn't want to sacrifice rigor by giving easier text to read. This teacher is under the assumption that by having the more difficult texts the students will plow through it and learn more. What I feel he doesn't understand is that if the text is too hard the students will stop reading it and become discouraged.The result of this kind of discouragement can be seen in the U.S. History classes failing ratio. She later explains that you need to gradually build the student's reading up. Start them off at text they can understand and then give them harder and harder texts as they start to learn the stuff before. We are pretty much using scaffolding for our students in this way. Instead of just giving them the tools to build a bridge and telling them to go build it we are showing them each step as it comes. This is very important to all readers and especially to struggling readers. I found this to be true for myself as a reader as well. I struggled throughout high school and constantly tried to get out of reading the text. Once we were supposed to read a book and I ended up reading the first paragraph and decided that it wasn't worth my time. It was so boring and difficult. So I B.S.ed my way through it as I am sure most high school and college students do. But what did I learn? I am pretty sure that I got nothing out of that lesson. As an adult I started to read fantasy books and got really into this series. Soon I worked my way through this series and then I went on to read different types of text both easy and difficult. My reading and comprehension skills soared because I was able to want to read because of the content and I personally scaffolded myself to get me to a point where I am finally able to read difficult text that I never would have even finished the first paragraph of. I wish I would have had a teacher like Tovani in high school or even college. Even though I have progressed greatly since high school I still find some text very difficult. Our latest reading in this class is one of these texts that I am very discouraged with and having an extremely difficult time with. Tovani says, "If we don;t begin to find accessible text for all adolescent readers, they will continue to fail, only to become someone else's problem the following year. More students will become turned of by the content we love." (2004, p. 42) I have learned a lot about reading and comprehension to be able to help struggling readers that I encounter in the future. i will be sure to give text that they can understand and that challenges them at the same time.

Ch 3 Parallel Experiences: Tapping the Mother Lode

Tovani starts of the chapter with a story on how she was having a workshop for all the teachers in the school on a Saturday and then again the following Monday during school. As you could imagine some of these teachers were not too excited to have to be here to learn how to teach their students reading. Most teachers understood and appreciated the help that Tovani gave but some decided that they couldn't help their students read because they did not do any reading in their class. After probing a couple of questions to an angry industrial tech teacher the teacher and Tovani soon realized that the students had to read directions which can sometimes be very inconsiderate text. Then they also realized that they have to "read" blueprints in this class. Tovani had recently had an experience with blueprints and not belong about to read them. So she expressed to the teacher that you need to be able to read different things that only you as an elective teacher can give.
She then moves into a story how she presented to a class of math students how she thought about the problem when she was reading the math textbook. As someone that was mathematically on the same level as the regular students she actually went through and showed how she started to read through the text to understand the math. Tovani and the math teacher soon realized that the teacher sometimes takes for granted that they understand things about the text that they don't realize the students may not know.
She ends the chapter with a story on how she was coming into an English class to try to show the students how to get through a hard book like Frankenstein which they were having to read for their class. She expressed how she fake read it in college herself and had a hard time reading it for the lesson she would be giving to the students today. She then truly had to figure out ways to get herself through the book so that she might find ways to help the students get through the book. She piqued their interest by giving them the most interesting art of the book to start off with. She then gave a history on the author and why she made the book. She also explained  how the book was separated so that they had a better understanding of the layout.
I found this last part to be the most interesting because I am having a really hard time with a reading that we are having for this class. Unlike the considerate text that Tovani uses the text in this reading is extremely inconsiderate. I read through it once without picking up a single piece of comprehension. After reading it a second time I picked up on only a couple of things. Then I literally had to reread the beginning part like five more times to even get a decent understanding on the intro. I don't understand why we have to read things like this. I find that it discouraged more than encourages if the reader can finally comprehend. It's not exciting for me to comprehend.