WHOA!

Reading:
Catching Readers Before They Fall: Ch. 7 I Thought I Knew How To Teach Reading, But Whoa! by Johnson/Keier

I would like to preface his post by saying that the handwriting in the pictures on page 111 is unreal.  Like, it might actually be perfect.  I feel like there is a very high standard set for my handwriting, and I do not know if I can live up to these expectations!

Anyway, this chapter talked about what to do when you are struggling with struggling readers.  It is easy to see how it can become frustrating to work with struggling children, pour tons of energy into helping them, and see little or slow progress.  There are several strategies and specific things to work with these children on.  However, whether they need to learn which direction to read of what sounds certain letters make, working with them will take patience.

Not all students are easy.  Many have different backgrounds that we do.  I know when I was first thinking about teaching, I expected all of my students to be like I was: a precocious child who learned easily and excitedly.  I realize now, of course, that that is very far from the truth.  But that is what I originally thought.  That is what I'm sure many others with no experience think as well.  And that is still sometimes what I hope for.  It would make my job easier.  It is hard to put yourself back into the position of not knowing that text goes from left to right or that we start to read at the top of a page.  It is hard to remember what it was like to learn these things.  But we have to realize that many children have yet to discover what to us seem to be obvious facts of life.

My mom recently found an old video from when I was in first grade.  It involves my entire first grade class sharing artifacts that they have chosen to represent the various letters of the alphabet.  As students walk up to the microphone, they mumble their names and pause as they try to remember what their letter is and how it relates to their object.  When it was my turn (I had the letter R, in case you were wondering), I marched briskly up to the mic and announced loud and clear that I, Rachel Knuttel, had brought in rattles to represent my letter.  I then proceeded to shake the rattles in a demonstration, before, striding away and letting the next student approach the stand and mumble their name.  I laughed upon seeing this video, because I remember doing this project, and I remember my parents laughing at how much more confident I seemed to be than the other children.

It might sound bad to say that I was the kind of student I dream of having, but I am the kind of student that I have the most experience with.  I, and others, need to make sure to look past the idea of having only confident students brimming with background knowledge enter our classrooms.  There will be students with disabilities or with no previous knowledge or who are learning English for the very first time.  No student will have the exact same background that I do.  And therefore, we can not depend on our memories of ourselves as students to determine how we will teach our future students.  We must open our minds and prepare to learn many strategies, but especially the ones that we didn't need ourselves.