I Read It, but I Don't Get It

This book gave me perspective on how readers who are struggling think and feel. The realization of how demoralizing it is for an adolescent student to ask for help with reading comprehension or to be placed in a reading class is important to reflect on as we think about handling our own students. I liked how Tovani says that, "reading must be about thinking and constructing meaning. It's much more than pronouncing words." Her initial focus on studying what good readers do feels like an empowering approach to give students instead of focusing on what struggling readers do wrong. The self-monitoring of where you're at in a text is so crucial; I think about paperwork I've had to read for buying our house or legal documents and I know that sometimes in writing especially where the terminology is unfamiliar, I have to reread it to make sure I am getting the full meaning of it. Having an image like that to reflect on when considering working on reading with a secondary student will be helpful to me moving forward.

The tools that she presents to help readers are easily accessible and practical for classroom application. I can easily see how a little work with a struggling student to help their comprehension can go a long way towards their success. The fake reading habits that she talks about at the beginning and then the inference drawing that she talks about at the end are going to be interesting things to tackle in the classroom.  The way she describes her success all through high school makes me wonder how I will know if my students are doing the same thing.  The inferences that aren't quite there seem like they could be an indicator for fake reading or lack of comprehension.  The questions I have after reading this are more about how to discover my struggling readers so that I can employ these or other strategies to keep them from getting through high school never having read an entire novel. The idea that finding connections between the students and the text is something that can be powerful in their overall understanding of a book and that we have to be creative to find, but in order to help a student make the connections, I would first need to know that they're struggling.