In the end of Cris Tovani's (2004) book, she states in one sub-heading that we will never have all of the answers. This is more of a self reflection on ourselves as teachers. One statement that I thought summed up our careers as teachers was something someone said to Tovani. The women said, “My wish for you is that each of you look back at your career and laugh with embarrassment about the way you used to to teach. If you do this, you will continue to learn and grow” (Tovani, 121). I know this is silly but every year that I teach I feel that it gets easier and that my methods get better. This is for the fact that I always look at the lessons and the units that I teach and reflect on what worked and what did not and there is always room for improvement no matter how good a lesson is.
A Reflection on this book
Sorry if this is a cliche but this book was incredible insightful. A lot of the ideas in this book are ideas that I will use in my classroom or will use to build on strategies that I already use. The ideas that I found the most useful are the reading strategies for help struggling readers. I really like how Tovani sums up her ideas at the end of each chapter. This make is easy for teacher to use this as a manual to implement these ideas in their classrooms. The ideas in this book are not complicated and do not need to be taught as a huge lesson plan. These are strategies that are to be done in a repetitive manner because we want the students to make use of these strategies and, hopefully, make them second nature.
Remember, in the end, it is all about the students and what makes reading easier of them. We should not just dismiss our students lack of motivation of reading as just being lazy but we need to find out what the problem is and teach them these ideas. Remember, as teachers, we made it this far because we became good readers. We just one day become good readers but we became good readers due to finding out what works best for us and we should not take that for granted or even keep these strategies to ourselves but share them with our students because in the end, it is all about the students.
Reading your blog has been very beneficial to me. I feel as if I gave read the book. Even though I am not an official teacher yet, I do feel that with every year that goes by with experience I grow as a teacher and my methods become better and more effective, just like you stated in your blog. This book sounded very interesting to me and I think I will have to read this book, and by reading it I think it will give me more isight on reading and how I can relate it to my future profession of physical education.
ReplyDeleteI will also use the ideas that I found in my textbook as well as my peers textbooks in my classroom. I am pleased that I finally read something that I can take with me.
ReplyDeleteI am very grateful every time I read people’s blog. Though I didn’t have access to the books (since I am in China now), I feel I didn’t miss anything about the books. Reading people’s blog is a great way to learn, especially in this case of reporting the books people are reading. What’s more illuminating is reading people’s comments. It immediately expanded my horizon. Woo, people are reading the world from so different perspectives…
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.