I Read it, But I Don’t Get it

              I am definitely guilty of fake reading. I honestly don’t know how many people that are in college are not guilty of this. Students learn from a very early age how to cheat the system and not read everything that they need to so that they can complete their assignment. Fake reading is something that throughout this book stood out the most to me because I think the purpose of this book from what I understood was to give students ways to read and understand rather than just reading words on pages because someone told you to.  After reading so many stories from the students and even the teacher about methods of fake reading that they have used I felt sort of defeated as a future teacher. I had never asked myself the really hard question that I think every teacher at some point asks, how can I expect my students to read the whole book, if when I was their age, I didn’t? Reading through this book I kept coming back to this question and tried to figure out how could I hold my students accountable, and how can I alter my lesson plans if I have students who also don’t know how to read. Having students at different levels of reading and comprehension was always something I knew I was going to encounter when teaching, what I never really thought about was that there is always the possibility that I would have students that don’t know how to read at all. This left me wondering how I would bridge that gap and teach to all of my students needs. The book provided so many different strategies for students to use when reading that I do while I read but that I don’t realize I am doing. I had to fortunate advantage of being taught how to be a good reader and had teachers that would hold us accountable for reading, but this wasn’t in every class. Reading strategies that show the student how to be purposeful, reading with a purpose gives students the ability to question what they are reading, and “questioning engages readers particularly in relation to difficult or uninteresting material.” Giving students the ability to question the material and other strategies to use when reading like making real connections to the student’s life so they can relate to the material, making predictions, stopping and thinking, writing about the reading, visualize, and my personal favorite, rereading. All of these and more were touched on in the book about how to make reading a better experience for your students, or steps that they can take to further enhance their understanding and ability to read for comprehension.