Appleman Chapter 3

Appleman starts the chapter with a fantastic anecdote of a student with whom reader response didn't really work, the student was too into responding and not enough into the reading. She talks about some of the things I was talking about with others in my response to Be the Book! Sometimes reader response isn't the best. Sometimes it' s more important to make sure that the students are in fact reading the classics and it's important that they're actually getting what they can out of it. The dangers of only using reader response are very real, and I think they make a better case for teaching other types of reading theory than the entire first chapter. Thinking about how helpful it would be for students to know the different ways of looking at something is really interesting and I think it's definitely something that's teachable at the high school level, but I still think the risk of alienating your students is high.

Appleman Chapter 2

Assuming that teaching literary theory is the right course for the majority of students, this chapter is really helpful and gives strategies for helping teachers teach literary theory. Out of the four primary strategies he gives, I think the most useful one is having the students write nursery rhymes from the perspective of different characters. My problem with some of these other strategies, and Applemen even brings this up herself, is that it's easy to confuse something like the Star Wars exercise with just a simple review of characters and archetypes. The big challenge is taking the students and making sure they're able to step out of that and see the bigger concept of theory. I also really like the fact that Appleman says that every now and then the best thing to do is to just not use any literary theory for a while, I like the fact that she suggests switching back and forth between using it and not using it.

Appleman Chapter 1

The book starts off similarly to the way that Be the Book started, a little repetitive and the focus of it was convincing the reader that the authors purpose is an important one. This book was a little more interesting because Appleman starts off by making some really interesting observations about how teaching has been working lately. I definitely agree that it's a little blind for teachers to only teach through reader response, because there's something to be said about teaching students how to really read the text and get meaning out of it. I'm still a bit skeptical at this point about how helpful actually explicitly teaching literary theories is to high school students.

Wilhelm Chapter 6

"As the word suggests, canon is a holy word, and there are many teachers and parents who think that there is a particular set of texts so culturally important thta every student needs to know them. This becomes the job of schools. I think, though, that we need to ask what our purposes are as teachers: to teach texts, or to develop readers who can and will want to engage with and know texts in personally powerful ways throughout their lives." -Wilhelm

I've been thinking a lot lately with the current teaching philosophy dogma that seems to be taking over the pedagogical community, and it sort of bothers me. The main focus of all teaching nowadays seems to be solely the education and entertainment of the students who aren't excelling and the main goal is to make sure all the students are motivated and educated so that we can all live in a better, more educated society. Sounds great. But I worry about the students that don't really get talked about anymore(or at least not to my knowledge), the incredibly bright that don't need to be motivated. Teachers like Wilhelm claim that it's better to be teaching everybody the same things and that even the brightest learn from the activities he teachers, but I really wonder if the majority of lessons taught by him and teachers like him are really the best for that level of student, or if we should be designing lessons that specifically target the group that will benefit from it the most.

The reason I put that quote at the top is this:"to teach texts, or to develop readers who can and will want to engage with and know texts in personally powerful ways throughout their lives."
If you have motivated, intelligent readers, why not teach the text? Why not teach canon if you have some students who will benefit immensely from it? I'm not saying that these students are being overlooked entirely, but it definitely seems that the new teaching strategies talked about by Wilhelm would have been the kinds of things that would have bored me to death in middle school.

Wilhelm Chapter 5

In chapter 5 Wilhelm talks mainly about the students that weren't responding well to the Drama exercises and how he planned on appealing to their artistic nature to get them to read better. As I read this chapter I realized that you could play on a thousand different likes and dislikes, not just artistic capability, to encourage students to read. I thought about my own younger brother and how he loves to play video games, and I thought about the millions of different activities that could be done like that. Something like "If this scene in the book, or this story, were translated into a video game, what kind of video game would it be? Who would you play as? Would there be "boss battles?" Or even something so much as having younger students make Pokemon cards or just playing cards in general that are based on the characters they read about in a book. There are so many different ways to relate to the students that it's hard to believe there are so many students out there who don't at least enjoy reading a little bit.

Mainly I found the story about the ESL student fascinating. After being in Japan I definitely recognize the fact that even having some scratch paper to draw on does wonders when trying to get something across to someone when you only half speak their language. I think this is something that could be used extensively for all ESL students regardless of their artistic abilities, and encouraging them to draw what they're saying to help them in class could help open whole new levels of expressiveness for them.

Wilhelm Chapter 4

At this point reading this book wasn't really something I was just doing for class, it was something I was doing because I actually enjoyed reading it!

The book gets infinitely more interesting once Wilhelm starts talking about the students in his class that are having a hard time getting interesting in reading. Chapter four mainly focuses on those students and how he helps them through the use of Drama and acting out scenes from the book. Probably the most helpful thing from this chapter is the large amount of information Wilhelm provides on the different activities he used with his students and the positive reactions he was able to get from some of the more stubborn students. The stories about the kids who "just didn't get it" when reading reminded me a lot of my younger brother, who is going into 5th grade this year. I can tell just from the books I've read with him that this is exactly how he reads, I can see now that he has a big problem visualizing what's going on in the story and for him it's basically just a bunch of words, and I look forward to going home sometime this month and working on some of these techniques with him.

Wilhelm Chapter 3

The third chapter of Wilhelm's book was fantastic. It was really interesting to see the different ways he was able to get into the heads of the students and the different results of his research. Mainly I thought it was hugely beneficial to hear about the amazingly complicated things his different students were doing to read, and at the same time the chapter had me thinking about my own reading styles. It strange because thinking about it now, I've always been an avid reader but I don't think I do nearly any at all of the kinds of things some of these kids do when they read. It did have me wondering how many students actually are like that. I realize he's mainly taking the things he found from some of his most helpful students but it still skews things because it's hard to keep in mind that there are probably plenty of students out there that don't have any of the same reactions at all when they read.
I'm amazed by the complexity of the SRI exercise and I've already been able to think of many ways to incorporate this method into my own kinds of teaching, and the different ways it can be used to help students improve their reading skills. His classifications are a bit technical, but the very specific anecdotes he gives from Ron, Cora and Joanne are fascinating.

Wilhelm Chapter 2

In chapter 2, Wilhelm raises some interesting questions about the nature of reading. I found it interesting that he does in fact value the concept of valid reading, and he recognizes the fact that even though it is very important to simply get the kids reading, the most important thing is that at some point they're actually reading for meaning. Wilhelm has started to present some of the interesting things he discovered through the conversations he had with his students. It's hard for me to believe that even in a large class there were even three kids that were so open and ready to talk about the reading experiences they had, reading experiences that they actually enjoyed! Of course it's no surprise that the biggest complaint the students have is that the reading they do at school isn't anything at all and isn't nearly as enjoyable as the reading they do by themselves at home. Wilhelm then goes on to cover the same ground that most other literature teachers are covering these days, mainly the fact that students need to have access to a very wide selection of reading material so that there is a lot of things for them to choose from and there for there's a higher chance that all of the students will find something interesting. Because after all, simply getting them to read is always step one.

Wilhelm Chapter One.

Well, I just finished chapter one of the Wilhelm book, and maybe I'm feeling more belligerent than usual today but this book is driving me crazy. Having read the full introduction and the first chapter the list of actual information I've gleaned so far is ridiculously short.
Mainly:

• Reading is good.

• Some students simply don't want to read, this is terrible.

• The reason these students don't want to read is because they've been encouraged to read only to look for meaning.
• Wilhelm's daughter Fiona is very cute.

It reminds me of one of those old Bill Nye episodes where Bill takes a simple scientific fact and expands that information into an hour of entertainment without really adding anything else. Of course I'm expecting the book to become more practical as I progress through it, but I really didn't think the first chapter had much to offer.

The main thing I did learn from the first chapter is that for a long time kids were turn to look at text in a very scientific way, searching just for meaning and not concentrating on the different emotions and ideas that the text elicits from them. It's easy to see why this was such a dominating way to teach because in many ways it's the easier path, and grading and lesson plan creation are likely simpler. It's also easy to see why a reading philosophy based on Efferent reading can let a lot of students slip through the cracks.