Ch4: "...We focus too much on teaching our curriculum and don't devote enough time to teaching our students"- Rick

"If the reading is too hard, I just get the Cliffs Notes or skim through chapters. If I can't get the Cliffs Notes, I just listen to what the teacher and kids in the class say."- Jay, high school sophomore.

I can personally relate to this quote. It was uncommon for me to have trouble with a book and for me to borrow someone's Cliffs Notes before taking a test. But what did this do for me in the long run? I ended up cheating myself out of building up my literacy which became prevalent when I came to college. Finding college readings to be more diverse and complex than high school readings. In college I had to learn how to comprehend, and ask questions on research papers for biology classes. At first I found this to be very intimidating since I didn't want to ask a dump question, but I later came to find out that everyone else was asking the exact same questions.

In this chapter the author finds that rigor reads aren't necessary for helping students succeed. Instead the reading needs to be fitted to the students so that they can work on a challenging level to where they can decode the text and still ask questions. If the material is too complex students will not be able to ask questions and will give up. It was also found in a study that "Students care more when they are encouraged to think, when they are challenged to an intellectual wrestling match"- Hyde & Bizar (1989). Students like to feel included and intelligent if we give them a text that they are unable to comprehend even in the smallest sense then we are just lowering their self-esteem and prolonging the inability for the student to work on their comprehension and fluency.

It is also complementary to have text sets which consist of accessible texts that support the current reading or study in the classroom. This allows the student to be exposed to a broad spectrum of readings and helps them to understand the primary reading. For instance, when I had to read The Odyssey I found the text to be a hard read even though we went over it in class and got to watch the movie. Tovani (the author) suggests having a Text Set available in the classroom for books just like The Odyssey. For The Odyssey she suggests reads that illustrate the gods, heroes, and monsters, historical books from the book’s time period, a map of Greece, etc. Such resources will help educate the students past the information seen in this text and build a foundation of background information which will in turn help to make the book an easier read.

Ways that I could use this in my biology class is by finding current research papers on hot topics, historically famous research papers, anatomy books with illustrations and comparisons, bibliographies are profound scientists, and journals. This way I am exposing and preparing my students for a broader spectrum of readings and showing them the relevance of biology in the real world.