Pytash: Chapter 1

All seven guiding principles discussed in chapter one are very true statements. From what I have seen at Firestone I can say that all of these principles deal with the student and teacher related issues that are directly related to a student's success in language arts. The first principle is so important because from all of my experiences in high school and college I feel that about only half of the students are doing the assigned reading. In Firestone I saw about a quarter of the students did their nightly reading, and they were the only students that participated and actually learned from being in the class room. I admit in high school I was not a consistent reader, If a book looked too long, then I would get the movie or read cliff's notes. But my freshman year of college in college writing 1 I had a professor who remedied the the class' not reading; he gave us daily reading quizzes over happenings in the book that wouldn't be on spark notes. I failed the first quiz or two, and decided I want to make it in college, so I made time at night for the reading. When my students start to show that they are not reading I will use this daily quiz approach to get them reading.

The second principle really opened my eyes to the debate over YA literature and the classics, I think this would be a great section to have INLA students read in Teaching reading with literature. This section got me to think about YA lit in a way I have never thought of it before, I now see (or remember) how reading mysteries and suspenseful books was one of the first times I ever associated reading with rewarding. We must begin to incorporate YA lit or exciting lit into the high school curriculum to create life long readers. Also, while reading this section I found myself agreeing with Oprah for the first time ever. I see how the INLA program is trying to incorporate a lot of these seven guiding principles in the program, like the idea of having a 'mirror' book and pairing it up with a classic, I don't care if scholar say that this will 'dumb down' the classics, if a student is actually trying to make connections between his or her life with a classic piece of literature, then we should be encouraging it no matter if some intellectual says we aren't teaching Shakespeare the proper way.

After reading section three I had my own idea about teaching difficult books and not assigning them. It is definitely important for a student to deal with the rigors of getting through a thick book at least once, but if we want to teach more than just one thick classic in a semester we could have the students only read the most important parts of the text and go over the theme of the text and other important parts. I know some one could say this is just like having students read cliff's notes, but if the teacher can guide the student through an important piece of literature that usually takes weeks to get through in one week, then think of how much more literature a teacher can cover in a semester, when we don't read a vary wide array of literature ,we focus in on the one area that the department has decided to focus on, we ought to throw many different types of literature at the students in a organized fashion, and see what they are interested in.

I like this how the author writes in this text book, I feel like her advice will translate in the classroom way more than some of the other advice I get from education gurus. She obviously has spent a lot of time teaching language arts, and her guiding principles are the issues we will have to deal with in the classroom, I feel that this text book is good preparation.