What Reading Should Be to Your Students

 I this book “I Read It, But I Don’t Get It” I learned a lot about what it means to actually read and what it means to be a constant teacher of reading. In the book, Tovani’s referred to so many times in her career where teachers have complained or wondered why they have to teach reading to secondary students. This is something, before reading this book that I wondered as well. Now I understand that not every reader gets to the same level throughout school and sometimes we, as teachers, have to get students to that level. This book also taught me a lot about what reading is and what reading is not. Most people think reading is being able to actually read and then comprehend what you read. There is so much more than comprehending but using background knowledge, inferences, inner voice and drawing connections. Being an active reader has been brought to my attention a lot lately. I am guilty of a lot of the things that Tovani’s students struggled with when it came to reading. Things like letting your inner voice drift off to something more relevant in your life or just accepting the fact that I don’t understand the text and waiting for the teacher to tell me the answer. It wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that teachers don’t want to give you the answer but want you to come up with it on your own. I think that it is important to teach students to become good readers because reading is in every aspect of our lives. I like the activities she used to help students understand their confusion when it came to difficult text rather than just telling them to correct answer but having them break down where things go astray. I think that the journals are a great asset to have because you can choose to focus on different components of the text like background knowledge so the students have a purpose for reading.