You Gotta Be the Book

What a wonderfully engaging text for this course! I must admit, when I started to read this one, I had just come off reading "Confessions of Nat Turner" for my African American Lit course, and I just wasn't in the mood for another text that didn't interest me. I was pleasantly surprised.
There were several portions of the introduction, chapters 1 & 2 that jumped out at me, so this blog entry will center around specific quotations within those portions. To begin, I will say that Wilhelm almost instantly gained credibility in my mind because of the completely honest way in which he described his teaching. I never got a sense that he was one of those braggarts who call themselves professionals in the field of education. The section titled "Personal Readings" affected me in a personal way because I share his feeling about how the reading of a story can get into my soul, change my life, and lead me in an entirely new direction. He says: "My best friendships involve books; some friendships are because of books. There are authors and characters that I feel I know so well I regard them as friends, great-hearted people whom I get to know better each time I read. Seeing they have written a new book or story is like receiving a dinner invitation: a chance to get to visit and know each other more" (Wilhelm 4).
As I read on, the words on the pages kept urging me on, to find answers to the very important questions he poses: how can we as teachers reach the students in our classes that don't share this absolute love of reading, and how can we motivate them to even care? The whole first chapter set me up for these answers, but I simply wasn't given any. What I was given were stories of his life as a teacher of reading, his experiences with those children whom I most fear at this point in my teacher education program. He voiced his thoughts on pedagogy, on theorists, and practice. I found myself feeling really good about the program here at U of L because it is so vastly different than the one that Wilhelm had to endure. My heart broke for him when I read this line: "My notes from college classes recorded the 'intentional fallacy' and the 'affective fallacy' - which warned me not to be moved or affected by my reading - as pitfalls to be avoided..." (Wilhelm 14). Yikes! I can't imagine wanting to teach reading if this was my educational experience!
Moving on, I like the theory of David Rumelhart that is mentioned on page 17. He advocates an interactive model that "conceives of reading as both a top-down and bottom-up. Yes readers search for global meanings, but they sometimes use decoding skills on a local level to achieve this end" (Wilhelm 17). I found myself agreeing with this approach most, because I can't imagine having to decide between a top-down or a bottom-up method to teaching adolescents to read. Why choose when you can incorporate both and target the individual needs of students? I like also that Rumelhart stresses the relationship between the reader and the text as important, rather than one or the other guiding the process of discovering meaning.
I also fell in love with the idea of the necessity of a feeling of freedom for readers, especially among adolescents. If they don't feel free to discover meaning, to read on their own, to read in class, to discuss what they have read, they simply won't do it. The example given of the two students who were doing the outside reading but were embarrassed to admit it in front of their peers shocked me! How could reading be "uncool"? Not in my classroom, not in my life, not in my philosophy of teaching. I hope I don't encounter that attitude, because it will take all of my patience to not be angry at the students who call others nerds for their love of reading. Rosenblatt seems to support this, as the text describes: "her model suggests that 'students must be free to deal with their own reactions to the text,' which also means that teachers should 'ask students what they see, feel, think and remember as they read, encouraging them to attend to their own experiences of the text' (p.31)" (Wilhelm 21). Within the discussion on Rosenblatt, however, I also found one of my concerns that Wilhelm evidently shares: "Rosenblatt rings true to me, but she doesn't give an answer about what can be done to help my middle schoolers see themselves as readers" (Wilhelm 23).
Chapter 2 shed some light on those answers, thank goodness. I love the stress placed upon viewing students as specific human beings rather than just some generalized, marginalized person. When we think of them as brilliant, unique individuals, I think we can discover their own personal attributes and how they can add to the classroom community in their own ways. I also liked the reference given to "winning 3 out of 5" so that Wilhelm and his students can "go to the World Series" (Wilhelm 28). I am such a baseball fan, so that is why it caught my attention, but upon further consideration I realized that it rings true to one of my other fears as a teacher in training: that the students won't like me, or that I will fail to help them learn. This attitude Wilhelm has is very realistic in that he realizes that there is no possible way to reach every student in every class, every year, but that we must try to do our best despite that fact.
To end the chapter, and the first reading assignment, I will say that I identified most with the student named Cora in the text. I, too, remember a time when my absolute favorite thing to be doing at any given time was to be reading. I could escape through it, learn from it, makes friends within it, and come out a more intelligent person all around. I still have those experiences with books sometimes, but my priorities have changed a bit (I have someone I would rather be with than my favorite book). I appreciated the story about her most because I could see myself in it so many times. I can't wait to see what happens next, and to see how others in our class reacted to the text.