10/8

I have been so busy this week because I’ve been moving and it’s been the hardest thing ever! Nonetheless, I’m glad the hard parts are over and now I get to decorate everything and make it gorgeous and fashionable probably to my boyfriend’s distaste, but I’m selfish when it comes to making things pretty J.  But even with the agony of moving balancing over my head I still managed to read for this week and might I say I love our Book Club book, and thank you so much Alexis for recommending it!

            I think Tyrell is a great book for adolescents because it can be so relatable to a lot of kids. I cant wait to get to the end because I am eager to see the message that Coe Booth ends the book with. As we go on this journey of Tyrell’s life, I am really interested to see what she wants the reader to get out of it, especially Blacks and Latinos who are highlighted in the novel. What does she want them to go away with? In what ways might the message impact adolescents in Tyrell’s shoes?  On the other hand the book is not only relatable to African Americans and Latinos and that is also a plus. Tyrell faces many obstacles and even positive experiences that any HUMAN can relate to, which makes the book even more appealing for the classroom.

            The Beers text (though not as interesting as Tyrell) was enlightening and taught me that the definition of a “struggling reader” is more flexible than I once thought, and at times I struggle, but it never defeats me because I know what to do in those situations so it shouldn’t defeat my students either. Her explanation of a dependent versus an independent reader was key to me because it first posits everyone as readers, and second gives a clear solution to improving the ways in which dependent readers read and that makes the mission of getting kids to become active and productive readers a lot easier.

            As for my classroom visits they have been going fairly well. I’m getting a lot  more acquainted with the students which makes me very happy. When I visited the reading class, the students spent the whole period on “word recognition strategies” in which they looked for synonyms in a thesaurus and substituted words from a passage with the new words they discovered in the thesaurus. I honestly did not see the point of spending the whole class on this as the students were struggling with doing it independently and I couldn’t grasp what the benefit of the assignment was. Especially when done independently and students are choosing words that completely change the meaning of the text they are working on. I also noticed that the class is sort of spread out and because there are only about ten students, I think it would be better if the class came together and did more group focused work with the instructor and not with so much lectures. What do you guys think? Can you see some positives and negatives in these situations? I’d love to hear!