You Gotta Be the Book: Chapters 1-3

I loved the introduction to this book! I really like reading about teacher's experiences, so this was awesome for me. It provides for a great reflection for ones self as well as their readers. Creating a teaching journal such as this demonstrates the care, compassion, and motivation for the author to become the best teacher FOR his students that he can be.
With that being said, one of the fist journals the author shares with us states, "The eighth graders simply hate reading, or say that they do, and they refuse to even try to do it" (3). Nothing that the teacher was attempting was working. How frustrating this would be! It seems as though the teacher was so open and willing to attempt all possible avenues to get his students engaged in independent reading.
Thus, his first chapter explores how to morph the classroom into a reader-centered one. The author describes a reaction that I am so familiar with, pertaining to the boy, Randy. He stated that "school is a bunch of crap that doesn't mean anything... you just do a bunch of crap for someone else so you can get through the year" (19). This, for me, epitomizes my entire high school career. Yes, I do like reading. Yes, I did exceptionally well in school. Yet, I was also able to produce what the teachers wanted. They wanted a five page paper on "my" representation of a character in a novel, that they said represented a certain thing, so I wrote the paper based on what they told me it represented. Quite honestly, I did not really notice that I was moved to "do as told"  as much as the reality of it, until last semester. I was talking with a fellow classmate who had been out of school for a while, thus offering more world experience than what I could offer. Our one professor would tell us something, yet could not always tell us why it was this way. My classmate could not accept this. She said she learned by connecting things together; learning by knowing why things were the way they were. At first, I could really care less why the answer was the answer. Ridiculously, I just wanted to memorize it and get that "A." However, as my peer continued to question why and was further agitated by the unresponsive professor, I became interested in the "why." As a side note, one of my other classes began stressing that as a student teacher/ teacher in general, one should continuously ask "why are things this way?" Asking "why?" will get you answers, and when it doesn't, you can go out and find the answers. So anyway, I became unsatisfied with not knowing how ans why things connected, it didn't make sense. We were being fed ONE person's view, ONE person's answers. We were being told to memorize certain things that ONE person felt was necessary, yet that person could not provide why we were memorizing it. As a student, I felt I was being slighted. Yes, I could memorize this ridiculousness; however, I could not tell you why it was important, how it connected to other information, and why I was learning it in the manner that I was. I ask you, is this teaching?! Is this really learning?! I think not. Teaching, as well as learning, is an interactive process. It's a process in which one explores the "why" when they are unsure. It is NOT the ability to regurgitate an answer, simply because the teacher tells it to you.
Ahh, sorry for the off-topic long reflection, that's not all that off topic. Nonetheless, I shall get back to the book in a later post! Thanks for reading : )