10/18/17 - Tovani and The Art of "Getting It"

In Tovani's book, I Read It, but I Don't Get It, she outlines many of the issues young students have when it comes to reading. Most of them come down to the simple task of getting them to care. Now, simple does not mean easy. It is by no means easy to get students to care about what they read, but it is straightforward. All you have to do is help them relate what they are reading about back to their everyday lives. One of the better examples Tovani gives is when she is asking a male student to read an article about Area 51. The student tries and fails to read the article well, so she tries a different approach. She says to “use outside information”; to add the student’s preexisting background knowledge to the article to make it more relatable for him. And you know what his initial response is? “I thought that would be cheating.” That’s right, cheating. Students have been so conditioned to treat each source of information as its own self-contained bubble that they cannot connect the dots of information even if they are right in front of them. This allows the student to write about things which they might personally disagree with, but then they discard the information whenever they are done using it or file it away under “use only for school”.

Another reason students don’t care about reading is that they are easily confused by the text. This is not to call them stupid, just to say that reading something without really trying to understand what is being said can lead to a lot of confusion. While not the main cause of causing students to not care about reading, it is, in fact, an issue which compounds their already muddied understanding of the text. To counter this, Tovani offers many strategies: make a connection (as discussed in the paragraph above), stop and think about you have read, paraphrase what you’ve just read, or perhaps just increasing or decreasing your speed of reading. Personally, I think it’s amazing to see an author write about confusion among readers, which is often lamented by education but seldom worked on or ever resolved.