Chapter 2 of Doug Beuhl's Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines addresses some of the expectations of middle school and high school students regarding their reading comprehension. As students read, they should be generating questions, recalling prior knowledge, visualizing and creating mental images, making inferences and drawing conclusions about presented information, determining importance of various pieces of information, synthesizing and organizing that information, and applying reading strategies to adapt for different kinds of reading material.
Doesn't that sound exhausting to you? It sounds exhausting to me, yet that is exactly what we find ourselves doing when presented with extensive and detailed information that we are genuinely interested in reading. We do it automatically! The human mind is amazing. However, Beuhl calls attention to students's seeming inability to do something that we hope might be automatic by the time they are entering high school, at the very latest.
My theory? We need to pay more attention to our third, fourth, and fifth graders. Middle school teachers should be teaching students advanced reading methods for dealing with more complex texts, not teaching (and re-teaching!) basic skills. Literacy needs to be a focus of educators in every discipline at every level, not just when we start to realize our teenagers are having problems.
But hey, that's easy for me to say, right? I don't want to be a teacher, I'm an oddball here. That's all right, sometimes it's nice to be an outsider, you get a fresh perspective, a different angle. As a librarian, I feel like I have the chance to have a wider perspective on literacy in students of all ages, even if I don't have the deeper influence that teachers and parents get. Still, libraries are part of the communities that surround them, and I look forward to finding new ways of encouraging young students to not only read, but to explore the world around them.
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