tekmology

recently, i was named to a national commission for reading. it sounds pretty fancy, but i'm sure that we're not super super important. the commission studies recent research on reading and tries to produce advisories and guidelines for field teachers and teaching education programs. the last commission recently received word that a major publisher will publish their recent research for release in early 2008.

at my first meeting, we tried to respond to the keynote speaker's call for applied technology in our classrooms. she explained that our students learn to read and write in diverse media and our teaching and our learning should reflect their new abilities, interests, and needs.

i'm into technology, for sure. (i love my ipod!) i have used a computer since forever, i started my family into blogs, i can still help people with their computer problems, and i even can explain some pretty arcane stuff, sometimes. but, i'm definitely not a full fledged geek. and i tried to be clear to the commission that field teachers don't have any use for technology that doesn't help us get somewhere important. i don't want to bring a computer into my room so i can say we did something on the computer.

that said, i've tried recently to bring in two ideas that i think are really gonna work in the classroom. first, i've worked with a group of class leaders to develop a weblog to begin posting writer's notebook entries. the nice thing about the webiste, though, is that students can bring in all sorts of the media they want to be about and think about and talk about. and, i think it's really important that the students can write and comment and share discussion about the things that they're all thinking about. it gets them to publish in a way. . . to think about what they're writing and to open their ideas and themselves up into a conversation, and i'm excited for it to happen.

also, i started to read the television show "heroes" with my classes. i can be a pretty strict teacher, but i also believe students understand that i like to have fun with them as themselves. i feel like "heroes" allows us to work on the reading skills we've been learning in our books, but it allows them to acquire and practice the strategies on something they find really engaging and interesting.

i'm trying to get the students to understand that we read everywhere: we read books, but we also read people and movies and situations and television shows and settings in our lives. when we ask questions and make predictions and inferences and make connections to help us understand our books, we use the same strategies to analyze and understand our own lives. we don't read to say we read. . . we read because it helps us understand ourselves and our world.

i tell them reading has no meaning to say you have read this book or that. it isn't important to read romeo and juliet to say that you have read shakespeare. it is important, though, to think about and wonder about and know about love and jealousy and honor and loyalty and family. it is important in our lives to know these feeling and these ideas and to make our lives more full and more round. there is meaning in reading, and there is meaning for our reading in our lives. and, i believe, the only reason for students to be interested in reading is because it will deepen and change and enlighten our own ideas about our lives now.