Blog #1
My name is Claire Nastari and I was born and raised in Cupertino, California. I am a sophomore here at Chico State and just recently changed my major from business to liberal studies. I am looking forward to being a teacher, but also in my spare time I love to bake and hope to open my own bakery at some point down the road.
When reading a text for the first time I believe that good readers read to make sense of whatever they are reading. They are not necessarily the fastest readers, but they will take the most out of the book after they are done reading. They will understand the text to a deeper meaning than someone who just reads for speed. I also think that good readers will read over a paragraph a few times if they do not understand it the first time in order to make full sense of the remainder of the reading.
A positive reading experience that I have had recently was last year in my english class. This was the first year that I actually enjoyed my english teacher because she gave us options instead of making us read a certain book. I ended up choosing the novel Divergent to read, write a paper on and to present to the class a common theme from the book while relating it to society today. This was the first book I had read in a english class that I could not put down. It had adventure and suspense around every page and I lost myself every time I opened it up.
The most reading that I do outside of school would have to be on my computer. I am constantly checking my email, scrolling through pinterest, looking at recipes and much more. Other than looking at a screen for my reading, I read the Bible frequently. The reading that I do outside of school rarely connects for the reading I do in school. Sometimes biblical references will come up in a humanities class or in an english class discussion but other than that, my reading for school and outside of school does not overlap.
One of the claims that Williams is making in the article is that people have different definitions of “readers.” Some could refer to it as someone who is always quick and on the feet about different topics and others could refer to it as someone who takes different thoughts into account and waits for a while until he or she has a well thought out answer. I believe that one of the take aways from this article is for a teacher not to have closed mind about what category to place each child in. Just because a student does not do well on a particular assignment or an activity in class does not mean that he or she is a bad reader. Teachers need to have an open mind when it comes to how each individual student processes information.