I don't know if I would consider myself a "good" reader because I'm not the fastest or best at comprehension, but I absolutely LOVE reading for enjoyment! I love reading romance, fictional stories about the everyday person, and fantasy novels. I love books that can take me away from my own problems. I love to read the Sunday comics because they can almost always make me laugh out loud. I love reading facebook status updates because I like to keep up with people's lives.
I always loved reading at home because I could read whatever interested me, I had no deadline of when it had to be read, and I wasn't going to be quizzed on the material. That freedom is what makes reading so enjoyable. Most of the time, I didn't enjoy reading books for school because I was not given any sort of choice as to what to read. Although there were some exceptions. For example, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is my absolute favorite book, and I had to read it for my high school English class. I think everyone should read this book because it is so spectacular! It has adventure, romance, mystery, and historical fiction all rolled into one book!
My mom is definitely the reason I love reading so much. She had a great selection of books in our house from children's books to adult books. She read to me as a child and always encouraged me to read for enjoyment. I was also greatly influenced to read the scriptures from my church group. That definitely helped me improve my reading because there are a lot of big and strange words in the scriptures! As far as I can remember, I have always had friends who love reading as much as I do. I remember going to the library during lunch with my friends in middle school. We were all reading the same series of books, and we loved to discuss what was going on in our latest read. I honestly can't think of a single person who ever discouraged me from reading. Probably the biggest discouragement has been TV and the internet because sometimes it just seems so much easier to flip on the TV than to go find a good book to read.
I really like the idea we've been talking about in class about having a class library where students are able to find interesting books about my content area. At first, I was thinking I'm pretty sure there are no books about math that a 14 year old is going to want to read! But, since I've been working on the text set assignment, I've found many high interest books about math for people between the ages of 6 and 600! The young adult books often have a lot of colorful graphics which will catch the interest of young people. They also address some of the more interesting subjects that are related to math. I think the best way to get kids interested in reading texts about my discipline is to have them available in the classroom.
I would love to have assignments where students get to choose one of the books from the library to read and write a reflection about or create a display to share with the class about their book. I also think it would be great to have a comfy reading corner where kids can go if they finish their assignment early. I also think I will add little blurbs about math books in my lectures. For instance, if we were talking about the additive identity, I might recommend that they read Zero by Charles Seife for the biography of zero. I think these activities will foster a good climate for students to be interested in reading books about math. I think the key idea is to give students a choice of what they want to dedicate several hours to read!
When students are choosing to read for the pleasure of reading, they will probably consider themselves readers. There is nothing I can do to make a student choose to read, but I can do several things to encourage it. I can give them reading assignments that makes math interesting to them, maybe in a way that they never even knew was possible! I can put in a plug for reading and how much I enjoy reading. I can reccommend good books that I enjoyed reading at their age. I cannot, however, force students to enjoy reading and consider themselves readers. I hope to show student how fun reading can be and more importantly, how fun reading math literature can be!
My google books library
Reading this posting really makes me look forward to reading your text set! Your enthusiasm for reading will make you a tremendous asset to your principal, to your colleagues, and most importantly--to your students. Rock on!
ReplyDeleteI had similar thoughts before I created my text set about the lack of books in our content area. But like you, I discovered there were tons. I like the idea of working books into your lectures. That made we think of another way that might be cool to talk about books. I thought of doing a book highlight each week. The idea I had in mind would be having the book in a prominent display location with a summary attached. Then throughout the week I would use information, stories, examples, etc. from that book to teach concepts to the class. I thought it might show students that there are other ways of learning math than just from a text book.
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