"Subjects Matter", Chapter 1 and 2 Response

The anecdote provided in Chapter 1 about the Fast Food Nation at Best Practice in Chicago encourages me to believe that when you help students fill their reading and writing toolboxes, they can really rise to any occasion. I’d be lying if I said the idea of my students distributing flyers and causing a bit of scene in a McDonalds didn’t worry me. Basically, I read that and my mind says, “What if someone called the cops?!?” I am really trying to imagine that… Did these students discuss the level they were going to push their protest with teachers before doing it, and what to do if someone called security or the police? Am I being alarmist? Daniels (2004) suggests later that teachers should “prefer to see students overly worked up than not worked up at all” (p. 13). This seems reasonable to me. A curriculum where students need to be reigned in does sound preferable to a unit where I need to pull them out. I loved that Daniels emphasizes that the reading and writing skills being taught are just as important as the content in allowing the students to get so worked up and be so engaged, “In this unit, for example, the teachers made use of text coding tools, book clubs, dialogue journals, bookmarks, post-it notes, text annotations, admit slips, and exit slips” (p. 4).

I appreciated very much that Daniels says “there is a robust industry of public school debunking, with think tanks pundits and publications deployed in loud unanimous doom saying” (p. 12). When community schools who need assistance are successfully portrayed as beyond assistance with the help of standardized tests, it makes room for for-profit companies to come in through the rapidly changing charter school movement. Stan Karp (2013) suggests in his article Charter Schools and the Future of Public Education that “Gradually this charter movement attracted the attention of political and financial interests who saw the public school system as a “government monopoly” ripe for market reform.” In a time where the very existence of a school can be at stake when student success is examined, it is very important to use the practices that Daniels describes which “have scientific research showing that these practices work - and plenty of it” (p. 17).

The reading exercises in Chapter 2 did a wonderful job of reminding me that much of the reading I do has become habit, I tend to just ‘click’ along. I certainly feel as though as I have “cobbled together [my] inventory of reading/thinking skills” (Daniels p. 31). The reading exercise regarding Columbus truly underscored Daniel’s point that activating a student’s prior knowledge is key, and that a student’s trouble reading is probably not an issues of poor phonics. I’m looking forward to the strategies the rest of the book will provide.