In Ellen Carillo’s article, she talks about how if students don’t really know why something was written, they won’t really care about what they are reading.  In a sense, I believe she is right about that because now a days students only care about the purpose behind of what they are reading. If they are given a random article, with no context behind it, they won’t really see the importance of that article, and once they find the meaning behind it they can decide for themselves if its important to them or not. In the past I’ve had to read many articles for the  context, but deep down I didn’t really care about what I was reading, I was doing it because I had to. The difference it would make is if a student knows why they are reading that text, they would not rush to get it done quickly because there is a real important meaning behind it. There is a higher chance of them taking notes and annotating to truly understand that text. But if a student is reading for only context, the’re is a higher chance of them getting bored midway and they would take more breaks because they don’t really see why reading that text is important.

I disagree with her because I believe having a balance between Google-knowledge and having understanding is the right way to go because if you understand the text with your own knowledge, and also having google to back up your understanding is better for you because there is a higher chance that you are right.  It’s good to have a balance of both because if you have complete google knowledge, you won’t really know how to put it into your own words, and that could confuse you in the long run. And if you have understanding from your own knowledge, there is a higher chance of you making mistakes, and it could take you a really long time to fix those mistakes. So in the end, having a balance  between the two reduces mistakes being made, you can put it into your own words with a low chance of getting confused and you’ll have complete understanding.

According to the article, some tools that can help students become a better reader is by reflecting on what they read and annotating. These tools definitely  helped me in the past because if you ever read a complex article and you start annotating you’ll start to understand what you just read.  These days, especially when I was in high school, teachers would always tell students to annotate and every time I do, I would understand the text way better than I used to. Now ever since then I’ve always understand the importance of annotating.  Also writing a reflection after any reading has helped me because I can write down what I remember and the meaning behind the text.