In his article, Ellen Carillo worries that we’re creating students who don’t know why something was written and therefore they don’t care why it was written or why they’re even reading it. I’m not sure how other students deal with reading but that statement feels really accurate for me personally. Whenever I read through a text, I usually have no idea what I’m looking for. With no purpose in mind, most of what I read just useless information I cannot get back to immediately. I believe that the current state of education for how to read any form of text is flawed and does not actually help students understand reading in a good sense. Even reading through Ellen Carillo’s article, I struggled and felt ironic how he described the flaws of the CCSS and how students struggled with reading while putting it all down into long elaborate writing. Moving on, she talks about Google-knowledge vs. understanding and talks about a study that shows reading online makes us better at one than at the other. Personally, I don’t think reading online makes us better at one than the other but I believe people can read more if they’re more immersed in the text rather than stare at just lines and lines of tiny words stretching endlessly on a page. As for Google-knowledge and understanding the text, I feel like whenever I have to read anything, I’d just end up with “Google-knowledge” and just get a general view of everything and miss out on very important details and not really “understanding” the text. And finally, the section from p.146-153 of Ellen Carillo’s article talks about ways to help students be better readers. I really don’t think there’s any hope for myself, to be honest, so I can’t suggest anything. Aside from that, the idea of having annotations by texts to guide the reader through doesn’t appeal to me. That strategy just ends up with needless distractions. While the idea of having a certain goal in mind looking for something specific, tests used the education system feels more unrelenting, making you understand everything from a text while referring back to it with choices that are right but also choices that are better, all under a limited time span. I don’t think I am good at reading and it’s something part of English class (or any class that makes me do textbook type reading) that I don’t ever see myself enjoying.
About
This OpenLab site accompanies Jackie Blain’s synchronous ENG 1101 course for Fall 2020. The Course Materials are here (Assignments, Resources, How-to Videos) as well as the Class Discussion blogs. We’re all about writing in multiple digital and analogue situations, for multiple purposes… and investigating and talking about issues by asking questions. Lots of questions.
To get in touch with Prof Blain, either drop me a text on our Slack channel or email me at DBlain@citytech.cuny.edu.
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Buzz Lightyear photo: Brett Kiger
Imagine photo (street art): Creator: José Iván B. V.; Copyright: PeterPunk – Fotolia
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Ursula C. Schwerin Library
New York City College of Technology, C.U.N.Y
300 Jay Street, Library Building - 4th Floor
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