comprehension

After reading through about reading comprehension I feel like I have a deeper view and understanding of myself and why I struggle with reading comprehension. I remember in school always hating reading, and still to this day there is a list of about 50 things I'd rather do than read a book.  Although the idea of being "taught" how think about your reading during the reading process seems somewhat silly, how readers think during reading and the strategies they use are extremely important when it comes to comprehension.   I realize now that a lot of this has to do with never being "taught" how to read. The only time I have been able to find myself actually comprehending text is when I have to take notes, or have some type of question or ideas guiding my reading. Through out elementary school most of the reading had to do with being presenting a surface question about the reading such as " why did Tommy leave his house" with surface level answers. By the time I got to high school the only real comprehension techniques I knew were to take notes and visualize. Don't get me wrong, I had book discussions in class and always ended up leaving class with a deeper knowledge of the material than what I came with, but that was half in part to not comprehending a lot of the text and relying on others to help fill the gaps kind of like what applegate describes as "fuzzy thinkers."  It wasn't until sophomore year in TE 348  that the idea that you create meaning within text by relating it to yourself in methods of  text to text, text to self, and text to world even became something evident.  I have always struggled with reading comprehension in part to my ability to focus and not allow my mind to wander while reading texts. Another problem I have is looking too closely for things within texts, being a "literarist" and concentrating too hard on creating a meaning, or finding the information that I need rather than enjoying/ letting the reading process and comprehension happen.

Within the classroom, I see a lot of the students going down a similar path when it comes to reading. Most of the time the students are reading silently and then answering questions about the text, and you can tell what students are actually comprehending the texts, rather than just reading the words. A lot of the students are "quiz contestants" and "literalists" I kind of got excited when thinking about the book discussion I am going to be having with them this week because it is so different from what they have experienced. I hope that the book discussion can show them some ways they are suppose to be thinking about texts and introduce them to some reading comprehension techniques that could potentially steer them away from the "hatred of reading". Although I know its not something that magically happens over night, hopefully the students experiencing a grand conversation can elicit some of the students to realize how they should be thinking while reading texts.