What am I Taking Away from the Readings?

This week’s question is, what if anything am I taking away from the readings at this point? I will answer this mainly based on the short stories and the Smagorinsky readings, which were assigned this week.

I LOVED the short stories. They reminded me of some of the reasons why I want to be an English teacher. I’ve read “The Fall of the House of Usher” countless times, yet each time I seem to appreciate more the gothic literature and the twist Poe inserts at the end. I remember, as a teenager, literally screaming out loud when I got to the end of the story and I cannot wait to share, teach, and analyze similar pieces with my own students!

The Smagorinsky readings this week were absolutely critical to me and helped to clear away some of the remaining cobwebs I had regarding unit design. For what it’s worth, a former boss once told me I, “don’t think the same way that other people think.” What does this mean? It means that sometimes I can quickly understand a concept while at other times I get hung up on minutia. While my peers have been handily working on their unit designs, I’ve had a few challenges and needed these additional readings this week before I felt I firmly had my hands on the football.

Certainly it can be argued that the Beach text has been addressing unit design all along and why, might you ask, did it take me until NOW to understand what we are doing? Part of it is the mapping we did with Sarah in class last week. In addition, the Smagorinsky text is written in a pragmatic style and formatted in such a way where I can pick it up at any time (even on four hours of sleep), understand it, and glean something useful from it.  Smagorinsky has a way of taking the obvious and making me think further about what he is saying. For instance, in his discussion of tracking versus non-tracking in schools, he explains how my decisions about unit design will be affected by the presence or absence of tracking. He states, “If your school uses tracking, then your decisions about materials should be responsive to the reading abilities and interests of your students…” (137). This is the obvious. He then goes on to say, “…and you should be alert to the ways in which race and class-based discrimination can account for the different populations you find in different tracks” (137). This too might be obvious to us now that we are enmeshed in ED330, but it is still not something that is always in the forefront of my mind, yet I need to consider my students when choosing materials for my units. Smagorinsky has clarified that rich excess, such as that shown in “The Great Gatsby,” may not be an appropriate unit choice for a track of kids who live lives surrounded by “race and class based discrimination” (137). As a product of a predominantly white high school and college, these ideas and issues do not come to me as readily as they might to my peers, such as Aaron. I think Smagorinsky understands this, and although at times he may be appearing to point out the obvious, there usually is some kernel of truth in there that I find useful.

The Beach text is extremely rich but at times can feel dense to me, like a chemistry text – I must go back and read, re-read, and read sections again, wherein that is not the case with Smagorinsky. How do my peers feel about the differences in the texts?

So to answer the question, I am still learning from the readings. I certainly plan to keep both texts as references for my teaching career, but I do think I will be reaching for Smagorinsky first and Beach second, particularly when I am designing my unit for this class and future units for my students.