To me, rushing an assignment seems to come very naturally. Every night, I (along with everyone else) have hundreds of pages of reading, and I’m expected to internalize the themes and ideas being explored by these texts. Fortunately, I like reading, so I am capable of doing so—but I’m almost always held back by an anxiety (physical and abstract) about having to rush myself through the process. I feel this anxiety every time I crack open even the most seemingly dull or antiquated text; it’s not that I don’t want to read Chaucer, it’s just that I want to be able to take my time and process his words. At the end of the day, I’m unwilling—or unable—to compromise, so I end up staying up late to get my work done, reaffirming for myself that I am a person, not a scanner.
Janet Allen’s chapter on effective vocabulary instruction was refreshing, due to the fact that it undertook the task of re-approaching an area of school that even she herself considered challenging. One of the most irritating things about a policy like NCLB is that it fails to appreciate that learning is a process, not a product: that in order to be able to read, a person has to understand the words. In the section that asks, “How can we use vocabulary instruction to increase content knowledge?” Allen outlines a process for approaching complicated texts through the vocabulary words themselves, understanding that knowledge cannot be imposed onto students, that it has to be built. Particularly for students today, who apparently have difficulty with print literacy, the words themselves are the place to begin. She notes that, after reading an introductory text that uses some of the difficult language and then assigning a fill-in-the-blank activity, students can “bring enough background knowledge to do a Possible Sentences activity” (99). Knowledge isn’t imposed onto the students; it is built, stacked, layered, and also connected to new and different ideas. The Possible Sentences activity takes a small, but well-built, foundation of understanding, and then allows the students to exercise some agency in continuing to create connections between the words and concepts at hand. Only then do they undergo the process of reading the actual textbook.
This chapter in particular directed my attention towards something that I try to keep in mind any time I am helping someone who wants to learn: the only way to do it is to be patient. Each page in each textbook is made of individual words, each of which are paths to knowledge in and of themselves. There’s no good reason to ignore the fact that someone may not understand one, or any, of them.
