Blog Post #9: Cris Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

What I love most about Chris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don't Get It is how personal and professional her writing is. She introduces herself by explaining how in high school, she was a struggling reader and goes on to describe her own reading history of fake reading for classes. She the reading struggles of her past to connect and relate to the struggling readers in her classroom. The reality of fake reading is something I think most college students have experienced at one time or another. Most good students have figured out how to play the education system by simply jumping through the required academic hoops, in order to receive the grade they want. This is the reality for most students. I love that Tovani purposefully structures her expectations of students around this well known fact. She doesn’t do book reports, because she knows how easy they are to fake. She doesn’t waste time creating “cute” projects that work with Bloom’s Taxonomy, because she knows that thought-provoking questions don’t always equate to high-level, thought-provoking answers. She is real and honest about what works and how to make reading instruction meaningful for students.

The expectation amongst high school educators that their students should already know how to read by the time they reach their classroom is common. Even I have heard teachers complaining about this. I love how Tovani addresses this directly by stating that reading instruction must continue in secondary schools, because it is perhaps the time when students need it the most. At the primary level, students are taught basic level comprehension skills such as decoding and reading with fluency. Yet, secondary teachers continue to expect their students to walk into their classroom at the start of each school year as sophisticated readers who are ready to tackle dramatically increased reading requirements. Tovani explains to her readers that a master’s degree isn’t necessary for improving student reading comprehension, instead she offers the following simple suggestions: “become a passionate reader of what you teach,” and “model how good readers read” (21).

I usually like when authors of pedagogy books provide concrete activities and lesson ideas, because it helps me visualize how I would implement the theories into a classroom, which is why I particularly enjoy reading Kelly Gallagher—but Tovani provides very few detailed descriptions of what her theories actually look like in the classroom. However, I still really enjoyed reading this book and it has provided me with a more comprehensive understanding of how to teach reading to my future students.