week 6 readings

I thought this week’s reading was very interesting. Too often we think of reading as just something from school that we are obligated to do, but we neglect the fact that there are things outside out school that we love to read. Different people have different interests and reading abilities depending on the topic. I think as educators we should try to tap that interest to allow students to get better in scholastic reading. I also liked how the author categorizes reading into basic, intermediate, and disciplinary, and shows that it’s an ongoing process to be honed because students have individual strengths and weaknesses reflecting different disciplines. I feel like for scientific reading, there is a lot of background information and facts that students have to make sense of, but at the same time there is less room for open interpretation as compared to history or literature. There are always different representations for the same data, but the conclusions drawn would be similar if they’re close to the truth. Back to reading, my question is that as educators at the secondary level, there is a huge possibility that we will “inherit” students who were passed along without much intervention in earlier grades, never fully attaining even “basic” reading level. I would like to know ways to help more able students develop disciplinary reading while at the same time help others catch up, all in the same classroom.