I Read It, But I Don't Get It

I actually read this book in Dr. Beth's class The Composition Process last winter. From what I can remember, the book is about how students are reading things without actually understanding what they are reading. I remember going through the motions and not understanding what I was reading because in elementary school, we were always being timed to see how fast we could read a paragraph but we never had to summarize what we read. They just wanted to see how fast we could read. Because of that, I always wanted to read as fast as I could and I never got good at retaining what I was reading unless it was something I was interested in. Even when I got older and had to write papers, most of the time I would start reading what was assigned, but then would just look up the text on Sparknotes and was able to write the paper from that. Sometimes it was even worse and I was able to take bits and pieces of what I was supposed to read and somehow come up with enough BS to write a paper and somehow got a good grade on it.

Hopefully this has changed. I don't know very much about what they are doing in elementary schools nowadays when it comes to reading and comprehension, but hopefully they are actually focusing more on the "comprehension" part so that by the time kids get to high school or even college, they can actually understand what they are reading and they don't just look up summaries or just skim what is assigned so that they are able to full contribute to whatever assignment that it is attached. For this book itself, there are some awesome tools in the back of it, so I'm planning on keeping this book for my own personal use in my classroom someday as something to refer back to.