Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

          Reading Cris Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It has reintroduced learning strategies for both eager and reluctant readers.  Some of the more obvious learning strategies are strategies that I learned while in high school but never mastered until my first year at university.  Talking aloud, marking text, visualizing what you’ve read; all of these reading strategies were something I was familiar with at some point in my academic career but was something I never practiced or took to heart because I was (and to some point still am) a reluctant reader. 

In Part 1, “The Realities of Reading,” Tovani brought up an interesting point to my attention about previously learned methods of reading.  In this situation, Tovani was talking with a teacher candidate who questioned Tovani saying, “[S]houldn’t They Have Learned This in Elementary School?” and followed it up with “[W]hy do I have to teach reading?  Do you realize only eight of my twenty-two students can read the science textbook?”  Whenever a teacher asked me a similar question such as “haven’t you learned this by now?” or “didn’t you learn this last year?”  Such questions made me feel inadequate in class and made me question my own learning up to that point in time.  However, as a future educator, it is my job to understand that sometimes the best way for a student to learn to read or improve their reading skills is to make sure that the text is accessible to everyone and to make sure that each student has the tools needed to understand their reading.

Another problem reluctant readers such as myself have is getting stuck in what I’ve been reading.  The words go in one eye and out the other without retaining any information I just read.  It becomes frustrating – to say the least – when someone, either myself or my student, becomes distant from their reading and instead of trying to provoke some response to their reading their minds just wander off to La-La Land.  In response to this problem reluctant readers have, Tovani’s chapter “Fix It!” provides solutions to these problems.  Rereading the text, questioning what you’ve read, making a prediction to the next chapter, visualizing the world that the text takes place, and even writing a response to the text helps those stunted minds wake up to their reading and assures them that they can get past their literary stopping points.