Today’s post is the second in the 7 day challenge. Important family commitments meant that I did not get this posted yesterday so I am going to try and do 2 today.
This is a situation that you, as an English teacher, face all the time I know. Your lessons are all planned, you have organised all your requirements to the Nth degree, everything is ready to go – and then something happens.
The technology doesn’t work, even though you practised it, students have suddenly disappeared on an excursion (field trip) that you weren’t told about, a colleague is away and you need to organize their class also. In a school full of children and young adults there are so many things that can go pear shaped that you are sure Robert Burns was a teacher when he wrote ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men/Gang aft agley.’
Anyway, today’s challenge is to write a post in response to a FAQ. Given our newness at this endeavour we don’t have a lot of questions from our readers, but there is one question that I hear English teachers asking ALL the time. How do we get our students to read?
This is going to be a short post today, not because I don’t have thoughts on this. On the contrary, we are in the middle of writing an e-book on this very subject. So You Want Them To Read will be ready to publish soon. In it we are looking at the 5 main reasons we have discovered why students don’t read the texts we choose. We are also going to suggest some strategies to overcome this perennial problem.
Today I am just going to list those reasons:
- The texts are inaccessible to them.
- We choose texts before we know the students.
- We underestimate their intelligence.
- We don’t like the texts either.
- We teach the curriculum rather than the text.
(I did not set out to make this a list post. It just happened.)
Until next time (which will be in a couple of hours *frowns*.)
Teach Well
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