Joseph Melvin-Zenon
English-111
Miller
10/17/12
Academic Multi-Source Synthesis Essay
Throughout school students will always have reading assignments; some students
comprehend the material better than other students. They understand what they have just read,
and they can make a connection with that they are reading. Therefore this leaves the student
feeling confident in the reading. Then there are the students who have the worst time with
reading. There are the students who are afraid to speak up in class, because they are lost in the
material. They don’t like to read books, not because they can’t, but mainly because they cannot
connect with the text, and they cannot keep in the information that they just got done reading.
That is the problem that I chose to write about, Students and how they cannot connect
with the reading. Students graduate from high school, and attend college, thinking that they are
ready. Then they get assigned a reading assignment. They go home and read, then eventually
give up on the reading, simply because students don’t know how to interpret the text. They
cannot paint a mental picture in their head, or they cannot relate at all to the author. The students
today don’t fully understand what it takes to read. The open their book and just stare at the pages,
or they end up re-reading the same sentence over and over to try to fully comprehend the
information. The students don’t have any strategies to help them; therefore the reader is left
feeling unconfident about their assignment, or eventually will give up on it. This leaves the
student clueless whenever the class talks about the reading the next class session.
In the article “Disliking books at an Early Age” written by a literature teacher Gerald
Graff, he states that “what made literature, history, and other intellectual pursuits seem attractive
to me was the exposure to critical debate”. (Graff, Pg. 113). His class broke down questions for
them to answer; Graff found that by using the critiques of other people helped him with
connecting with his readings. “Reading the critics was like picking up where the class discussion
had left off, and I gained confidence from recognizing that my classmates and I had had thoughts
that, however stumbling our expression of them, were not too far from the thoughts of famous
people.” (Graff, Pg. 114).
If students learned how to understand “critical debates” I think that it would help the
students become more confident in their reading and writing. They wouldn’t be afraid to
speak their thoughts during the class discussion. Instead teachers are not even teaching
their students how to become confident readers, Graff explains “charge leveled against
the current generation of literature teachers, who are said to have become so obsessed
with sophisticated critical theories that they have lost the passion they once had for
literature itself. They have been seduced by professionalism, drawn away from a healthy
absorption in literature to the sickly fascination with analysis and theory and to the selfish
advancement of their careers” (Graff, Pg. 115). Students are not being taught the right
way, because the teachers are not helping them develop the proper skills that they need to
help them strive to become a better reader, writer, and learner for that manner.
Students need to be taught the proper ways of reading, annotation, debates, read,
and re-read, write down a summary of a paragraph, then continue with their reading.
There are so many different types of methods that teachers should be teaching their
students to actually be prepared for college level English classes. Teachers and students
need to understand one another; the teacher should help out the students individually,
because every student is different. “The moral I draw from this experience is that our
ability to read well depends more than we think our ability to talk wall about what we
read” (Graff, Pg. 116). Students just need that little push, and help from their teachers to
help them get on the right track to becoming a much better reader. Graff says “the
assumption was that leaving me alone with literary texts themselves, uncontaminated by
the interpretations and theories of professional critics would enable me to get on the
closet possible terms with those texts. But being alone with the texts only left me feeling
bored and helpless, since I had no language which to make them mine” (Graff, Pg. 116).
Students need to be given something to go off of, in order to develop their own
style, in order to help them understand their readings more, teachers and students both
have their own certain things that they need to work on, and they can be resolved if the
student and the teacher interact more.
Works Cited
<Norgaard, Rolf. Composing Knowledge. Boston, New York: n.p., 2007. 111-16. Print.>
<Graff, Gerald. Disliking Books at an Early Age. N.p.: Gerald Graff, n.d. 111-16. Print.>