Samantha Sweigert
RPP – Draft 1
English 486 – Dr. Shea
1 May 2012
Reading Partner Profile: Draft 1
Introduction:
Reading is a skill that we must nurture and develop throughout our lives, no matter
where we stand in relation to others. As a future English teacher it is overwhelmingly
important and necessary to understand that students come from different backgrounds,
hold different values and beliefs, and are on different levels than each of their fellow
students. As a current student of literature and language, it is easy to forget that not
everyone is interested in the subject that I love, nor has it always come easy to them. It is
always important to keep in mind that everyone has their own strengths as well as
weaknesses. This is why I chose to do my Reading Partner Profile on a 10th grade student
named Melissa who loves reading outside of school, but could care less about educational
reading.
Melissa is a 15 year old sophomore in high school. She is very outgoing and loves to
be with her friends. She enjoys listening to music, singing, drawing, writing poetry, and
reading “as an escape”. Conversely, she has not always had the easiest experiences with
reading. Although her family is full of self-described readers, and reading was an activity
that was nurtured as a child, she was placed in a “reading difficulty” class for first and
second grade and was later diagnosed with ADD. She explained to me that throughout her
public school experience, she would get the feeling that her teachers would automatically
assume that she wasn’t paying attention or that she was having difficulty as a result of her
earlier placement in supplemental reading classes and her Attention Deficit Disorder label.
She therefore has tended not to enjoy school as much as other young adults I have spoken
with. Jeffrey Wilhelm says in regards to his own study of “remedial readers”, “With every
move and comment they made, they damned the very label, the class they were in, and
their whole history of reading education in school” (2). Indeed, Melissa values school for
mostly social reasons, though she understands that she needs to do well. She skates by
with most of her homework and earns B’s and C’s for the most part, with the occasional A.
She spends most of her free time either hanging out with her friends or on the computer
utilizing various forms of social media. She says she enjoys reading, but usually only before
she goes to bed at night and mostly just young adult romances.
While her reading ability has increased tenfold since she was placed in
developmental reading during her first and second grade years, she still struggles
occasionally in her English classes with her assigned readings.
Pattern:
Melissa makes obvious distinctions between school reading and reading for
pleasure. Although she admits to enjoying be read to when she was little, and
“pretending” to read to her parents before she would go to sleep at night, she seemed to
lose her love of reading as soon as books started being assigned to her. Melissa’s time for
pleasure reading is either before she goes to sleep at night or during summer vacation
when she has practically the whole day to do what she likes. This is in direct correlation
with what Wilhelm observes in his classrooms from year to year. He says,
…it seemed that the real reading lives of my students were led outside of school.
They did not expect school reading to be fun, engaging, or personally satisfying. If
they regarded themselves as readers, then the reading they valued was pursued in
study halls, at home, with friends and family—usually any place but the classroom.
(39)
Melissa says she enjoys reading magazines (Seventeen, Cosmogirl), fantasy novels,
young adult romances (especially Sarah Dessen), and fan fiction about her favorite bands.
While she tends not to like reading in the school environment, she has a few good
memories. One of her favorite literary experiences in school was when she was in 7th grade
and she read The Outsiders. She explained that she was pleasantly surprised by how much
she liked the book and the characters because most of the people she reads about in school
are “hard to relate to”. She also said she got to choose how she wanted to cover the book in
a report. Instead of a basic, “here’s what happened, here’s what it means” paper, Melissa
chose to put together a collage of things that she cut out of magazines, quotes she found
from the internet, etc. “I ended up getting a really good grade on that project,” she says. “I
think it was probably because I got to use art to tell everyone about the book.” Wilhelm, as
well as many other teacher-researchers and education theorists, would mark this as
evidence that the interpretation of reading should be open to multiple intelligences.
“School should be a place where students are encouraged to use their natural talents and
aptitudes” (Wilhelm 183). He admits that “If they are not, students will be unrecognized,
bored, and unhappy” (183). With what Melissa has described to me about her experiences
in school, she has encountered classrooms that have made her feel all three of these
emotions.
Origin:
Melissa’s automatic need to separate school reading from pleasure reading is due
largely to the fact that she feels like material she can’t engage in is forced upon her. In an
interview when I asked her how she feels about school literature she replied, “I mean, I
understand that we have to read the classics, but there are a lot of other good books out
there that people my age really like and I don’t understand why we can’t have a little bit of
both, at the very least.” In this circumstance, Wilhelm’s view of “the traditional literary
canon” would prove helpful. Wilhelm states, “What constitutes a literary text is any text
that provides a particular reader with a deeply engaging aesthetic experience” (p. 47). She
has demonstrated that she does well with material when she can make an emotional,
personal connection to the characters in the story. Melissa’s experience with reading S. E.
Hinton’s The Outsiders, can be seen as strong evidence supporting Wilhelm’s claim. Milner
and Milner describe the book as a “realistic and compelling tale of alienated teenage boys
that was written when Hinton was sixteen and reflects what she was experiencing in her
Tulsa, OK high school. After more than forty years, it remains in print as the second bestselling young adult novel in publishing history. It helped establish young adult literature as
not only a serious genre but one worthy of legitimate study in mainstream classes” (223).
Having something relatable to real life experiences and emotions in front of the students as
a text has proven vital for Melissa, as well as countless other adolescents. She counters by
explaining, “Having something that I have to read in order to get a good grade on a quiz
every single week makes that really hard,” she explains. So reading for pleasure often gets
put on the back-burner in order to keep up with mandatory reading, and the
complimentary worksheets and quizzes. For that very reason, reading for pure enjoyment
may often be knocked to the very bottom of the list on her things to do.
Pattern:
The types of fiction that Melissa tends to gravitate toward are, more often than
not, either fantasy (Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Cassandra Clare) or young adult
romantic fiction like Sarah Dessen and John Green. She says she enjoys reading authors
like these because they “give me a world that I can escape to. One where I don’t have any
homework to worry about.” Some of her favorites are the Harry Potter series, The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, Looking for Alaska by John Green, and The Hunger
Games by Suzanne Collins. Some of her worst reading memories come from having to read
The Scarlet Letter. She explains that she had a difficult time “getting into” and connecting
with the book or the characters because of the way language was used. “Why can’t they
just say what they mean,” she asked in frustration. “Then we have to have an hour long
conversation about what the red letter ‘A’ means,” she laughs.
In order to really try and get a glimpse of this in action, I asked her to read a chapter
of a book of her choosing with me. She chose Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (part of the
Hunger Games trilogy) which she had been currently tackling in her spare time. “I just can’t
get over the fact that they are sending her back into the Hunger Games,” she remarks on
Katniss Everdeen’s newly discovered fate. “I knew that something big was going to happen,
and that her life would probably change—there is another whole book left in the series,”
she reminds me, “but I really didn’t see this coming.” Melissa is showing strong evidence of
Wilhelm’s Dimensions of Reading as she describes what she is thinking as the story moves
along. In the above statement, Melissa is remarking on how she had envisioned something
different for the plotline of the novel, illustrating the evocative dimensions, specifically,
“Showing Interest in the Story [where] students comprehend the literal meaning of the plot
and became interested in it as they read. They made predictions and formed expectations
about story action” (Wilhelm 67). She continues, “I’m really nervous about what this
means for Peeta and Katniss. They love each other! They haaaave to end up together.”
With this passionate response, Melissa is “Relating to the Characters: Readers created
characters and took up relationships with them. The reader often became a presence in the
story and made judgments about characters” (Wilhelm 67). “I don’t know what I would do
if I had to kill my friend [Haymitch] and the guy I loved,” she despairs, showing evidence of
drawing on real life experiences to help explain the text or, what Wilhelm would call
“Connecting Literature to Life”.
On the other hand, I also asked her to read the first part of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray
Bradbury with me, just to see what her reaction would be to a similar genre (dystopian) in
a “classical literature” format. When I mentioned it she told me, “Oh, I was supposed to
read that in school before, but I sort of got by just using Sparknotes and skimming here and
there. I couldn’t tell you much about it,” she admits. When I told her it would really help
me out if she could try to read it over again, just the first part, she agreed. In an email about
the first part of the book she says,
I had a harder time getting into this book because I knew it didn’t really involve a
love story of any sort but as I kept reading, it really did remind me a lot of some of
the other books I really like, like The Hunger Games and Matched (you should check
it out I think you’d really like it too). The idea of the government controlling things
so much seriously freaks me out, but I can understand why someone would want to
write about that. I also understood the symbolism behind “The hearth and the
Salamander” a lot more this time around. Where the hearth is supposed to be the
home and the salamander represents fire and Montag’s job and the destruction of
the idea of the home. I really think I could enjoy it this time around.
This email correspondence hints at Melissa’s blossoming ability to engage in
Wilhelm’s reflective dimensions in which the readers consider significance, recognize
literary conventions (symbolism of the hearth and the salamander), recognize reading as a
transaction (why the author might have wanted to write about censorship), and evaluating
an author, and the self as a reader (“I really think I could enjoy it this time around.”) (68)
Origin:
Melissa is a very social teenage girl. She thrives off of interaction, whether it be
between her and her family, her friends, or boys she’s interested in; being with people
drives her day. For this reason, it is natural that she seeks out reading that she knows she
can identify with and find enjoyment in. Milner and Milner cite Rosenblatt in saying, “‘Like
the beginning reader, the adolescent needs to encounter literature for which he possesses
the intellectual, emotional, and experiential equipment,’ [and] ‘Books must be provided
that hold out some link with the young reader’s past and present occupations, anxieties,
ambitions’” (222). Because she has had such a negative view of school literature, she
understandably flocks to fiction that you normally wouldn’t see in the classroom like young
adult fantasy and romance.
Pattern:
Melissa, although she is an intelligent young woman, cannot seem to recognize
her own cognitive processes. When she reads for school, she does it statically and purely
for the intention of answering whatever questions may have been sent home with her on a
worksheet that day for homework. She does not realize that she brings her own
preconceptions into a story, that she problem-solves to figure out answers, or that she
engages in a mental conversation while she is reading. Schoenbach argues,
Reading is not a straightforward process of lifting the words off the page. It is a
complex process of problem solving in which the reader works to make sense
of a text not just from the words and sentences on the page but also from the ideas,
memories, and knowledge evoked by those words and sentences. (18)
And yet, when Melissa reads (more specifically for school than for pleasure), she skims in
order to get the big picture, and looks for specific details about the story only to fill in the
blanks on a worksheet. Wilhelm offers that this way of reading is a direct result of the
“bottom-up” approach. He tells us that, “This view regards reading as a data-driven
process, and is rather mechanical in that it emphasizes mastery of specific skills, moving
from small units such as words, phrases, and sentences,” and this approach, he argues,
yields “the longest and greatest influence on reading instruction, and the one that is usually
reflected in basal readers and reading programs” (20).
Origin:
This could perhaps be due to the fact that the process of reading has not been
reinforced as it should have. Melissa has very rarely described an English class in her
school experience that engages her or interests her. “It’s mostly just the teacher asking the
questions, us giving the answers. Or the worksheet asking the questions, and then
skimming to find the answers,” she complains. She seems to be a prime example of what
Milner and Milner would label a “resistive reader”. Resistive readers are described as,
“Students capable of reading who choose not to because they prefer the teacher to do the
work for them. They have learned to be ‘dependent’ readers, waiting for the teachers to
give them the answer, so their skills never improve” (Milner 210). When a student is
unfamiliar with the various processes of reading, he or she is therefore highly unlikely to
readily engage in those processes and repeat them, using them as a valuable tool.
If Melissa were in my class:
Though Melissa shows difficulty with reading in school, she professes to enjoy
reading when she has time to. This presents an interesting dilemma to the English teacher.
How does someone who likes to read, who is able to immerse themselves in stories dislike
reading so much when it comes to the classroom? I feel like the disconnect with Melissa
has been displayed very pointedly throughout our time together. Ever since the diagnosis
of Melissa having Attention Deficit Disorder, she feels as though she has been treated
differently by her teachers, especially in her English classes. She has also resented being
made to read certain types of literature, though she is able to admit their value. As a future
teacher, I feel that whether or not material sticks with a student depends largely on how
the material is covered. I’m also a huge believer in students needing to feel that the
material being covered in class is relevant to their lives.
Milner and Milner pose the job of education well in saying, “We have a responsibility
to meet them [struggling readers] where they are and intentionally scaffold instruction to
help them undo the detrimental effects of past failures and frustrations” (209). This is true
for every student, but I feel that this statement could be specifically applied to Melissa as
she has had so many negative experiences in the past with the preconception that she is
ADD and will consequently not be engaged in the material. If Melissa were in my class, I
would take that information into consideration but would in no way let it drive my outlook
on her as a student. If we, as teachers, set high and reasonable expectations, students will
generally strive to meet them. Milner and Milner emphasize this concept, explaining, “We
must recognize that communicating our belief in students’ capabilities and our
commitment to help them become active readers can transform both their reading
experiences and their self-concept” (210).
In addition to expecting more from Melissa, it is also important for her to see the
value of reading in and out of school. If I, as a teacher of literature, reading, and writing, do
not openly posses and demonstrate the love for reading and writing that I expect my
students to show me, what kind of message am I sending? Something every English teacher
should remember and be aware of is the idea that, “Giving students an opportunity to
watch their teacher model his or her thinking process before, during, and after reading can
be one of the most powerful tools for shifting the way that students perceive the experience
of reading” (Milner 211). If a student witnesses any person whom they respect not only
displaying and actively engaging in reading processes, but enjoying them as well; they are
more likely to display and actively participate in those same processes. High schoolers are
very aware of hypocrisies and if the sermon isn’t practiced by the preacher, then it usually
falls on deaf ears.
In regards to the types of text covered in class, Melissa needs a balance of canonical
texts with young adult literature. Wilhelm argues, “Part of encouraging adolescents to read
is knowing a variety of materials and encouraging kids to read different genres and authors
to learn the scope of what is available and the field of their own taste” (48). Melissa has
said explicitly that she prefers to read stories that involve an element of romance and that
she usually sticks to the genre of fantasy.
If Melissa were in my class, I would try to incorporate a variety of genres that she
might find she likes in order to broaden her scope and increase her capabilities. I’ve gotten
the feeling that she hasn’t been regularly encouraged to experiment with different texts,
with the exception of classics that obviously haven’t made much of an impact. To that end,
“When students are helped to outgrow their current selves, they will have the desire to
deepen and expand their experience. Any text that serves these ends must be regarded as
literature” (Wilhelm 49). When teaching more traditional canonical literature, I might
suggest watching current film adaptations of some of the classic texts or dramas in addition
to reading the required course material in order to have a visual to go along with the
written text. Providing plenty of background information about the time period/culture
within the text might also help Melissa enter the story world more easily. Anything that
can help her connect or have any sort of emotional investment in the story would be
worthwhile. Melissa has said that she enjoys literature that she can relate to, so suggesting
various nonfiction texts might go a long way, especially memoirs. Having a variety of
different genres and kinds of texts available to all students would increase the chances of
them picking up something new and consequently growing as a reader.
Because Melissa thrives off of social interaction, I feel it would be incredibly
beneficial to incorporate a reader’s workshop into the classroom. Getting to share her
thoughts and insights with me (as the teacher) and her peers in class would stimulate
social conversation about reading and reading processes. Having her use a journal in
which she could record personal responses to the texts she is reading as well as use to
write back and forth to her classmates and teacher would enhance her awareness of her
own cognitive processes and gain insight into others’.
The teaching profession is arguably one of the most demanding as we must not only
impart knowledge to our students; but we must engage and take interest in their lives
outside of the classroom as well. No student is the same as the next, and everyone has
different skills, emotions and life experiences in their “backpack”. It is important to
remember that I will have good readers in my classes, and readers who struggle.
Hopefully, by using different methods to aid students like Melissa in entering, exploring
and extending the texts that they comes across, my future students will be able to say with
confidence that reading is a valuable and ever-present part of their lives and who they are
as a person.
Works Cited
Milner, Joseph, Lucy F. Milner, and Joan F. Mitchell. Bridging English. Boston: Allyn and
Bacon, 2012. Print.
Schoenbach, Ruth. Reading for Understanding. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1999. Print
Wilhelm, Jeffery D. “You Gotta BE the Book”. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008.
Print.