10/8 Blog

In Buehl's readings, one of the main points he makes is how important prior knowledge is to reading comprehension. He states that, "...what you know is a make-or-break variable in reading comprehension" (Buehl 75). We have learned that reading comprehension does not just apply to reading books or passages for English; rather, it applies to all texts, and every discipline has their own form of texts. By extension, this notion applies to all subjects one is exposed to in high school. For example, in math, if you do not know the Pythagorean Theorem, you'll have great difficult in solving for the hypotenuse of a triangle. In history -- the discipline I plan on teaching -- if you do not know the context of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech (the context at its most basic form would be the Civil Rights movement), making sense of the speech becomes a much more difficult task. In subjects such as English, but history especially, complex words adds another barrier to reading comprehension. If students do not know these words (which an instructor should anticipate), how can we expect them to make full sense of the text? To avoid this, I think providing a word bank to accompany the reading would be very helpful. Students who already know the more complex words can disregard the word bank, while students who do not know what these words mean can greatly benefit from it. I think this is UDL is all about and is a great example as to how practices like this can benefit everyone in the classroom.

"...[S]ometimes, we as readers are mismatched. The author constantly refers to things that are unfamiliar to us, and we become overwhelmed by a text in which everything seems to be outside our knowledge and experiences" (Buehl 78). This is one of the worst feelings a student can have when reading a text and, unfortunately, it is not a rare occurrence: feeling lost. As was stated earlier, if you do not know the context of the reading, the reading is difficult to make sense of. Often, the context acts as the foundation of the reading and, without that, few aspects of the reading will actually make sense. For example, reading a historical article on the Cuban Missile Crisis without knowing the context -- the Cold War -- would undoubtedly beg the question: what the hell are the Russians doing in Cuba? And why? The students might understand from reading the article that Russia wanted to construct a nuclear arsenal in Cuba and that the U.S. wanted to prevent this, but the essential "Why?"question becomes harder to grasp. The "Why?" question in history (and many other subjects as well) is really the meat of the text -- its most significant component. The "Why" question is also something that students care about the most; otherwise, history becomes a subject area of memorization and facts, which is boring and ultimately comes with little utility. 

Without knowing about Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolutionary War, this political cartoon can be impossible to make sense of. Context matters!

In the reading, Buehl also talks about the importance of generational knowledge, topic knowledge, and domain knowledge, which varies amongst students due to their different cultures and experiences. The "buy in" to history that Buehl seems to argue here is to, "...identify essential questions that target transcendent themes and ideas of human experience and interactions" (Buehl 97). The most important word here is "transcendent," meaning that these significant questions relate to themes of human interactions that are relevant both today and throughout human history. Not only does posing these questions get to the meat of history, but they also allow students to relate seemingly distant historical events through the lens of their own lives. Although it is important to understand the context of which a historical event occurs, it is also important to see how the event relates to human interactions or lives today. For example, when learning about the Industrial Revolution, the teacher can pose a question relating to how the average person spends their 24-hour day, which is relates to all points of history, even today. More specifically, many workers during the Industrial Revolution fought for 8-8-8 hour workdays (8 hours for work, leisure, and sleep), many farmers worked from sunrise to sunset in centuries ago, and students today often go to school for 7 hours. Appealing to this notion allows students to understand past events in a way that permits them to out themselves in "their" shoes, which can facilitate reading comprehension. I think that this is something that is very important in history, and failing to allow students to relate their lives to history creates a disconnect and, thus, often disinterest in history. Disinterest in a subject area often leads to a lack in comprehension, and we need to avoid curriculum that allows this to occur. 

When reading these articles, I always ask myself how we can address issues that the readings bring up in our classrooms. A question I had is: How can we incorporate these bigger picture questions (What if? So what?) into our curriculum if the schools we teach in might not test these areas, but instead test more quantifiable questions such as when an event occurred in history (i.e. memorizing dates?") I feel as if it might be difficult to incorporate both equally into curriculum, and one area would have to be compromised more than the other. What do you think?