Proust and the Squid, Posting #10 (Final Thoughts)

After finishing this book I know feel that I have a better understanding of the science behind reading and how I can relate reading to my future profession. When I first started reading this book I had no idea that there was so much to reading. I thought it was a plain and simple process that was easy to pick up. But now I know that that is not the case. How one learns to read depends on a number of factors; where they are from, how they where raised, how much they travel outside of their home base, and many other factors. This just blew my mind once I started to read this book. Now the concept behind this book is very scientific and can be complicated at times, but I felt that I got the gist of what Wolf was saying through out the book. My favorite part of this book was that while I was reading I realized that it tied into what we where learning as far as Gee’s theory goes. This helped me greatly with my understanding of the book because it gave me another resource to reference.

The other aspect I enjoyed about this book was that she had a great organization of topics. What I mean is she started out talking about the history of reading/writing and how it evolved. Then she went into the science behind reading and how the brain interprets different things. This gave me a great basis to go off of once she started talking about how everyone interprets text differently. It also gave me a good background once I reached the chapter pertaining to dyslexia, something that I was completely unfamiliar with.

Having a better understanding of the concept of reading and writing will give me more confidence when I try to incorporate this into my physical education lesson. Since I will be showing confidence, the students will be more confident and trust my judgment. Also, knowing that I need to become fluent and think more outside of the box when teaching students with other discourses will help me immensely when teaching. That is just one of the many tools that this book has given me. I feel like I need to think as if I was a student being taught and how I would feel when a lesson that I develop was being taught. If I become literate in many discourses through out my career than this will be possible for me. This was a great book to read and it gave me great insight and a different perspective on reading and writing. If you want to read this book here is the link to where you can find the book for purchase: http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Squid-Story-Science-Reading/dp/B001HT4PRC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1310244976&sr=8-2

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope it was as beneficial for you as it was for me, Thanks!

Proust and the Squid, Posting #9

Today we have tons of technology influencing our children and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. There is anything from iPods to PSPs that kids use everyday. So this raises a question, how does this influence the kids and how can we use it to help them excel in literacy. This is something that I was seeing slowly arise in high school just before I had graduated, using technology to teach. As the old saying goes “if you can beat them, join them”. Since technology is quickly on the rise we needed to find a way to incorporate this into our lessons to keep kids interested because they are used to this type of technology at home. One way to combat this problem in regards to reading and writing is to show a movie as you read a book and have the students gather in groups to discuss the differences between the two. Maryanne wolf the author of my book says that children are pre-programmed for sound and touch ext. So why not use these to our advantage. We could have kids use technology in their projects instead of writing a cliché book report. A great example of this was in my high school English class my senior year. My teacher have us the option of writing a summary of the book, doing a presentation, writing a book review acting as a critic, or we could make a short movie trailer for the book. I chose the movie trailer and it was my favorite project of all time. This was because it was something different than just the old average book report. The uses of technology engaged my mind while I was reading the book because I needed details to make the trailer. Once I was acting the character in the book, it also gave me a different perspective of the book. I had to think outside the box to make the charter come alive in the movie trailer. Some of my other classmates did the same project and they had the same feeling as I did.

Wolf said in her book, Proust and the Squid that the options given to students, will allow them to engage their minds because they are choosing something and it is not being forced upon them.  I am also seeing the idea of using technology in the field of physical education. A good example of the use of technology is UNM’s P.E. department. They acquired a grant a bought iPad 2s and use the cameras on them to record students as they perform a skill. They them show the student the video so they can see what they are doing are well and not so well. As I said before, Wolf said that children are pre-programmed to sound, touch, and ext. So why not use this in our lessons? It will engage the learners and make hem more excited about learning. If we can do that than helping the student with literacy in their early development stages will be easer and more beneficial.

Proust and the Squid, Posting #8

For this post I am going to talk about how children my interpret text differently. We all have read the articles assigned to us and the main reason people interpret texts differently depend on the primary and secondary discourse. In my book, Wolf uses a great example. She uses the book, Dr. Seuss and says the “ children who never left the narrow boundaries of their neighborhood, either figuratively or literally, may understand this book in an entirely different way from other children” (Wolf, 9).  This quote is so true because your original understanding id=s developed from the people you grow up around. So, if you never venture out into the “unknown”, beyond your county line, then you will never see other discourses and see how others interpret different ideas.  This is the same for students as it is for teachers. If you do not learn or experience other discourses, than it will be hard for you to communicate outside of your home base. If the teacher is not literate in many discourses, then they will have a hard time explaining different ideas to different students. This was exemplified in the Mosaic article with the students Jeremy and Rachel as well as my book, Proust and the Squid. For myself as a P.E. teacher I need to make sure I am literate in more than one discourse so when I am showing the students how to do a skill, such as striking a ball, I can contour my explanations to the students when they ask me questions. By being literate in many discourses, I do not leave any students in the dark when they ask me a question, listen, or read my directions. Also, Wolf, talks about finding deeper meaning in text than just the absolute obvious. She says that this is why it can be important to venture outside of your home base. She says that “the goal of reading is to go beyond the author’s ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative and ultimately independent of the written text” (Wolf, 18). This idea does not just promote a new way of reading and writing; it promotes a new way of understanding what ideas are being presented to the reader. It makes you an outside the box thinker.

            Going back to what I was saying earlier about children from different discourses interpreting texts differently. The whole idea of outside the box thinking, wraps around the idea of broadening your horizons when it comes to discourses. If one learns and becomes literate in many discourses they will have the ability to think outside the box and find deeper meaning in a text. Students who do not venture out of their home base will be limited to how far outside of the box they can think.  This a why it can be important to go outside of your home base and become literate in other discourses because it can open up your mind to a more exciting when you are becoming literate as a child. 

Proust and the Squid, Posting #7

Dyslexia is becoming one of the most prominent childhood problems in the U.S. The unfortunate part is that many victims of dyslexia are not diagnosed until later in their lives, usually way after they are out of the education system. “This leaves that child with bad memories that relate to reading because of neglect from teachers from teachers and teasing from other children” (Wolf, 166). Some people never get over this part of their lives because it had such a big impact on them. This is why it is our job as teachers to recognize this problem and try to help the student so we can avoid that problem all together.

The reason why dyslexia is usually missed in childhood, as stated by Wolf in her book, is because many teachers overlook it or just do not know enough about the problem. Most teachers will just keep pushing the students to try harder and read more and the majority of the time the student just simply cannot understand the text. Since some teachers just don’t want to deal with the issue the just pass the students along. Then the students go home to their parents and the parents push them to try harder not knowing that their child has dyslexia. Now we all know that schools these days are hard for kids that do not “fit in” per say. Now imagine being in kindergarten or first grade and not being ale to read properly. As stated by Maryanne Wolf in her book, “children will be tormented and made fun of just because they cannot understand the text they are reading” (Wolf, 167). This is not the students fault, they did not ask to have this problem, so our job as teachers is to recognize that a students is struggling to read and then do as much as we can to help the student with dyslexia. When trying to recognize of a student is having trouble reading, you may want to look for these signs. One sign would be simple spelling errors in short words. Also, if the student has confusion over left and right may be a red flag that there is a problem at hand. Now do not assume the student is dyslexic just because they do not know their left and right because I sometimes get the two confused ha-ha. Another symptom to look out for would be if they have trouble following two to three step instructions. Noticing these problems when a student is having trouble reading can help them greatly. We can help the child and let them know that they will be able to succeed and not be left behind or passed on.  Educating yourself on this problem will allow you to give the student reading exercises to help them practice. This will give the student confidence and allow them to feel comfortable trying to read, which is huge when the student is in the early stags of leering how to read. 

Proust and the Squid, Posting #6

This next post contains a question that I want to answer, what is the difference between learning to read and reading to learn. In my book, Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, she talks about early childhood reading development. This is where, as stated in my previous post, parents read books to their children at a young age.  This early exposer helps them with their literacy in their later stages of development. Now to answer the first part of the question, what is learning to read?  As I read this chapter I pondered this question and I came to a conclusion. Learning to read is learning the ability to associate words and pictures with sounds. This relates to my previous post because I said that reading to a child when they are young helps them master this process much faster when they are learning how to read.  Now for the second art of the question, what is reading to learn? Reading to learn relates to one reading different text in order to learn about a specific topic. Now comes the question to interweave the first two questions, How are they both important? They are both important because one is not possible without the other. If one does not learn how to read than they will not be able to read to learn. In this chapter Wolf says that children who are read to and learn to associate words with sounds and visual images will be more literate in the future, hence those who do not learn to read will not be as successful when they read to learn in the future.

The second part of my response is how literacy relates to my profession of physical education. As I stated before, in the book Wolf says, when children are first becoming literate they make connections between words and their sounds and also words and their sounds with visual images. In physical education all of these connections are key to the understanding what is being taught to the class. Sometimes I have to give directions verbally. When the students are listening to me they are visually seeing the game or activity come alive in their head. Here they are making the association with the sound of the words with visual images they have associated with those words in the past. If I give them written directions they do the same thing put they use all three connections to understand the game or activity. And if I give them a picture, then they have to use he same three connections just in reverse order. They must first understand the visual image and then associate the images with words. It is sort of like a blue print where different shapes or symbols can mean different things. This may seem a bit confusing and it was and still is a little fuzzy for me, but literacy and P.E. do have a relationship. Whether you are giving verbal, written or visual commands, the students still need the proper literacy skills learned in early development to help them understand what you are telling them during class. Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

Proust and the Squid, Posting #5

So my post today is going to be sort of a scientific approach to reading. What I am going to talk about is how exposing children to reading early can help with their literacy later in life, when they develop the ability to read write and talk. When most people, that do not know much about education, hear about early exposing kids to reading early, they think this means that they should try to teach their baby or toddler to read. Now I know this sounds kind of cool to have you baby or toddler reading months before other kids pick up a book, but what most parents who do this do not know, is that this can have a developmental affect on their child. What happens when a child learns to read at a very young age is very complicated in a way. So here is the watered down version, at least from what understood from the book. When a child learns to read too early in their development, it effects the development of their neurotransmitters in their brain. This can then cause the neurotransmitters to develop slower and cause problems later in development.

             What I am talking about is very different from teaching your child how to read at a young age. When I say this I mean reading to your children. We all might have childhood memories with our parents reading to us while we are curled up in our arms. This was something that helped us feel positive about reading. “ The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientists or educational researcher could have designed a better one” (Wolf, 83). When a child is read to they begin to associate words with pictures and visual images become more familiar to them. As Wolf states in her book, a child can begin to do this around eighteen months, and this is when “ the brain gets the ability to connect two or more systems to make something new” (Wolf, 84).  Children that are read to more often during childhood understand all of the language around them better than a child who was not read to in their childhood. The best way to read to your child, as stated in the book Proust and the Squid by Wolf, is to use visual images while reading. So the best way is to read picture books. This way the child begins to see that a picture of a dog is associate with the word dog. This is the key to language and literacy development later in life.  This is because they are learning the sounds of the words and seeing the words and also seeing those two combinations associated with a picture. When children are learning to read on their own, they will see the word dog and recall the sounds and also be able to visualize the picture of the dog. Now this may not be for every child, but after reading this chapter I do believe that reading to your child early is key to developing their literacy skills later in their life.

Proust and the Squid, Posting #4

For this post I have a new daunting question. This question is does an Alphabet build a different Brain? In my reading of Proust and the Squid, I came across three ways of how the alphabet can help “build” one’s brain. The first explanation is that “the alphabet increases efficiency over other systems” (Wolf, pg. 60). The second reason is, “that the alphabet’s facilitation of novel thoughts, never before articulated” (Wolf, 60). The third and final reason is that “ the novice reader’s ease in acquiring an alphabetic system through their increased awareness of the sounds of speech” (Wolf, 60). All of these explanations are great but there is one in particular that focuses on one of our framing questions for the course.

The one explanation I want to focus on here is the last one, which talks about the alphabet and relating it to sounds of speech. While reading about this explanation in the book, I felt that it covered the question of how someone can become literate. Why I think this you ask? I thought of this because the explanation behind the idea says, and this is my understanding of it, that the alphabet gives readers more “awareness of speech” (Wolf, 66). Now for us who have been speaking English and know the alphabet like the back of our hand can have a hard time understanding this reasoning. This is because we have been around the language long enough that everything is automated and imprinted into our brains. For someone who is learning English as a second language this may not be the case. For an alphabet to be an alphabet it has to consist of certain characteristics in order to be “official”.   These characteristics can include vowels, syllables, ext. This is something that can be hard to grasp when leering English. But by learning the alphabet it causes your brain to “think differently”, as the author Maryanne Wolf would say. It causes a different thinking process because when you start learning different words and how they are pronounced, you see them in a different way. One now sees them as letters that make a certain number of syllables or vowels that make a long or a short sounds. It is just more than seeing letters and knowing how to pronounce them, you “see” the word as a whole and what it is composed of. By seeing this and understanding it, it can help increase your awareness when speaking the word. A great exercise for this when “seeing” the word is sounding it out. It allows you to verbally and visually understand why and what letters make certain sounds. Understanding this idea can help one become literate because it will allow them to understand how and why words sound the way they do. It will give them a different way of thinking and looking at the words, as stated by Maryanne Wolf as she answers her question, if an Alphabet builds a different Brain? Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

Proust and the Squid, Posting #3

      This entry is about a very interesting topic I came across my book and it actually fits perfectly into the framing question of the course. The topic is what the most important things are for students to learn to become more literate in our disciplines. It does not directly say what this exactly is in my book, but I feel that I have interpreted the information so I can get the idea across to you all. First the book goes into once again talking about the history of writing and how it dates back to thousands of years. I felt that this was an important detail for children to learn to become literate because, from personal experience, once one learns the origin of something and how it came about, you develop more of an appreciation for it. For example, if you order a burger at McDonalds, you know that it is an easy food to prepare and that not a lot of work goes into preparing that kind of meal, so in turn you do not appreciate it as much. Now lets say you order spaghetti and meatballs from a fancy Italian restaurant. Upon ordering you know that all that pasta, sauces, and meatballs are handmade from scratch. Knowing how much work was out into this meal, you now have a great appreciation for the food you are about to eat because you know equally where it came form and how much work went into just that one meal. Even though it is a completely different side of the spectrum, the same goes for learning the history of reading and becoming literate. A student or child is more likely to appreciate leering to become literate if they know how language (reading and writing) came about and how much work many people out into it over thousands of years. If the child does not know this, then they will simply just think that it is another thing to learn and not appreciate it at all. If I have lost you at all I apologize, but what I am trying to say is building an appreciation and understanding of where and how something came about, can peak your interest and motivate you to want to learn it and in this case become more literate.

            After having this thought, I tried to relate this topic to my field of teaching, Physical Education. Now I know what you are thinking, “How in the world can this relate to Physical education. I had the same thought when I tried to connect the two. After a few minutes of thought, I came to a conclusion, which to me seemed very obvious. Just simply teach the students a basic history of the different games/activities in the unit you are teaching. Now I am not saying having two days full of this because then the kids would be bored and un-motivated. I am saying give them a brief history in 20 minutes so you get them excited, but also appreciate how the game/activity came about. It can be a short lecture of you can give them a handout to read and them ask them review questions at the end of the class period to check for understanding. This is just one idea, among many, from my book, Proust and the Squid, that can help students become more literate in our disciplines. I feel that if a student learns the background to what they are learning about they are more likely to pay attention and be motivated to do things, such as learn how to read, or becoming literate. Thanks for reading and let me know what you think!