Post Secunuds: Types of readings, text sets, and proses

Rather unsurprisingly for a book about teaching teaching reading skills, chapters 3 & 4 of the Torvani text were about cultivating reading understanding (holy verbals, Batman!) in students. Torvani's third chapter touched a bit on Gardener's multiple "intelligences" (quotations because I'm obdurate when it comes to redefining words) with the writer's observation of how vocational instructors may not be able to easily read a passage of, say, Shakespeare, and comprehend it as easily as an English teacher can, but they can quite easily take a technical text and build a model/determine if their components are usable whereas someone like me would be hopelessly outmatched. Torvani managed to get the vocational teacher to (after a bit of Socratic prodding) describe how he went about reading and thinking about what he read. This mental modeling is an invaluable skill to have, as we (hopefully, after we get licensed and all that) will be experts in our fields -to some degree- and will have long since internalized how we go about solving problems in our fields. If we model what we did when we were in our students' shoes years and years ago, we will be able to more effectively train them how to tackle problems (academic) in our classrooms. This will also humanize us, as to most students, which will hopefully build up a friendly rapport.

Or a respectful one at least, as I cannot help but think of Tiberus' quote, "Oderint, dum probent," or "Let them hate me, so long as they respect me."

The fourth chapter of the text followed along with the "theme" of the previous one, but focused on finding alternatives to textbooks. I can get behind this in some content areas, but the creation of "text sets" does not seem to lend itself very well to Latin. Or at least the grammatical parts of it. I can find stuff about culture, mythology, history, etc, but short of pulling introductory-level materials from a variety of other Latin textbooks, it seems that my work will be cut out for me with finding alternatives to the "hardest" part; the linguistic stuff.

Looping back to the initial part of Torvani's fourth chapter, Bakken and Whedon's short piece on the problems students have with textbooks was one of these-type moments for me. Students learn how to read a certain type of text, get confident and then are punted at textbooks (which have an entirely different style, more often than not) with no training and we wonder why they get burnt out on reading. This is something for us language teachers to keep in mind, as I doubt any textbook will have a narrative-style lesson or chapter explaining what an indirect object is and how it is used. Having thought about it for a little bit, however, this may be dealt with as simply as making sure to identify three 'steps' in learning a new bit of grammar: Identification, formation, and then translation; corresponding to the introduction, action and conclusion of a story.

The jury's still out on how to make that exciting, though.