Carol’s Reflection on Taberski, Chapter 2

This is a superior textbook – I appreciate the language used, organization, and use of practical examples. Just as the author tells us to eliminate things in our classrooms that don’t help us reach goals, she insures that everything in the text is vital with no extra padding.

This chapter started me thinking about what kids need to read in order for them to reach their goals. Once again, I have nothing good to say about the basal readers in classrooms that are standards-based and ensure that each story comes with comprehension exercises. As Taberski points out, the claims are superficial and deceptive (or specious, a word my mother taught me during the last election). In the fall, my mentor teacher and her colleagues had to plan a unit by choosing the story and exercises according to the standards they needed to address, and my heart just sank because I knew most of the kids would have no knowledge or interest in dogsled racing. It was confirmed when I corrected their worksheets and saw strings of words pulled from the text randomly showing no evidence that the students made sense of the story.

This leads to the alternative that we are striving for: having books in the classroom to teach reading for many levels, on different topics, and in different genres. My question is: How do we start filling up our shelves with the quantity of quality books we need to make it work? How do we distinguish 200 great books from 200 junk ones? I’ll be patient and wait for Taberski to answer that one.