Fake Reading and the High School Students -- Blog 10

“I Read It But I Don’t Get It” by Cris Tovani covered the topic of “fake reading” in the first chapter. The chapter in question explains what “fake reading” is and how students accomplish it. “Fake reading” is the act of pretending to read an entire book. Tovani explains that this could be done by “attending classes, reading first and last chapters, skimming the Cliffs Notes, and making Bs or better on essays and exams.” The chapter certainly hit close to home for me, I have been fake reading for about 15 years at this point and still do occasionally. Fake reading is a hard habit to break, especially when it works for the most part, and I understand why Tovani worked so hard against it. It was also a demonstration in one of the struggles of teaching that no one really talks about. Teaching students who dislike reading is hard enough, but teaching students who dislike reading and know how to almost convincingly pretend as though they read what they were supposed to read. I connected to the anecdotes about the students who struggled with reading, despite being able to it. I find myself in a strange predicament because of this. While I write more than most people do, I read far less than most other college students do.  I have never considered reading a strength of mine, and I suspect that the concept of fake reading may be somewhat to blame, but I do consider writing one of my strengths. It is hard to improve my writing ability without reading more often, as such this is an aspect of teaching and of life that I need to work on. Luckily for me, hopefully soon I will actually have enough time to read with the intent to improve my own skills. Bring on the spring break. Seriously, though, time is not kind to me this quarter, but I will have time to catch up soon.

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