YELLOW BRICK ROADS -

I have been reading Janet Allen’s – Yellow Brick Roads for the past couple of days, since it is the Literacy program that our school uses and I need to know the basics of it.  I have reached the end of Chapter eleven, but here I am at at 1:15 A.M. writing a reflection on what I have read this evening – I must be out of my mind!

I simply needed to get this out and written down – before the effect of what I have read this evening is diminished and I minimize its importance.

I have read several Literacy “how to teach books” over the past few years (since I had to start teaching English in 2005) and have adopted some of their strategies and things they say will help kids read better.  However, after reading Allen’s Yellow Brick Roads and the stories she relates as part of the information she is providing to the reader, makes me realize how inadequate my teaching of Literacy has actually been.

It is scary and frustrating when you finally realize how much or how little you don’t know about what you are doing.  Before tonight I believed that I am a decent, Special Education Teacher who was sidelining as a English teacher, who had some good ideas and was doing my best to help my students in my classroom.  Tonight I had to face the reality of how much more I need to do and learn, to provide them what they deserve from me.

On page 160 of Yellow Brick Roads she wrote the following which I fund extremely powerful. 

For many years I commiserated with my colleagues about the abysmal apathy some students exhibited toward reading.  After some time I came to realize that I was contributing to this lack of personal response.  A pattern was evident in our classroom; when we read books that angered them made them laugh or cry or argue, they were full of personal response.

Why does it take so long to find the patterns in our classroom?  Probably because the concentration needed just to keep a classroom filled with multiple personalities moving forward doesn’t allow much leftover time for close observation and thoughtful reflection.

There was just something about this section that just struck a cord within me, the section that I Italicized, Bolded and Underlined especially.  I guess because I have only been back in the classroom for about a month and a half and have been focusing so hard on getting the classroom under control and getting to the students to believe that my classroom is a safe place and no I am not going to leave them.  That I have attempted to do things that I thought would only appeal to the students, but I have not really thought about how to engage the student’s interests when it comes to choosing literacy books, using SSR effectively/correctly or writing.  I can now see the difference between appeal and engagement. 

I came into this school year late, and was woefully unprepared.  I hit the ground running too fast/hard and I guess that has been the most stressful part for me.  The resulting lack of focus and cohesiveness in my classroom is very frustrating to me, because I know that I am a good to very good teacher, but something was totally missing. 

The road map that I have been reading tonight is what was missing – the strategies and re-focus that is happening as I read this book is what I need now.

Many of the strategies that Ms. Allen voices in this book are not really new and have been written about by others also, but they are an accumulation of what she has gleaned put into practical use over several years of her experience in the classroom.  I guess it isn’t so much the strategies that she is providing, but how she is putting their use into context, using snippets from her experiences in the classroom and how she felt positively and negatively as she told her story. 

Am I going to be able to make all these changes overnight – no.  Will I become frustrated and give up because I now realize more than ever how much work I actually have to do – no. 

What I will do is finish reading the rest of Yellow Brick Roads tomorrow, then move on to Plugged into Reading and find out where and how I should be implementing these strategies into my classroom.  I know that I can’t do it all in one fell swoop and have everything work perfectly – because it won’t.  I have to make incremental changes in my classroom, fit the program to my students, my students sure as hell aren’t going to fit into any neat little box and I don’t want them too!  Now at least now I have a direction to go in and it looks like some structure too.

There I feel better getting that out of my head.  I know that teaching is a journey fraught with highs and lows, but sometimes something as simple as a book can be read and make a big difference in your outlook.  Perhaps Yellow Brick Roads has done that for me, I think it might have.

This also gives me a better understanding of why my school is so gung ho about using Janet Allen’s Plugged into Reading program and why they are putting their money where their mouth is and supporting it appropriately.  Does this mean I have become a card carrying disciple of Janet Allen (no not yet ), but it does mean that it has given me a framework to look at Literacy through a perspective that I didn’t have previously.   

We shall see how this turns and I look forward to reflecting on the changes that I will implement in my classroom and teaching as a result of reading a book.

Maybe I will find a Yellow Brick Road of my own to follow .

It about the kids – not you or me.

Disclaimer – My school gave me a free copy of this book to read and I have purchased my own copy so that I can mark it up.  I have not received any compensation for writing this blog entry about this book.  The words in this web log are simply my reflection after reading most of the book.