Chapter 4: Toward a Balanced Diet of Reading

              “Towards a Balanced Diet of Reading” is going to always be pertinent in my field of teaching as a future English teacher. Where the students find this balance, and how can I help them reach it? It has always been a question of mine about to assign for reading and does it always have to be the “classics” that every one of my high school English teachers covered. I was bored in those classes where the teacher would assign To Kill a Mockingbird, and by then I would have read it three times in other classes. I found that this chapter in the book broke down my questions, and not only applied the answers to English teachers, but also to other content based subjects. 

               One section that stood out to me is called “A Balance of What?”. It made me stop and wonder about how a balance of reading can be achieved. Many classes only use textbooks, and research is saying that those classes need to add more “real life” reading. The eight sub-sections about this topic broke down the question of how you create the balance and what kind of texts you can use. I found the Fiction vs. Nonfiction part to be pertinent to a wide range of subjects. A suggestion was a science classes adding in fiction and nonfiction novels to have students become more engaged in the material they are learning. The teachers can use the nonfiction books to give background or learn about how something was developed, like the chapters suggestion of learning about the creation of the atomic bomb, or use fiction books and use a science fiction novel to introduce to concepts of time, space, and astronomy. This chapter did a good job in breaking down what a balance looks like and how teachers in all subjects can use the concept of balanced reading in their classes.

               My favorite part of the chapter is about the Classroom Library. From personal experience, I always enjoyed going through the books that the teacher had in the classroom that the students were allowed to borrow. It always gave me good ideas for future books to read or exposed me to books that I had never heard of before. I knew, even before reading this chapter, I wanted to have a classroom library in my future classroom. Even this past year when I was doing observations at a high school, I found myself going through the books that the teacher kept on the shelves in her classroom. I find it to be a way for the teacher to foster reading within their students. One part that I didn’t think about was adding newspapers, magazines, and web articles into the library. Maybe some students don’t have access to these forums of literature and the classroom library would be a good resource to have students branch out and read other things instead of only assigned books. The most highlighted part of this section came from the box titled “Key Ingredients of a Classroom Library”. I found all of the points to be incredibly true. I started looking into some of the general interest magazines online and spent hours reading articles on http://www.time.com/time/ . Implementing the use of magazines and articles would really benefit a classroom library by finding a wider range of materials for a wider range of student interests.