Chapter 7 - Teaching Difficult Academic Material

Chapter 7, like the preceding two chapters covers a vast expanse of material and concepts, but it also continues to make ties to the past chapters and objectives. The major components of the chapter included finding out what the students already know, breaking down complicated material, take different approaches, ask questions that make students think, challenge the assumptions of students, use more than just textbooks, help with research and resources, and give opportunity for revision. Of these topics the parts that seemed to make the most impact with me where taking a different approach and not sticking with textbooks. Although these are quite similar they are different enough that they stuck with me for different reasons. In my practicum classroom the teacher uses handouts, movies, question and answer time and group presentations to present the blocks of material to the students. This would demonstrate both taking a different approach and not sticking with the text books. There are times when the answers will be taken directly from the book and will require the students to read and comprehend, but by following up with a question and answer session or a review session this will provide for multiple instruction over the same material.

In reading Chapter 7 I noticed that the students were reading, and struggling though, the same material, namely Shakespeare, that I struggled with over twenty years ago. This is both a little disturbing and comforting at the same time. Disturbing in that it does not appear that any changes have been made to the Literature reading list in twenty years, and comforting to know that I am not the only person that had a strong dislike for Shakespeare. The reading did offer some keen insight into where the opportunities lie for us as new teachers to connect with students on difficult material. We have to be aware of the pitfall of trying to seem to cool for the difficult material, but also understand where the students are coming from when they have difficulty with the same information that we ourselves struggled with a few short years before.