Pytash: Chapter 7 Literature, and the High School Graduate

I thought this chapter was very appropriate to end with. I liked the statement on page 155, "I would like to believe that I am always improving my practice, but in fact I often make adaptations that I later abandon. Teaching is an organic process. This is one of the things that make is such a challenging profession." I think that this shows that as teachers, we don't have to be perfect or find the perfect lesson to teach. There is going to be a lot of trial and error, until we find what works best for the students we have at the time; and this will always be changing, and so will we.

I thought that this chapter gave a lot of important information about assessing student effort, especially when it talked about how "close reading of the text," "character analysis," "drawing inferences," "application" and "evaluation." I think that in order to expect our students to learn anything, then we need to incorporate these elements into their study of literature, so that they can have a deeper and richer understanding of the text and be able to apply it to their lives and future studies.

Just a little note about the book as a whole. I thought it was great and really enjoyed reading it, which is nice because most "text books" are dry and hard to get though. One of the things I liked most about this book is the information Jago provides in the appendix. There are lists of Canonical texts and what grades they are appropriate for, I think by just having this it will help us to decide what to teach when we get our jobs, and maybe even in our student teaching.