REED 502
03/05/2010
Mikehil13 Discussion on Chapter One and Chapter Five from the Book “You Gotta Be the Book”

After carefully completing my assigned reading of the Book “You Gotta Be the Book”, Chapter one and chapter five, the author describes the need to patiently take new and innovated approaches to address the deficiencies in reading skills of students. In the introduction the author describes the hardships students were having with reading, their reluctancy to read, his frustration he was having with addressing the issue of literacy instruction, and the struggle to reach these students. In my reading I found out that the author came up with some interesting ideas to address the issue of literacy in the classroom. While addressing the needs of the student’s reading problems the author discovered other factors affecting their ability to read proficiently, the human factor, and the cultural factor.
Because the author consider himself to be a researcher as well as a teacher he evaluated his studies and findings in a much clearer or scientific way, he was able to experiment and apply different techniques. In chapter five of the book titled: “Reading is Seeing”, the author attempt to provide the struggling reading student with a visual approach in defining what they read. The author wanted the student(s) to be able to mentally visualize what they are reading thus increasing their level or ability to comprehend more clearly and also for them to retain or remember more information. When applying these strategies the author found out that not any one approach is applicable to everyone in the classroom but must be modified to the student and his abilities. When the students were evaluated on their reading skills their comprehension and retention increased and improved, his visualization strategy worked.
In conclusion this episode addresses the use of visualization to approach or to address the deficiencies in literacy; the author not only addresses the issues of the teacher with regards to application of visual art in literacy instruction, but also the needs of the students when it comes to comprehension and memory, the learner. He found that that many teachers utilize visualization techniques in their classroom easily but fail to make the connection to literacy instruction. He concluded and showed that students ability to think and relate to reading subject material improved when visualization takes place, with emphases on the understanding of the relationship to characters and to the theme of the story.