Discipline-Specific Reading

When I was in fourth grade, I though history was the absolute, most boring subject that anyone could ever think of. It seemed like a regurgitation of facts. I hated history. My teacher didn’t really like history either and made it seem like something that was a punishment. I remember copying passages out of my history textbook and hoping that the book would spontaneously combust. Then, I got into the fifth grade and it was like someone had flipped a switch. My teacher loved history and she made it come alive. We re-enacted parts of the American Revolution and we read books that were fascinating. I found that I actually liked history.

Unfortunately, like most of my students, my first encounters with history texts in a school setting were horrible. Most people think that a typical history text is a giant textbook that is as dry as sawdust and has little or no information that is relevant to their lives.

The most unconventional texts that I have seen used in my discipline is historically based movies. I had a teacher who, for our final project, assigned us to watch any historically based movie that we would like. After watching the movie, we researched the time period in which that movie was set and wrote about whether the movie was historically accurate or not. This was followed by informing us that there were people who actually got paid to do research about time periods and work on movie sets like Pirates of the Caribbean to make sure certain things were historically accurate.

One of the most pleasurable texts that I have read in my discipline (that wasn’t a movie) was Anna Funder’s Stasiland which was about Eastern Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a historical account that was completely true but written like a novel. I couldn’t put it down! I loved it because she kept saying things that I thought “No way!” but that were true.

The most unpleasant thing that I ever read for my discipline, was also the hardest thing that I ever read for my discipline, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. The first time I read Rousseau’s work I hated it because I couldn’t understand it. I was a freshman in college and my teacher had given me no idea how to approach this document and no understanding of what it was about. When I read it the second time, as a senior in college, my teacher gave us a ton of reading to do along with Rousseau. Suddenly, everything made so much more sense, and the reading, while difficult, was understandable and interesting. I could finally see how it applied to what I was learning about.

The difference between my two readings of the Social Contract was that the one professor, who was a highly effective professor, helped make Rousseau’s language understandable and applicable. My other professor just assumed that we understood the document as well as he did and had the same passion for French political history as he did. My other professor assumed that we knew nothing about the document and that we had no interest in it. This made it so he put in a lot of extra effort to help us love it as much as he did.

I hope to be able to apply the same strategies as my second professor in helping students enjoy texts in my discipline. When teachers help their students see how a text applies to their lives and then give them other resources to help them understand what they are learning, students find that, even if the text is difficult, they understand and enjoy what they are reading. Most importantly, I hope to always make sure to share my passion for a text without assuming that students love it as much as I do. I plan to “sell” my text to my students as well as the toy commercials on TV do because helping students want to read historical documents is just as important as getting them to actually read them.