p8-22 Golden Gate Bridge & Secret Agent Mother

The story is really well written and easy to get absorbed into, although as a good reader accustomed to reading fiction, slipping into new characters is a skill that I posses. I’ve always known that not everyone is as good at this as I am, which really speeds up how long it takes me to get through a book but also in how I am able to get enjoyment from a book. I think MESE has made me think more about other people having different “reading ability capital” especially in the Souto-Manning article that talks about adapting read alouds to better match cultural capital learned through literacies at home. One of the exercises that I do with my students uses the metaphor of going on a journey and considering what supplies you had to take with you, what you were missing, and how you were able to survive the journey given what you did and didn’t have. A lot of them don’t seem to get this at first but I usually use it particularly in response to reading a novel in verse (a challenging format) and a multicultural book (possibly challenging content). Perhaps I need to stress looking out for this type of thing with the understanding that each of their students will have different supplies given their cultural capital and that they are responsible for coming up with the adaptive techniques to help their students read and ideally enjoy these pieces of fiction while gathering some pieces of information from them. In my poetry class, Dr. Soter talks a lot about the importance of re-reading things and I have to admit that I never do this. I think that I’ve trained my brain to pick up on many things that other readers might not get at the first pass but I also need to consider the alternative perspective.