Assignent Template: California C.C.S.S for ELA

The first thing that I want to talk about is how much academic reading has changed in the past twenty some odd years.  I went into this text thinking that the steps involved would be pretty straightforward and boy was I wrong. I honestly had no idea how much preparation goes into academic reading nowadays. When I was in high school the pre-reading that students did was never as involved as this template. We usually had one or two class periods where the teacher lectured us on the author and gave a brief historical framework for the piece that we would be told to go read. After that, we were typically left to our own devices when it came to reading and comprehending the text which was fine for some of the students, but for the rest of us, it was complete and utter chaos.

Overall, I think this template will be a huge help when it comes to teaching students how to read and comprehend informational text. As a side note before I continue and talk about the template itself I like the definition that the reading gives on what it is to read rhetorically so many times we get so focused on what the text says that we forget about its purpose, intentions, and effects. The thing I like the most about this model is how clear and specific it is. This template takes a lot of the guesswork out of teaching students how to read an academic text as well as how to write about said text.

One concept that I am interested in trying is the idea of having students read "with the grain" on their first reading, and then having them read "against the grain" the second time through. I think that this is a great way to get them to read a piece multiple times as well as get them to see differing viewpoints in a text. As I said at the beginning of this post I wish the kind of thought and effort that went into this template were around when I was a high school student. Being able to connect what I was reading to what I was writing would have been a lot easier had I gone through the various steps that are laid out in this template.