Jane Lee Shuler           

October 1, 2004

Teacher as Researcher

My Intellectual Autobiography

            As I begin the reflection of my earliest memories of reading, I find that I can only conjure up bits and pieces, due to my age no doubt, but I do have some vivid memories at certain ages with, unfortunately, many years of lapses in between. 

            As a child, my home was always full of books, magazines, and newspapers.  I do not remember if I actually learned to read any specific words per se, but I do know that my parents read to my sister and me every night before we went to bed.  When I started to school, there was no such thing as kindergarten, so my parents sent me to a private kindergarten.   I do not remember reading, but I do feel sure the teacher read pictures books to us.  I do remember first grade very clearly for some reason.  Reading was done in the ubiquitous reading circles.  I loved reading the Dick and Jane books and was always so excited that I knew the words.  I can still completely visualize the large room, the teacher, and the small chairs in several circles.

            My father brought home our very first television when I was in the fifth grade.  I can remember sitting and watching the test pattern while waiting for programs to come on.  Since we did not have a television for the first ten years of my life, reading was a natural past time for my family.  I remember making a private reading spot under a crabapple tree in our side yard.  I vacillated between reading comic books and the Nancy Drew books.  Nancy Drew must have won out, because mysteries continue to be my genre of choice. 

            My next memory of reading classes in school was not until the sixth grade.  I, along with two other students, left Mrs. M’s class everyday to go down the hall to Mrs. G’s room.  There we sat in straight, long rows, took turns reading out loud and then answering questions that were written on the board.  Little did I know at the time that this was the class for accelerated readers.  I shudder to think what the poor kids back in Mrs. M’s class were doing during their reading class.

            In junior high, I do not remember any kind of reading class.  I just remember doing a lot of reading in science and history classes.  I know I had a lot of grammar throughout my schooling, and I will always remember how to conjugate verbs and diagram sentences.  My senior year in high school is the next vivid memory I have of a reading class. This is when I began to read literature.  My teacher, Mrs. A.,  was a dream come true for someone who loved to read.  We read Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, The Old Man and the Sea, and the Great Gatsby.  I can still see Mrs. A. standing in front of the room reading passages from certain novels.  She devoured every word and had a way of making her students follow suit.  I remember exactly where I sat in that class, although I have not thought about it for many, many years.

            When my mother became a librarian at the city library, I learned to ‘respect’ books.  I already loved to read, but mother taught my sister and me to take care of our books.  She was always bringing home the latest books for our ages that she thought we would enjoy. I have never doubted for a moment that my mother’s love of literature is the greatest influence I had during my life for wanting to become a life long reader.  Believe it or not, when my sister and I reached dating age, we were not allowed to go out with boys who had overdue library books.  Mother always said that a boy with overdue library books was an irresponsible boy.  Somehow I doubt that many of the boys I dated every read a book to even have it be overdue, but my mom was still a very wise woman.

            When I entered college,  I had no idea what I wanted to be “when I grew up.”  Girls of my era became nurses, teachers or social workers while waiting to get married.  For some reason, and I still do not know why, I decided to major in sociology and become a social worker.  Unfortunately, my social work internship was not until my senior year, when I quickly discovered that being a social worker and saving the world was not for me.  I graduated with a degree in Sociology, but went back to college a year later to get a teaching certification.

              I know that I had absolutely nothing that resembles phonics instruction at anytime throughout my public school years. I also received no phonics instruction for teaching while in college, nor was I expected to teach phonics when I first began teaching in a third grade classroom.  It is no wonder that I did not know what I was doing.  For the ten years I taught third grade, my skills for teaching reading were definitely lacking, as I did not receive any worthwhile training in college.  I remember having a shelf  full of old basal readers.  I remember spending a lot of time with my third grader working with vowels.  I also remember having my students put on plays from the stories we  read.  The reading books were so boring, so we made up skits to go with the stories.  I always enjoyed poetry and can remember having my students learn poems, such as “Give me your tired, your poor…...” written on the base of the Statue of Liberty.  They actually learned it and enjoyed knowing why they were learning it from the book I read orally to them. 

After ten years of teaching primary age students, I became bored with the curriculum and still wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my life as a teacher, so I moved away for six years and went into real estate property management.  During this hiatus, I made new friends and had new experiences, but I no longer felt like I made a difference or could make a difference in someone’s life.  I also did not feel “smart.”   When the opportunity presented itself, I moved back to where I had started out and went back into the classroom in the very same school.  This time I taught sixth grade language arts and social studies.  This is when I started teaching classroom sets of novels and learning strategies to make reading “come alive” for my students.  I am fortunate that the school system in which I teach does a wonderful job of providing staff development, so I attended every reading and writing workshop I possibly could.   Once I actually started learning strategies to use with all age students, my ability to teach reading took on a whole new meaning.  Most important were the CRISS strategies that I learned.  I continue to use these daily in my classroom.  Learning how to differentiate assignments and how to do tiered assignments for all different levels of readers has made a world of difference in my teaching of language arts.  I also use Literature Circles and Cooperative Learning groups with my students.

Three years ago I had the opportunity to move to a middle school and teach seventh grade language arts.  Not only are seventh graders challenging, but also trying to figure out a way to make them want to read sometimes seems an impossible task.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that the state adopted literature book was certainly not going to do the job.  I first spend a lot of time teaching the strategies I have learned over the years.  Without these strategies, understanding characterization, plot and all other elements of a novel are much too dry for my seventh graders to appreciate.  Once my students have a better understanding, we dive into various novels throughout the year, such as The Outsiders, that I hope they can relate to.  Along with the reading of a novel, my students do a lot writing about the novel.  I strongly feel that reflecting through writing is so important, and I do not think our students get enough of it in the public schools now.  Unfortunately, the End of Grade tests have eliminated a lot of the teaching of writing and grammar in the younger grades.    I have recently begun piloting a grammar series called The Shurley Method.  Grammar skills and all the parts of speech are no longer taught in isolation, but with total student interaction. They learn the parts of speech and the definitions of those parts through jingles, chants, and raps.  Instead of spending a whole chapter on nouns and then verbs, etc., the program teaches the necessary components of good sentence structure at one time.  I think it is really important for my students to reflect on their reading, and not having the proper ability to express themselves makes it extremely difficult for many students to write coherently.

One thing I am positively sure of is that I now teach reading totally differently from the way I can remember being taught.  I realize kids and ’their world’ are different now, and therefore reading for enjoyment and pleasure is not a priority for the majority of students.  I know that I have to continue to find ways to create a love of reading in my students.