Chpt 2-Gotta BE the Book

Chapter 2
As I read chapter 2 in You Gotta BE the Book, I found myself most intrigued by the "Studying Student Response" section. I found the author's strategy to seem considerably efficient and something I feel is worth doing with students as an English teacher. To sum up his strategy he says, "I study every student who comes into my classroom. To do less would be not to take each student with the seriousness she or he deserves" (Wilhelm, 28). I really feel that in order to engage a student in reading, it is important for your students to 1) understand how serious you, as the teacher, are about reading 2) to have teacher/student consultations on a regular basis to discuss their reading and 3) to do different work strategies like protocols, interviews, think-alouds, literature circles, etc to engage each student in their reading which the author mentions in this section of chapter 2 as well.One thing I do remember growing up in different English classroom settings was when one of my English teachers gave us choice in our reading. Everyday the teacher would have student silent reading and he would keep track of the pages we were on to see our progress. There was always a due date to be finished with whatever book we decided to read, but the one downfall was that there was never a fun final project to do in the end. We had a paper or a book report format due which did not motivate many to read (in fact I think many people slept during silent reading because of it). I think in order to keep the idea of giving students choice in their reading would work better if their final project could be something like a newspaper article, or a tabloid of some sort to display characters, symbols, and themes of the story.I plan on incorporating these types of final projects that I feel serves more of a purpose to the students individually than a standard essay does. These projects can engage the students in the classroom and put each of them in the a mind frame to focus their time on reading and less time on stressing about a 5 page paper they have to write afterwards. Since reading and writing go hand in hand, writing is definitely something to include in some way in the final projects as well.