D&Z Chs. 3-4

            Chapters 3 and 4 from Daniels and Zemelman highlight quite a few ideas which I have embraced as a student and future teacher.  In a nutshell, they give reasons why teachers should use reading selections outside of the prescribed textbooks of their content area to foster enriching interaction with the content as well as helping students to become lifelong learners.  I am a strong supporter of this idea.  I have taken part in classes which relied solely upon textbooks to teach content.  I have also been fortunate to have experienced classes which used textbooks as nothing more than reference materials and allowed most of the learning material to come from outside sources.  There is so much left out of text books.  We lug around these thousand-or-so page books that say so much and almost nothing at the same time.  I think that splitting away from this idea of learning everything entirely from textbooks would benefit every individual greatly.

            I took World History my junior year of high school.  My teacher gave us an assignment which required that we read one source outside of our textbook and write a report or critical paper on it.  I chose to read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.  (I highly recommend this, by the way, if you are at all interested in WWII, post-modern literature, or simply want a great read.)  After reading this book, I noticed that the reasoning behind war troubled and intrigued me.  Ever since that assignment, I have put in many hours of additional reading in order to answer some of the pressing questions I have about war.  Why do we have them? What greater purpose do they serve? Is there ever really a "good guy" and a "bad guy,” or are there always extenuating circumstances?  This anecdote just serves to prove that lifelong learning and a search for answers can come from sources outside of textbooks.  Perhaps if we took the chance in our own classrooms, we would be able to replicate this experience.