Tompkins Chapter 7

Tompkins chapter 7, about students’ comprehension, was a chapter that grabbed my attention. This may be because of my unhappy experience as a student related to reading comprehensions. In this chapter, it talks about comprehension in depth, showing many parts of comprehension and how they can be done. Comprehension is “a thinking process” where students can “activate their background knowledge and preview the text, and it continues to develop as students read, response, explore, and apply their teaching” (223). But throughout sixth, seventh and eighth grade, literature and any reading related subjects were something that I hated, but on the other hand, I really liked my reading classes when I was in elementary. I can remember some of the things that I did in my elementary reading classes, but I do not remember what kind of things we did in reading classes in middle school aside from taking comprehension quizzes. All I can remember is the comprehension quizzes that were taken all the time after reading certain texts. I was a fluent reader but was reading without a purpose. I was not even able to make connections to myself or even to the real world, because I could not find the purpose for reading. Reading was merely reading fluently through the text, then taking the quiz, and then forgetting the information. As Tompkins talks about the purpose, it is for students to “activates a mental blueprint to use while reading” (227). But I never had a chance to form this mental blueprint, because I was busy trying to memorize the basic information in order to do well on the quiz. After graduating middle school, I had a hard time adjusting to high school reading materials and in my literature classes, because I was never able think and read with a purpose aside from the quizzes. So I had to struggle through adapting to finding the purpose of reading and also comprehension. It is important that “when teachers set the purpose, they should be teaching students how to set purposes so that they can learn to direct their reading themselves” (227).