Characteristics of Text

After class I was thinking about reading comprehension, mostly on the characteristics of the text. I know that from me the characteristics of the text play a big role on how I read and understand what I’m reading. I like to read for pleasure and what I read for pleasure is nothing like what I read for school. If it’s a history book, it on a subject I’m really interested like WWI, WWII or colonization of the new world. But if the books are non-history books they range from magazine to books like The Da Vinci Code. I also prefer books that have larger text or large spacing in between line, even though this doesn’t make the book necessarily short because they might have more pages, but it helps me read cause I feel like I’m getting through the book faster.

One of the age-level characteristics for kids in the primary grades is the fact that they have a problem with small text. Even though I don’t have problems with small text I do have my text preferences that if are interrupted can cause me to read slower or no understand I can’t imagine how it would affect a first grader. Now I know why my niece, who’s a first grader, gets her homework in large print.


Knowing that people have different preferences, how would recognize a student’s preference? If I did recognize it, what could I do to help that student with his problem? This are question I’ll consider for a while.

Competition in the Classroom

This semester I’m also taking Child and Adolescent Psychology, last week we spoke about competition in the classroom. At first I didn’t like the idea of having competitions in the classroom cause it can cause a student to create a sense of inferiority that can affect the student a long time, especially if its used in an assessment. For example, teachers in my grade school used spelling bees to asses student’s ability to spell instead of having a test, quiz or some other form of assessment. I believe this form of competition is and will always be harmful because students that perform poorly will do so in front of their peers, making them feel inferior to their peer that perform better. But after thinking about competition for a while I changed my mind, it can work if it’s structured differently. If the competition is set up in a way all students can win maybe it might work. For example, the teacher I observed during my Junior field made up a bingo game in which the student completed a matching assignment in class, then after they finished they would use the answer from the assignment instead of numbers on their individual bingo boards. The competition was not in completing the assignment or getting certain questions right but in where you placed the answers on the bingo board and then they played long enough for a large number amount of students won. Even thought that I agree on this kind of competition I don’t agree in any competition as an assessment.

A different view to the education problem

Obama unveiled an ambitious $18 billion plan to expand public education frompre-school through 12th grade while at Central High School in Manchester, New Hampshire this morning.
Calling education "the currency of the Information Age," Obama stressed the need for expanding public programs to help American competitiveness with other nations. He said that a child in Boston now needs the training to compete with the kids getting an equal or better education in Bangalore or Beijing.

"In this kind of economy, countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow,” Obama said. “Already, China is graduating eight times as many engineers as we are. By 12th grade, our children score lower on math and science tests than most other kids in the world."(MSNBC Tuesday, November 20, 2007 11:38 AM by Domenico MontanaroFiled Under: 2008, Obama)

I was recently looking into the education polocies of the decomcratic candidates and I found this article on Obama. What really sttruck me was the fact that he seens educatuion as a problem because of the competition with other countries. That seems wrong to me, why not just see it as a national problem instead of a competition with other conturies?