April Etzold RED 6116

I read everything from blogs and beauty magazines to best sellers and the classics. I love to read, but reading for pleasure sometimes has to take a backseat to my responsibilities at work, my own homework, and my personal responsibilities. I typically spend much of my summer vacations getting caught up on all of the reading I’ve been craving all year.

The learning styles inventory shows how truly diverse my interests and learning styles are. My strongest area is linguistics – which explains how I came to be an English teacher. I am also very strong in other areas, especially inter-personal, intra-personal, and bodily- physical. My tastes in books, movies, and hobbies also reflects this diversity.

I have a close group of friends who are reading or English teachers (and also omnivorous readers). We often make recommendations to each other – usually for young adult novels. I often become interested in books I hear people talking about on television – I want to know what all the fuss is about. I frequently peruse amazon.com reading book reviews and investigating the books they recommend to me based on past selections.

My strengths include a strong vocabulary, diverse tastes, a wide-range of background knowledge, the ability to infer meanings and the ability to empathize with characters. My weaknesses are becoming bored easily, being overly- critical, and being easily distracted.

When reading difficult texts I usually will take notes as I read in order to maintain focus on the important points. I may also have to go back and reread certain sections. This was especially true when I was reading this textbook for EDF 6481 last spring. I shared this experience with my students to show them how active reading strategies can help comprehension, even with the most challenging texts. I demonstrated my use of the strategies through “think-alouds”, then had students practice keeping notes during reading. Afterwards we discussed how note-taking helped them stay focused on the text and when other strategies, such as rereading, were necessary.