Online Reflection #2, or Help!

So many things have happened since my last blog post both good and bad. I have a couple of experiences I want to relate and seek advice from you all on. My first experience deals with the first time my CT was gone and it was only me and the sub with the class. Since I had spent the majority of the time with the class and had more experience with them, the sub essentially let me take over. The class was supposed to be reading silently by themselves but they kept acting out. They weren’t able to focus on their reading at all and I constantly heard conversations about their friends, what happened last night and what they were planning on doing later that day, but nothing about The Odyssey. I quickly got frustrated with the class, I think I hid it pretty well though. By the end of class, they were up out of their seats moving around and I constantly had to ask them to sit down. My main question with this situation is if you guys have any suggestions as to how to control that kind of situation. I’ve visited briefly with my CT about what happened and she gave me a few suggestions but I’d love to hear other pieces of advice. Obviously the same suggestions aren’t going to work every single time which is why I would love lots of suggestions for how to control a situation like this that could happen in the future.

                I had a question that I posed for today’s Socratic seminar but never shared it but I’d like to hear some of your thoughts. Interestingly enough today’s reading from Bomer was focused on something that I’ve been thinking about for a while, especially while observing the students in my classroom. In most of chapter four he focuses on what we can do to initiate outside reading from our students and help them to become lifelong readers. I have a few ideas as how to facilitate this but I am extremely curious as to what other ideas you have. I feel like students frequently feel like we are assigning them the most boring books or that we read these types of books all the time, not realizing that we aren’t constantly reading “the canon”. I don’t think any of them realize how important it is to be a lifelong reader for so many reasons but at the same time, telling them those reasons won’t be a good solution either. I know I shared the idea of using outside reading as an extra credit opportunity but I’d love to hear any other methods, activities, or strategies you might have to facilitate their lifelong reader status.