MCA Reading Strategies

For this first summer session I have to teach a class that prepares kids to pass the MCA reading test. To be honest, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  I've always been a voracious reader.  Growing up I inhaled books and magazines. Somehow through all the reading I did, I developed great reading habits.  I didn't know this until my freshman year in high school.  In writing and discussing, I began to use some of the words I had picked up from all of the reading I had done over the previous summer.  My classmates looked at me oddly.  I'm sure they were thinking "How does he know words like this?" So I intuitively picked up vocab skills through my reading. Likewise, I learned how to infer and how to pick out main ideas and how to summarize and all that other stuff. But I did it naturally.  Now that I'm prepping for this class and learning how to 'officially' teach struggling readers how to read, I'm killing my love for reading! I just read a paragraph with the class in their packet on finding stated and implied main ideas (trust me.  I've never ever ever ever ever ever read a book or essay or article and wondered if the main idea was stated or implied.  I wonder if anyone else ever did until the stupid high stakes testing craze thought it up!) on farming. Here is the paragraph in full-- A back to the basics movement is shaking up the business of farming agribusiness by getting impressive yields with fewer chemicals.  An example of the cycles of a healthy dairy farm includes a farm aerated by earthworms and brimming with fungi and bacteria.  Legume roots such as peas, beans, and clover fix nitrogen in the soil.  Five year crop rotations on this dairy farm begin with an alfalfa harvest; roots are left for soil enhancement.  After corn is harvested, rye is planted for winter cover, a pattern repeated the second year.  Oats and alfalfa replace corn and rye in the third year.  In years four and five, alfalfa is cut monthly, late in spring to fall.  Alfalfa and grasses provide feed for cattle which produce fertilizer as does plant residue.  Ladybugs and other insects are introduced to the fields to control pests.  With fewer insecticides used and entering the atmosphere to return to earth in rain, the purity of rivers and drinking water improves. Whew.  Honestly, did you read all that?  Did you stay awake?  What is the main idea?  Please state it for me. Really?  When was the last time a real reader was reading the Grand Forks Herald and thought, "Wow.  This is a great main idea.  I better get my pen out and circle it!" Come on! Plus, how many kids can even relate to all that farming terminology anymore?  Furthermore, how many veteran farmers could even make sense of that paragraph?  I'd love to have an older farmer come in and explain the benefits of crop rotation and compare it to the previous paragraph.  Which one would be more lively and entertaining and engaging? I know.  I know. I know.  Kids need these skills(like the ones needed to find the main idea in that paragraph) to pass the test.  Plus, the test is full of paragraphs just like that one! But isn't that the problem? Beating kids over the head to comprehend main ideas put there by test companies or worksheet manufacturers (and I have to wonder, did the test prep companies take that paragraph on farming out of a textbook or manual?  Or did they concoct it in order for students to find the stated main idea?  I have a problem with the latter approach.  It's kind of like grammar worksheets.  Drilling kids on grammar work sheets doesn't work because the sentences were created to have nice verbs and nouns and adjectives or introductory adverb clauses . . . it's not real writing.  Grammar instruction improves drastically when students look at their own work or their peers' work and see real nouns and verbs and other errors) seems to me the wrong way to teach reading. Maybe if we taught a love for reading over reading skills we might have a different situation on our hands. But - as you can certainly tell - I'm no reading expert.  I know full well too that the argument can easily be made that if a reader doesn't have skills in order to understand what they are reading, how will they ever develop a love for reading? I don't know. I like what Theodore Sizer had to say about reading skills and tests . . . "If you want students to do well on reading tests, they should be reading a lot of really good books." Amen. At least now I have sympathy for those in English who are not at peace with teaching writing.  Professionally speaking, I live to teach writing.  But I've studied comp theory extensively.  I am a writer myself.  I live and breathe it every day.  I read about teaching writing nearly every day.  So I am at peace with it.  But I know I have colleagues who don't do those things or feel that way about writing.  And so when they have to teach writing, I now can empathize with them because that is how i feel about teaching reading right now.