Chapter 4 of Making the Journey is one of those chapters that makes you look at the reality of all the things you'll see and experience at some point or another in the classroom. As I was reading about all of the problems she ran across during her teaching, particularly the student that murdered someone, it made me wonder how I would deal with all of those issues. Up until reading this chapter, I haven't really put a whole lot of thought into situations like that, but those are the situations that I should really focus on more in order to be better prepared in case something like that happens in my own class. While it would be impossible to be 100% prepared for every bad situation that might come up in my classroom, it is foolish to have the mindset that it will never happen to me. At some point it might.
I also liked the analogy that Gallagher used in Chapter 1 of Deeper Reading with the Puzzballs. I was one of those students in high school that only read the material one time before being tested over it, and in high school, that was all right. It got me through with A's and B's all through high school. Now that I'm doing college coursework, though, it's made it more difficult to study, because I don't have the concentration that I need to read something more than once. I really have to push myself to "study" the material that I'm presented with as opposed to cramming the night before and losing anything I might have learned the day after the test. My teachers in high school didn't really push the importance of thorough studying, and it's still haunting me as I try to study now.
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It haunts me too. I can't remember ever having to study for a test in high school like I have in the college setting. It's like every single class could consume an entire persons life, sometimes. Somehow, I've almost got the hang of it. I am trying to think of ways to express how important study is to students without turning them off.
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