To answer your concern about my “knee-jerk reflexive response”… yes I was being sarcastic, but not altogether. I don’t think that my approach to teaching is about “making everything about innovation” but may indeed be about finding a way to make reading instruction something other than conventional question and response activity in which meaning and significance is predetermined. There is a crying need to question conventional approaches that *don’t work* towards promoting critical thought, or even understanding the author’s purpose for writing a text.

The tension is at least in part a matter of distinguishing between the need to honor convention and prepare students for the rigors of academic culture, and the desire to promote enthusiasm for learning and discovery, allowing students to bring new and unique meanings to school experiences….finding the balance between authority and freedom.

Teaching comprehension is something that teachers have traditionally NEVER done effectively. If innovation isn’t called for under such conditions, then I don’t know when it would be.

A teaching mantra is just what I need to stay focused. I’m doubtful that I can be the source of one, though. According to Shrila Prabhupada, a mantra has to be received through a channel of disciplic succession or its power won’t kick in. I’m not part of such a lineage, so I suppose we’ll have to make-do with “a little help from our friends” for the time being.

And I think - How can I make what I share with kids “a source of power” rather than an “object of dread” - is a great mantra to hold in our minds when we teach.

Steven Johnson (Everything bad is good for you) has this interesting take on the rewards of reading - as being both the information conveyed by the book, and the mental work you have to do to process and store that information. - the acquiring knowledge and exercising the mind argument. I tend to get trapped in the acquiring knowledge bit. Johnson claims that society places a “substantial emphasis” on the skills of “effort, concentration, the ability to make sense of words, to follow narrative threads, to sculpt imagined words out of mere sentences on the page”, and this is why we value reading, even reading for pleasure - so much.

But by including visual literacies through google image search you are alerting students that there are many other ways in which they can learn about their world - ways that also require mental work to process, make sense of, and store information.