Kylene Beers - Reading Nonfiction: Notice & Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies

The title for this introduction includes the word again as a nod to the title of the introduction in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading (Beers and Probst 2013), which is simply We Begin. At one point we wanted to title this introduction We Continue, but that suggested that we would have to write a third book, and it would have to begin, We End. Beginning a book with We End didnt sound like a good idea for a plethora of reasons.

So, we began again . Beginning again was hard, perhaps even harder than beginning the first book. The challenge wasnt only that of writing another book, though that certainly was challenging. It was also the problem of telling a second story in a way that would seem as new as the first. It required us to challenge ourselves as writers and you as readers.

And we do want this book to challenge you. We want you to pause to consider new ideas, mull over comments we make, and mark passages you want to reread and discuss with colleagues. We want you excited to start online conversations, discard what you know isnt true for you, make better what you see you can revise for your students, or adopt intact what seems immediately applicable. This book was ours as we wrote it, but now that its finished, its yours. Your reading is what will make it meaningful.

This book was ours as we wrote it, but now that its finished, its yours. Your reading is what will make it meaningful.

And because its your reading that counts, you should know that we had you in mind while we were writing this book. We saw you in classrooms, standing before twenty or thirty or sometimes forty students (and thats only one class). We saw you arriving early, staying late, listening intently to students, laughing with them, guiding them, urging them, steering them, and always teaching them.

We saw you nod as states promised that these new Common Core State Standards are the standards weve been waiting for, only to be told within a year, that, well, were not actually going to use these standards but are going to adopt our own, only to discover that these new standards look a lot like the CCSS. We watched you face new assessments, endure new evaluations, and accept new policies that demanded your salary be tied to how individual children performed on a test. We watched you teach through salary freezes, increased class sizes, decreased time for professional development, and endless onslaughts of negative public opinion (coming often from politicians who seem to know very little about the public schools). Through it all, you kept doing what matters most: teaching kids. Every day. Like postal workers who deliver the mail no matter the weather, you delivered instruction even when facing a blizzard of new challenges.

Through it all, you kept doing what matters most: teaching kids. Every day. Like postal workers who deliver the mail no matter the weather, you delivered instruction even when facing a blizzard of new challenges.

Not only did we have you in mind while writing this, but we had your students in mind, too: diverse, quirky, funny, solemn, noisy, quiet; monolingual, bilingual, trilingual; selfie-snapping, snapchat-chatting, text-messaging kids. This is the generation that has declared that email is too slow (and we had just figured out how to add attachments), that Facebook is for old people (and suddenly we arent quite as proud of our Facebook pages), and that the one-second video is just about the right length.

There are the kids who make headlines for all the wrong reasons, and as we were writing, we were thinking of them too. What have we not done? What else should we be doing? Those kids who hurt others, who bully some to suicide, who strike out with knives and guns, were kids who sat in someones classroom. They answered questions (or did not); they turned in homework (or did not). They walked our nations schoolhouse hallways, and nobody noticed that something was amiss?