Time for Meaning : Crafting Literate Lives in Middle & High School

Rating:
Summary: Theory + Practical Ideas=Great Teaching Book!
Review: I read this book during my student teaching experience and found it very helpful and informative. Not only did it deal with the process of learning and how students deal with this, it also gave some excellent ideas for developing lessons and thematic units. Interesting and a quick read!

Rating:
Summary: A good next step
Review: Time for Meaning is a good book to read once you are familiar with the writing and reading workshop techniques of Linda Rief, Nancy Atwell, and Lucy Calkins, for Bomer pitches much of his book as a variation on their techniques and refers back to their work throughout. His book is a thoughtful supplement to and expansion of the standard texts on workshops and portfolio-based teaching.

Bomer's honesty is refreshing -- he admits that many of the standard techniques he tried to put to use in his classroom didn't work well, and he tells us how he came to adapt and revise other teachers' tools to fit the needs of his students. Especially helpful is his understanding of older adolescents, a group which is frequently not addressed by writers such as Rief and Atwell, who are middle school teachers.

Bomer's chapter on writers' notebooks, and how to get students to use them productively, is worth the price of the book alone. How many teachers have tried to implement journals and notebooks, only to find them awkward and frustrating for the students? Bomer has a number of useful ideas on how to integrate them into a full curriculum, how to motivate students to use them as valuable tools, and how to encourage students to write in a variety of styles.

Also helpful are the chapters at the end which discuss the teaching of genres, both for reading and writing. Bomer covers the major genres in depth, offering a number of helpful ideas and practices.

The biggest weakness of the book is that it doesn't offer enough discussion of assessment. So many authors of books about teaching writing forget that one of the greatest hurdles any teacher faces is how to turn all the fascinating projects you do in a term into letter and number grades to please the administration and parents. Bomer discusses assessment briefly, but a more in-depth and practical discussion would have made his book not merely valuable, but indispensible.

Rating:
Summary: More matter with less art
Review: While the book covers important aspects of literacy instruction with adolescents, it seems laboriously written in spots. Sentences such as this one come to mind: "Ronald and Katie attest to the despair about meaning in literacy with which students leave public school, their firm conviction that literacy is nonsense, their belief that they are 'just not that type of person,' the fatal heartsickness in their reading and writing lives"(21). The text could certainly be pruned of some of its circuitous jargon-laden language in order to make its case for literature-rich, response-based classrooms. Sometimes, less is more.