When I was first assigned the Expository Genre for my genre presentation, I found myself feeling unreasonably worried. I remember thinking back to elementary school when I struggled with expository text. I couldn’t help but feel the same frustration when I was teaching expository text for the first time in one of my placements. I remember noticing most of the students also struggling with the idea of expository text and how there was a lack of excitement surrounding the idea of this genre of text. I couldn’t help but blame myself, for the lack of excitement in the classroom when it came to discussing expository text. I knew I let my own personal bias affect my teaching on the topic. I knew I had to work on this aspect of my teaching.
That being said, my job as a hopeful teacher is to take away the frustration that certain lessons bring to students and to bring excitement back into the lessons of even the most boring topics (as you can see my excitement for expository genre is still growing). I needed to kick my habit of showing my feelings about certain topics. I knew that by researching the expository text I was going to be forced to think about this genre and was going to be forced to think about how to properly teach the genre in a more exciting manner.
I finally began to face the most dreaded genre to me. I had to really think about how to make it exciting. Gretchen and I worked hard on finding certain articles that helped support our cause of making expository texts fun. One of the most important aspects of teaching this genre is to start exposing students to expository text at a young age. By exposing them to an expository text it causes them to think about topics in a different manner. Young children are always asking questions, because of that, exposing them to expository texts will only allow children learn about more topics that they were once unfamiliar with. I feel that as a child I was not exposed to expository text as much as I could have been. I only remember reading and hearing fiction books. I cannot help but wonder if I was exposed to expository text throughout my childhood would my feelings on the genre be different.
After completing our research on the genre, I realized that it was not as scary of a genre that I imagined it to be. I let my fear from childhood affect a large portion of my exposure to the genre. Now that I finally have a new and unbiased opinion on this genre, I feel that my ability to teach and enjoy this genre will improve. I hope to one day be able to change a student’s opinion on a genre of reading or writing and to help them appreciate each genre they will be working with. I hope to help eliminate the frustration that may come along with some of the genres and help open their minds to learning about what each genre has to offer.
This is great Jaimie. Tell us more about how you specifically plan to eliminate students' frustration with reading and writing expository texts. For example, what types of mentor texts do you now plan to use when you teach? What text features/cues do you think are particularly important for young readers to begin to recognize?
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