The Columbus Key

         The second chapter of this text, much like the first, begins with a hook. The author gives the reader an odd, out of character passage to read, with content largely unfamiliar to the target audience of the text. After some confusion and multiple rereads, I learned this section was written about the game of cricket. Being not so familiar with cricket, I did not understand and tried to fit the knowledge into other games I was familiar with, into my own personal schema.

         In educational psychology, I was placed with a struggling first grade student to assist in developing reading skills. For the spring semester, I worked almost exclusively with this student. When we came across a new idea or word, she would often do the same thing I did in reading the text about cricket; she would try to place the information in a schema she was familiar with. Words that she was unfamiliar with but looked similar to words she knew were often read as the known word. Now obviously as a first grader, she was not conscious of this aspect of her reading comprehension. But as educators, we have to be conscious of this occurrence and ensure we provide the background knowledge, the "Columbus keys" to allow our students to understand not only the content of the discussion, but the background and "why". As content area teachers, this background will be even more crucial as our texts will focus primarily on content, and much of the content will be largely unfamiliar to the students.
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