This chapter made me look at reading through the perspective of my students and realize how important it is to have prior knowledge of a subject in order to fully understand a text. As teachers, it's easy to look at a reading passage discussing something in our content area and think "oh this is easily comprehensible" because we've been studying those subjects intensively for a number of years, but to our students, this is new material. According to cognitive researchers, "human being store our knowledge in mental patterns called schemata. It helps to think of a schema as a web that stores and connects all the information in your mind related to a given topic" (Subject Matters, 32). This concept of schemata is the key to understanding and it's our job as teachers to build our student's schema up about particular subjects, like plant cells, The Civil War, probability, etc. Giving a student a reading before adequately preparing them for the content the reading covers is somewhat useless and they'll likely just read over the words without truly understanding it's meaning.  So what do we do to avoid this mindless reading? We prepare our students by having class discussions, showing pictures and diagrams, watching videos, drawing models, and answering questions. Then, we assign a reading that they can use their background knowledge to comprehend, allowing the passage to connect new ideas for them and guide their curiosity. (Word count: 237)