First Weeks at School...

My first weeks at Baldwin County have been as expected. Lunch room confusion, kids thinking I'm a student, and the usual classroom struggles for a few examples. However, I am struggling most with how to introduce literacy situations in my classroom. One of the causes of my struggles is that we are not working out of the book. My host teacher works with her own lesson plans that coincide with the book, yet she does not ask the students to open them during class. I like the idea of exploring reading issues of word problems. However, I have yet to encounter a word problem. Thus, so far I have only introduced new note writing techniques in my classroom. Furthermore, I have introduced the techniques only to a small group of students. I plan to write about this for my first literacy exploration so I will not go into grave detail here.

The literacy future of my class does look promising.I have explained my inquiry research project to my teacher and she liked the idea and gave me some pointers. I plan to still incorporate a mathematician historical project in order to further develop content literacy. Hopefully my students will react well to this project and will become more engaged after they understand the origins of the mathematical facts that they constantly take for granted.

My teacher has been very supportive and intends to help me incorporate all of my literacy techniques. Any suggestions about literacy engagement projects that were not outlined in the book would be appreciated.

Readicide Blog #2

One of the main things I found interesting with Chapter two was Gallagher's discussion about the knowledge of the Vice President and Al Queda in his classrooms. Gallagher continues to discuss possible contributions to this lack of knowledge. At one point, the lack of prior knowledge he connected to low socio-economic status families. I find this to be of extreme importance in regards to "real-world" knowledge. Students of poverty more than likely do not have the same resources than students that fall in higher economic statuses. Things like computers, televisions, and the daily newspaper at times are not generally accessible to poverty students. These situations will cause a student to not be knowledgeable of daily newsworthy information.

When I taught at Early College, I experienced students of low socio-economic status. In that class we had the opportunity to bring in a Current events day. This gave the students the ability to experience newsworthy information that they might not normally experience. Some students rebelled from the project, however, the students that took the assignment seriously sincerely benefited. I hope to be able to incorporate this idea in my mathematics classroom as well. Regardless of the content, I believe that this assignment will help my students grow as individuals.

I am still struggling with original literacy ideas for my future classroom. Yet, through some of the reading, I have discovered different strategies that I will include in my class. Such as, notebook organization to increase vocabulary retention. Dr. Webb also gave me a good idea about textbook reading in yesterday's class. She described how I could assist my students in breaking down text. This strategy would normally be utilized in different content fields, but Dr. Webb showed me how to direct the strategy to a mathematical approach. Hopefully, i will continue to find ideas from these resources. In this case, I don't mind stealin...

Readicide Blog #1

The message of the intro and first chapter of Readicide is mainly concerning the idea that students are simply being taught how to achieve in test taking. Readicide involves the deterioration of pleasurable reading in order to force students into higher achievement of standardized testing. I thoroughly agree with the evidence shown in Readicide. I have witnessed in my small amount of teaching experience, these thoughts in action. While I was assisting at a middle school in middle Georgia, I witnessed students being taken out of normal classroom schedules in order to utilize the time in a mathematics "blitz" setting. Our traditional learning styles need to be changed, I agree, but not to the extreme that we only concern our teaching with standardized test scores. I think that schools are starting to focus too much on testing achievement and it is stealing the "well-rounded" feel of today's student.

Honestly to this point I am not sure how to help students in my classroom to more effectively read in my content. I hope that through further reading I am able to apply new techniques in my future classroom.