What do we mean by literacy NOW?

Yesterday I attended a seminar that taught us how to teach literacy to students today. I found it to be both informative and interesting..."students need to see themselves in the literature," "as time progresses so does the nature of literacy and the ways that students learn to be literate," "different cultures learn to read differently, and the problem arises that students come to school and there exists only one curriculum"...

These are some of the most interesting points that i got from the experience. I agree that teaching students to be literate is so important, and that too many students suffer from a lack of literacy in today's society. As a mathematics high school teacher, I feel incredibly helpless in some ways. When students get to the high school level, these literacy skills should be quite developed meaning students can not only read but write, interpret, and analyze at a pretty efficient level. Some students can't even read let alone anything beyond that! Of course students still have a chance to learn to read, but how difficult is it when everyone around them is at a much higher level and that for some reason they have been overlooked at previous grade levels or just passed along because that teacher gave up on trying to get them to be able to read??

We did a lot of reading of children's books with a "critical outlook" yesterday. After reading some books, we discussed certain questions like why did the author write what he/she wrote? Why is it meaningful and how could it be changed? What are we lead to believe by reading the author's words and looking at the illustrations? When one really sits down and reads a children's book with those thoughts in mind, it's crazy how different your outlook is and how an innocent children's book is transformed in your mind!

I want my students to look at the whole world around them and critically think about things that they see and read. I want my students to question, criticize, and really think! YET. Yet, I also want my students to learn mathematics. I am responsible for teaching my students how to truly understand patterns with numbers and space and be able to analyze those things. So after leaving a conference like the one I attended yesterday, I am interested but also confused as to how I can incorporate these ideas into my curriculum. Mathematics is a much more cut and dry topic than social studies or English. MATHEMATICS is a language by itself that students must learn how to read! It requires some of the same skills that students use to learn how to truly read, comprehend, and handle the English language. I need to find a better way to connect the critical literacy issues with concepts such as quadratic equations or geometric proofs...

No more schooling

In response to the article, "Further Notes on the Four Resources Model," by Allen Luke and Peter Freebody, I will recount a conversation I had with 9 of my students this afternoon in class. Because more than half the class was missing, we deviated from normal class routines and broke into interesting but random discussions. A key component of the article reads, "it remains our contention that, within a certain range of procedures, differing teaching approaches work differentially with different categories of students." Through our random discussion my students concluded that we should nix the whole notion of school. Schooling programs children to be a certain way, a robot of sorts. One student went up to the board and related students going into school and coming out of school with the idea of a natural resource going into a factory and coming out as a car. The finished product is a set thing. Our model of schooling does not work for everyone, evident in those students who fail their classes or drop out of school. Another student said that because we HAVE to go to school and HAVE to do homework, schooling becomes a big chore instead of a great way to learn about the world around us.

I am a math teacher and a firm believer in furthering one's education by schooling, but I do think that our system has forced our youth to fit a mold....even when we compare American society to other societies and realize that here we have a lot of OPTIONS and in most other places they have more of a set track in their educational career. I am torn, because I agree that students can learn a LOT by just life experiences and then do not think of their education as something forced upon them. Yet, how do we properly ensure that our students are learning what they need to learn if we have alternative methods of schooling? Or, does it really matter?