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...