Blog 7

I am so lucky that I was placed in Jones County High School for my field placement. I feel like this school seems to really have it together in a lot of ways. They do something every month that I have never seen a school do. Two days out of every month they have mandatory reading days where for the first 15 minutes of each period for both days the kids have to read something. It can be something they brought or something we provide them with in class but classes have to be silent and everyone has to read. How fabulous right? When I first heard about it I couldn't believe it. It sounded like something that every school should do, and the students actually brought their own books and magazines to read and seemed to enjoy it. Whatever school I end up teaching at I'm going to share my experience at Jones County with them and discuss how it benefited the students and the school and see if my school would be willing to do something like that.

At first when we were assigned these literacy engagements I began to freak out thinking "when the heck am I going to have time to implement 5 literacy engagements?" But I am so glad that we had to do these because it made me realize that I do them almost everyday. I am always looking for new strategies or learning tools to implement into my lesson plans each day to "spice" up the lesson. Students get bogged down with taking the same traditional notes everyday so if we can give them concept maps or K.I.M charts to fill in, it just adds something different. And when I found something that worked particularly well I was excited to write about it and share it with everyone.

In Readicide on page 114 the author states, "Their findings warn of the United States loosing their creative edge". I could not agree more with this statement. Reading Readicide has really opened up my eyes to literacy problems in the United States that I just was not aware of. I knew that there were children who could not read up to the level they needed to be at but I was not aware of actually how many students cannot. It seems with all the standards and standardized tests that the US is trying to create robots who all know the same things. But with all the standards teachers are having to worry about covering they loose all the time for creativity in the classroom. The don't have time to take a couple days on a topic and have the kids do activities on it to really understand it. They have to move on to make sure that they teach them everything that could be on a test. I really enjoyed reading Readicide and it taught me a lot about the problems that I need to keep a look out for in my school and classrooms in the future.

Observing Literacy in Action

• Having taken this class it's amazing how much it has opened my eyes to reading in schools and made me more aware of its presence or in most cases lack there of. But luckily at the high school that i am teaching in, in Jones County they seem to have caught on to the lack of reading in schools and are making adjustments. The first week that i was teaching, on wed and thurs the first 15 mins of each class the students had to read. They were allowed to read anything they wanted and for the students who didn't come prepared, the teacher had "history" themed magazines in the corner for them to flip through. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see how many students actually brought books from home and what they were reading. On a more negative note, i am teaching a high school government class and when the teacher handed me the book they were teaching, from the first thing i noticed was that it was the same book that i was taught from when i was in highschool (5 yrs ago) AND THE BOOK WAS THE 1999 EDITION! That's over 10 yrs ago! Not that the basic principles of Government have changed but you know we have gone through an election and we have a whole new set of people doing things, so a lot of the names and numbers are wrong in the book.
  
• I did my first literacy assignment last Thursday. It went rather well, i learned a lot from it that i believe will help prepare me better next time. I'll get more in depth in the class discussion.
  
• Readicide Chpt 3 i found fairly interesting. I've always been an avid reader since i was a kid so sometimes it's weird for me to imagine someone not enjoying reading. And i really connected with the author when he talked about "flow" and "Chop chop curriculum". When you're reading a book and you're so in to it, it is amazing how you get lost in it. You don't want to put it down, but at the same time you don't want the book to end. I find myself reading at a slow pace at the beginnings of book, a fast pace in the middle towards the end and then when i see i only have a few chapters left i slow down the pace because i don't want the book and the story to end. And i never thought about it this way but this whole idea of chopping up books and having students pull things out of every section really is killing it for the students. Instead of reading for pleasure and taking what they want to out of it (because almost every book means something different to everyone that reads it) the students read to find what they are "supposed to find". The underlying themes and the roles the different characters play etc. It makes reading less enjoyable because students are only looking at the small pictures and parts when the things that are going to change them are the wholes.
  

History in the making

• One of the ideas i've been coming up with for the literacy explorations is I would definitely like to incorporate the "article-of-the-week" idea and implement the idea of think-pair-share. I believe in a history class it is important to not understand history in the past tense but also understand history in the making, with students understanding what is going on in the world as we speak. This will be one of the first literacy explorations i incorporate into my classroom.
• Chpt 2 of Readicide I found fairly interesting in the sense that it brought in new ideas that I had never really considered before. For example, this whole idea of a political cartoon. A student can look at it, read what's written and still have no idea what's going on because they aren't coming into the situation with prior knowledge of what's going on in the picture. If students knew current events and read more things that were pertinent to the world outside of themselves than they would come into situations as a more well rounded individual and in turn perform better.
  

Readicide intro and chpt 1

• The message that i got from chpt 1 was how schools focus so much on test scores that they are cheating their students out of a real education. With school systems and states requiring teachers to teach so many standards per course it is almost impossible for teachers to cover all material in an effective way where the students are really grasping what the concepts are. Students are reading for the answers to the test they are not comprehending and enjoying what they are reading.
  
• I got from this chapter that as a teacher we have to work hard to find the happy median of fitting in all the standards but taking time to really focus on the important concepts that students need to get out of a content. We have to juggle to appease everybody, students, test scores and standards and some how hope that in the midst of it all the students retain something to carry on with them to the next grade.
• When i personally was in school as a student i enjoyed reading on a personal level but i hardly enjoyed anything that i read that was assigned to me. It was hard to get into something i was forced to read at a certain pace, on top of all the other subjects homework and after school activities. I found myself looking at spark notes and cliff notes for most of the books because i did not have time to fully read them. And when i did read i found myself daydreaming and not actually comprehending what i was reading. But now when i look back i wish i had learned and retained more from the books because i hardly remember anything i read in high school.
• Breaking it down i believe is one of the key concepts i have obtained from this class that i feel will be important for me to apply to in my future classes. Really looking at short passages and having students analyzing them and explaining them to me and the class. And it's not only important to pick out what they understand but help talk them through what they don't understand and help them build problem solving skills in reading that they can adapt to other forms of literature and other passages they will read that are confusing.
  

History and Mozart

• For my topic of inquiry for this class i have thought that i would like to do something a long the same lines as my action research project. I would like to examine the effects of background music playing while the students are reading and how it effects their memory retention. There are many theories out there that listening to soft music while students complete tasks such as reading and test/quizzes helps with student concentration and retention.
  
• I am going to be doing this project by myself since it is the same thing I'm doing for my action research.
• Looking at reading in a history class, now i understand that students need to come from the perspective that they are a historian. They are expected to know the vocabulary like a historian would and use the vocabulary the same way. They need to read and examine the documents, books and sources they read and need to ask the questions like "Who said this?", "Where did they get their information from". Because as historians establishing fact from rumor is very important to our discipline.
  

Content Literacy In adolescents

• After teaching in a classroom for a semester, reading through the article and from my personal experience of being in a classroom as a teenager, I've come to the conclusion that basically most students just do not enjoy reading. They especially do not enjoy reading texts that are assigned to them. Usually the texts assigned have more educational value than entertainment value and are harder for students to pay attention to and move through as opposed to books such as Harry Potter or Twilight. Now-a-days it is especially hard for teachers to expect students to read 200-300 page novels because this day-in-age with advances in technologies students have an abundance of information available to them with the touch of a button and teens like to be "instantly-gratified". Reading a novel, even though it might be as equally gratifying in the end, would take too long to achieve that goal so students are instantly turned away.
• My experiences, although meager at most right now, have shown me that the second a teacher requests students read something instantly the room will break out in moans and groans. Even if it is something that might actually appeal to them they don't want to take the time to read it, they would rather you just tell them what it is about and than they will tell you their opinion on what you said.
  
• In history there is a necessity to read a lot. To form opinions on history and to really understand historical events one most explore different peoples opinions on the event and read through multiple accounts since history is told through the eyes of the beholder. It is annoying and of course it is overwhelming when you have to think about all the articles and time you will have to spend to research topics but if you enjoy history than you don't mind because it is actually rather interesting to hear and read about the different accounts from a specific event in time. Effective reading in History is taking the time to rummage through multiple sources, both primary and secondary, and acquiring as much knowledge as you can from them to form your own opinion about how an event occurred.