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.