Due 2/1/10

The message that Readicide is trying to convey is that we are losing so many potential readers among our students in favor of teaching them to be great test takers. NCLB has not managed to accomplish anything because it has set unrealistic goals that 100% of students will be reading up to their grade level by 2014.  This is an impossible goal to attain especially given the fact that the way they measure their progress is through their scores on multiple choice exams.  Schools are in such a hurry to wade through the curriculum teaching the students just enough to pass the state mandated exams, that they no longer teach critical thinking skills and they rarely just read.

I liked what the author said about what our goal for our students should be, helping them become "expert citizens".  Emphasizing creativity, common sense, wisdom, ethics, dedication, honesty, teamwork, hard work, knowing how to win and how to lose, a sense a fair play, and lifelong learning.  If those aren't words to live by, I don't what else is. It reminds me of something I always say about raising children.  People need to keep their eye on the ball.  Our ultimate goal is to raise independent, productive members of society.

My connection to school experiences is that many students are unprepared for college due to their severe lacking in critical thinking skills and a low level of reading comprehension abilities. It is very important for me to include content literacy strategies in my classroom.  I am going to need to teach my students the tools they will need to figure out the meaning of vocabulary words and content specific concepts. I will need to incorporate different methods to increase my students reading comprehension because most of them are not going to be reading up to their grade level when they get to my class. I will look at trade magazines and use read alouds and shared reading strategies.  I will put new words into multiple contexts and encourage my students to make examples for themselves.  I will encourage students to make inferences and predictions from the context clues and to ask questions of the text. It is my ultimate goal that they will leave my classroom better readers than when they entered it.

Due 1/27/10

As a continuation of my previous post, I am interested in finding ways to help my students better understand the vocabulary they will be confronted with in the business education curriculum. I was inspired by some of the ideas introduced in Chapter 4 of the book, Improving Adolescent Literacy. I would like to research literature on this idea of using different methods in the classroom to handle the content vocabulary.  If I can help my students with the vocabulary it should improve their overall reading skills which will be very useful for them in all areas of their education.  I would like to see what happened when other educators tried some of these different methods and if they thought the techniques were successful. I am very interested in finding out if the students responded favorably and were fully engaged, for the most part. Technical reading skills are necessary in the business world which differs from the type of reading skills that are impressed upon the students in a typical English class.  Those types of classes typically focus on reading and interpreting literature and poems.  The ability to interpret and understand multiple types of documents including directions, graphs, charts, and manuals are just some examples of what is necessary and required reading skills in the business world.  If we as educators can successfully tackle the content level vocabulary, teaching these other reading skills is going to be easier and more hopefully more interesting to students instead of a being a study in frustration for all of us.

Due 1/20/10

My perceptions of content literacy and the adolescent reader are that the majority of today's students are not reading up to their grade level. In addition, students would rather do anything but read. From my point of view as a voracious reader, I find this incredibly sad. Students who are wasting their days playing mindless video games and watching meaningless television shows have absolutely no idea what they are missing out on. Reading can be such an unbelievable experience. The reader can go any where and be anything. In my opinion, the experience of reading a book can be more invigorating than any video game or television show.

My experience involving content literacy while teaching business education at Georgia College Early College was that the students did not even know basic terms and vocabulary. My teaching partner and I found ourselves giving remedial vocabulary lessons just to be able to teach our lessons. The lessons would then involve content vocabulary. We were experimenting with how best to have the students learn the vocabulary. For example, should we just have a hand-out or should we have the students copy the definitions from the overhead, or should we give them homework to go look up the definitions.... Copying from the overhead seemed to work best, but it was very time consuming.

Effective reading in my discipline involves having a somewhat advanced vocabulary, I have found having a dictionary handy and even the internet available so I can look something up if I need clarification is essential. In the future, I would want to have several dictionarys available to the students so they can look up the words they don't know. I would begin by teaching students how to look up a word in the dictionary and then decipher its meaning. In addition, I would make sure the content vocabulary in that unit is explained. I would also like to have an open-door policy with my students so that they feel comfortable asking me about anything they don't understand.