Readicide, Chapter 2

In this chapter, I could definitely relate to the teacher's story about Al-Queda. I just taught a lesson last week over the Iraqi War and my students couldn't tell the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This blew my mind. The lack of background knowledge is crippling to Social Studies. It's kind of like in math. If you can't add single digit numbers, how can you be expected to multiply anything? This goes along with the author's Phelps story. We expect students to be able to swim the English Channel when they've never even been in a bathtub. If they happen to make it across great, but when they don't, we try to point to everything but the elephant in the room: the lack of reading in schools.

Educators have no reason to not integrate literacy into their curriculum with the access to resources we have today in the internet. We focus more on test taking skills and neglect the simple fact of knowing how to read and comprehend a paragraph. Too much emphasis is taught on how to eliminate wrong answers and not enough attention is paid to keeping kids reading at their grade level. The best example I can think of is one student in my student-teaching placement. She's an outgoing, intelligent girl, but she reads on a third grade level... she's in the seventh grade. Her writing samples are atrocious. She can hardly write a sentence, but she's been passed on all the way until now and she's finally biting off more than she can chew. I was trying to think of who should be to blame; should it be the parents, educators, administrators, or the system itself? I think it is a combination of all of the above. For this much neglect to a child's literacy to occur, it bothers me. She's finally getting help, but I wonder if it's too late. She's going to fail seventh grade and if her reading level doesn't improve quickly, she could fail again. She could potentially be driving to middle school in a couple of years. We as educators must pick up the slack of our predecessors. It starts by integrating literacy into our classrooms. I can deal with students not knowing who Mao Zedong is or what were some of the acts brought about from the New Deal, but I will not tolerate my students not being able to read and write basic sentences. (By the way, I felt like there were a lot of metaphors and anecdotes in this chapter)

Readicide, Chapter 1

After reading chapter 1 of Readicide, it has made a great argument about the harmful effects of high-stakes testing in schools across America. I can look back at my educational experience and see how I was taught to read the tests more than I ever was taught how to read books and determine what to look for while I read. While I was able to achieve, many low-income and minority students have either failed, given up, or dropped out completely. This should be unacceptable to educators. While there will always be people who drop out or potentially fail, we must do everything we can to lower that number as much as possible and reading plays a huge factor in that battle. When students read, they have to do their own thinking. Reading requires more effort than just listening in my opinion. In my placement experiences, the students I saw that had to read in their classes had significantly higher order thinking than those who were subject to worksheets, lectures, and test-prep. While my effort as a Social Studies teacher is to create better citizens through many different educational experiences, these experiences can't happen without reading. I try to make my students responsible for their own learning and then I assess how they are progressing in their own learning and then I try to scaffold those who are not achieving as much as others. But without reading, this becomes very difficult. When reading is implemented throughout the curriculum, the students become better readers, writers, and eventually better thinkers. When you're able to get students thinking about the content on their own, it allows you to do more with that thinking and begin the process of higher-order thinking. The only problem with the higher-order thinking is being mindful that you do have a certain number of things you must cover in a year. I feel that the hardest part of teaching will be to find the balance of depth and width. How deep can you get without sacrificing coverage of something the students will be tested on? Hopefully through reading the following chapters, I will come to an understanding of this and find ways to implement reading deeper while getting the coverage I feel comfortable with.

Visual Literacy

In my Visual Literacy module, I watched a video on how the ACME program allowed for students in an animation class to get feedback from real-life animators on their projects. I would've loved to receive feedback from someone within the profession in which I was studying would critique something I've done. It really creates an authentic learning experience for the students by making it applicable to our real-world experiences. I hope to be able to integrate some sort of real-world application into my curriculum whether it be through having actual historians come in to talk with the students and tell them how they go about their work and how my students can think and learn like historians. The other thing that I loved about the visual literacy video was the technology. The way the teacher had videoconferencing set up for the animators to talk with all the students was very innovative. I hope to also use technology in my classroom to integrate literacy into my curriculum. The teacher said the students perform better whenever they know that the real-life animators will be reviewing their work. It would serve as a great performance assessment in the balanced assessment format of gauging a student's success within a unit.