Real-World Writing

In the reading for this week I want to bring up the tone that I detected in the Write Like This article by Gallagher. I found that I was conflicted about what ideas exactly the author was trying to convey—undoubtedly, I embraced his stance on showing students how to become better writers through modeling (Gallagher, 15) and the normalization of struggle (Gallagher, 16), but he repeats the idea of “the real-world purposes for writing (instead of simply writing to meet the next school requirement) [where students] begin to internalize the relevance of writing, and more important, they develop an understanding that writing is an important skill to carry into adulthood” (Gallagher, 8-9). Upon reading this passage, I immediately thought to myself just what precisely was implied by this author by emphasizing real-world purposes for writing—as a high school teacher (Gallagher, viii), does Gallagher not believe that the development of strong writing skills would be needed for success in college in order to obtain a career? Where in most careers, good writing skills are required in many aspects of daily life, from writing professional emails and memos, to writing reports and plans. Gallagher continues a couple of paragraphs after this passage and sarcastically dismisses the validity of tone and scoffs at it in real-world writing when he describes a hypothetical casual encounter with a student, years in the future where the student shares that they still keep a tone journal and continue to write essays about authors’ tone for all the books they read after high school (Gallagher, 9). Instead, Gallagher embraces real-world writing as students responding to editorials and writing blogs. While this sort of writing is absolutely valid and should be encouraged, I don’t think that it should be the sort of real-world writing that a language arts teacher should stress as the kind of writing that students will encounter and should anticipate for the rest of their out-of-school lives.

            I interpreted Gallagher’s own tone as demeaning and critical of the many elements involved in and taught in literature and writing.  To continue with Gallagher’s example of tone, I don’t think that the tone an author employs should ever be dismissed, and I do believe that analysis of tone should be applied to everything one reads and writes. Author’s write for an audience and are motivated to write with a goal or purpose in mind—this may not be quite as relevant in the natural sciences and mathematics, where writing is rather fact-driven and there is less room for interpretation, but it is absolutely pertinent to literature we encounter every day in history, economics, newspapers, novels, magazines, television programming, blogs and movies because the creators of these items want their audiences to believe their argument or “buy into” what they are presenting.

            Gallagher emphasizes that he wants his students to work toward becoming real-world writers, but that students make no distinction between the various purposes that drive real-world writing (Gallagher, 9). He goes about this dilemma by presenting his students with lists of purposes which drive writing, which include informing/explaining, inquiry/exploration and analysis/interpretation, among others, which are excellent, but fall short when he presents very un-academic, rather buzzfeed-esque topics (sports, book reviews, movie trends) found in newspapers he brings to class as demonstrations of real-world writing (Figure 1.2, page 11). These are relevant personal-interest ideas to inspire personal motivations for writing, but these purposes for writing do not prepare students for college or career writing and rather omit the idea of college all together, which actually seems very dangerous at a high-school level. I believe that Gallagher shares some excellent insight as to the need for mentors and models for students as well as the break-down of the processes and components for good writing. However, we must not be afraid to challenge students while giving them the skills for writing professionally, academically and within the disciplines because once they gain the tools for comprehension of these advanced literatures, then they will be able to put forth their own thoughts on what they read and connect ideas which they can then share.  

Reading in the Disciplines Struggle of Minority Students

The challenges of adolescent literacy in todays school system gives us an overview of how minority students have pronounced disabilities in reading. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) minority students stay in the first leave of reading whish is basic, compared to other students that reach to the level of proficient or advanced readers.  It is crucial that students/adolescents  learn how to read because they would not develop the skills necessary to use vocabulary, reading strategies and the necessary knowledge needed to comprehend new complex material.  

 

According to the authors "one of the main important conclusions of recent research is the foundational roles of a variety of forms of prior knowledge" the importance of prior knowledge and how it can impact the understanding of different topics such a science, mathematics, history and literature gives the students the opportunity to explore, question and interact fully with the text, but as the authors mention this is one of the main reason struggling adolescent readers have to deal which in this case are minority students. The lack of prior knowledge in a subject effects the students tremendously because they will have limited vocabulary, difficult to understand concepts, and low level courses in reading.

 

One important current intervention is the "Strategic Literacy Initiative" which consists of teaching genetic reading and strategies but also giving the opportunity to student to develop their own identities as readers therefore enforcing discipline where adolescent readers are expected to read in order to learn. It gives me much joy to learn that History teachers are contributing in a positive way by teaching the student how to analyze texts and to make sense of the kinds of text the students are reading.

 

According to the authors "there are limitations in the range of texts to which students are exposed in literature classes especially low income communities" the broken educational system has fail to provide the proper education, text, training, and the proper knowledge to students/adolescent readers in order for them to succeed  in todays society limiting them to contribute very little to this economy and the future generations.

 

 

 

I’m sure all of us have had that moment where you end up reading an entire page out of a book, newspaper, or magazine and as you’re moving on you stop and think “Wait, what did I just read?” It’s a very common occurrence, we get distracted while we are reading or start to space out. Well, for many students it’s not that they just that they space out, it’s that they don’t possess the tools to properly comprehend what was going on in the text. One of the articles cited that 70% of students struggle with reading in some way or another, and the article emphasized comprehension was one of the key issues. From a personal experience, I remember being in high school and my friends and I made it through secondary school without reading a single book. As a kid I thought it was amazing that I was able to get away with using spark notes and copying other people’s packets. Now as an aspiring educator, I see now that it is absurd that I was able to do that.  The article also stated that about 50% of college bound students end up taking remedial English classes in college since they struggle with reading. I saw friends who thrived in high school end up dropping out of college since they could not keep up with the work load of a lot of their gen eds. Now from my experience in college a lot of general education courses can be reading intensive. So, one can speculate that they didn’t develop the reading skills they needed in high school to be able to take on this reading intensive work load. The point I’m trying to make is that even though many of us see our friends thriving in college around us here at UIC, I want to make it very clear that this issue of a lack of reading ability is very real. So then what do we do about this? The article laid out a few possibilities and I would like to talk a little about my favorite ones. The article talked about a cooperative learning. I’m personally a huge fan of cooperative learning in the classroom. In gives each student to share their ideas and opinions in small groups, so every student gets a voice. When it comes to reading cooperatively, students of all different reading abilities should be able to be able to talk with someone whose reading ability is above, below, and similar to their ability. Each scenario offers a different benefit. When a student shares with students below their own reading ability, if they are able to articulate their thought in a way the other can comprehend it, it solidifies their own comprehension. When a student talks with another student whose reading comprehension is above their own, they are able to hear a thought that is most likely formulated at a deeper level of comprehension then their own. When students who are at the same level share ideas, they are able to build their understanding together at a fair pace for all participants. Building on cooperative education, the article brought up a point on teachers between different departments cooperating to build on students reading comprehension. I understand that this may be very hard for many teachers since most teachers need to follow a district program and each department has a strict set of things that need to be covered. Even though it may be hard I feel it isn’t impossible. This would require an entire reconstruction of the school so essentially it would require all teachers in the school or even district to be on board. There’s so much more that goes in to helping students reading comprehension but personally I am a huge fan of this cooperative approach. 

Reading In the Disciplines

I wanted to share this image not only because I find it rather amusing, but I think its interesting how the internet has allowed us to look at history in a more light hearted manner but still manage to get the point across through such a simple image. Comedy on the internet has turned into a surprisingly effective way to disseminate information to the masses. In particular I want to share John Oliver's segment on charter schools a video that now sits at 6.2 million views.

 I found both readings extremely insightful and eyeopening. Both readings point out the issue of the low number of students who can read at grade level or above. Lee & Spratley state that "at the most advanced level, less than 10 percent of 17 year olds, regardless of race/ethnicity or SES, are able to comprehend complex texts." Biancarosa & Snow bring up a similar point in their text stating, "approximately eight million young people between fourth and twelfth grade struggle to read at grade level."They go on to explain that their most common problem is that students are unable to comprehend what they read. To me it is hard to believe that so many students are struggling to comprehend text at the level they are supposed to. When I was a student in elementary school and high school it was obvious who had a difficult time reading. The students would usually skip words they did not know or understand, would read at a really slow pace, and would generally stumble while reading. At that time I would have never thought that students who seemed to be reading at grade level could also be students who could not understand what they were reading.

In Reading in the Disciplines Lee & Spratley present strategies that good readers use to comprehend text. They present asking questions as the number one strategy to use. I believe that students who do not understand text ask plenty of questions about the text, maybe even more so than those who are good readers. I think, however, that students who do not comprehend text also do not know what type of questions they should be asking. Lee & Spratley also state that comprehension requires knowledge of topics in a particular field before even considering those strategies. Using history as an example, when does it become appropriate to expose students to more complex ideas, like the struggles between countries that lead to war? How do you expose students to knowledge and ideas in history in an educational system that has students learning and testing on the constitution in seventh grade and then doing the same thing in tenth? How do we build a students knowledge and understanding when we have a system that dictates what students should be learning at what grade level?

Being a Teaching of History major what I found more interesting in Lee & Spratley's reading was the section reading in history. They make an interesting point that sometimes reading a textbook is harder to understand than a primary source. I can understand the point that they are trying to make. With the attempt to simply textbooks a lot of contextual information is left to the reader to fill in. Students might not have enough knowledge of a topic to be able to make inferences on their own. However, I do believe that their point is dependent on what you are reading. It would be easier to read a textbook about the amendments to the constitution than actually reading the amendments.

Reading Through A Disciplinary Lens

When I came to Chicago from China, I made some friends who had difficulty in reading math textbook because they could not follow the proof procedures, understand how to apply the theorems to solving the problems, or illustrate the meaning of the graph. It makes me wonder why they, while reading math textbook, feel like staying in the hell as same as me reading the literacy texts. The article, Reading in the Disciplines, tells me that the reasons can be involved with “vocabulary knowledge, general knowledge of topics and text structures”, and “proficiency in monitoring their own reading comprehension” (Lee & Spratley, 2010), which makes me recall my math class in my high school in China.

It is fortunate for me that I had an excellent math teacher in my high school. He always assigned some basic questions before the lessons he would teach in other day. Since the questions were based on the new knowledge, then it pushed us to read the textbook in advance and to comprehend the content as much as possible. In class, he began with the explanation of mathematics vocabulary and gave us chances to practice understanding the relationship among multiple math modes. The insights learned from his classes are that reading math textbook does assist students in comprehending the content and that practice makes perfect. “We should not underestimate the importance of our students being able to understand the language and logic of mathematics as captured in mathematics textbooks” (Lee & Spratley, 2010). In my opinion, it is not that students cannot totally understand the math content on their own, but that they are kind of afraid of reading math textbooks by themselves, which gradually forms the dependence on teachers or class teaching. If students do not have a try to think mathematically about solving math problems or understanding the definitions, they cannot “develop the capacity to access mathematics understandings independently, and then students become mired in a continuing cycle of dependency on a knowledgeable other” (Buehl, 2011). This continuing vicious cycle is of endless explanation and showing seem-to-get-it expression, which, in my eyes, is a waste of energy and time. Under this cycle, it becomes the common situation that students are often stuck in solving problems because the concepts are unclear to them and they cannot independently think about how to work on it.

It is interesting to see that “readers have to be flexible thinkers, able to adjust to these different informational modes constantly, and able to extract meaning from each” (Buehl, 2011), which I definitely agree with. Math is a language full of diverse texts, like symbols, graphs, functions, etc. The quick thinking transformation among those modes can be of great help of problem solving and comprehension. For example, both the unit circle and the graph of sine and cosine function can be a tool to solve the problems, but choosing one of them depends on the reader’s preference.

After reading all of the articles assigned for this week, “I do believe that readers read texts of one academic discipline in ways that are substantially different from the texts of other disciplines” (Buehl, 2011). As for me, I can be a quick thinker through a mathematics lens when reading math textbooks, which is a totally opposite situation when reading other literature. It seems a pressure on secondary students that they have to force themselves to switch the reading modes in mind as reading diverse disciplinary literatures, but who cannot say such a switch is not important to each disciplinary knowledge though a unique disciplinary lens.

Reading within a Discipline

            

             This week's reading was very interesting as we got to learn how literacy is applied to disciplines and ways to comprehend each discipline. Each reading brought a different perspective of what every student does before reading or even approaching a text. Throughout the readings, I found myself rereading texts and underlining words that I was unfamiliar with as well as asking myself questions. According to Buehl, this is important as we are using the seven fundamental comprehension process to make sense of what we are reading. Many students in high school don't use such approach whereas they try to just finish the answer to an assignment without fully understanding what they have just read. It's sad to read and even hear that students are not fully developing their comprehension when reading a text. Buehl mentions many teachers often ask themselves "we cannot really teach students how to comprehend, can we?" (Buehl, 37). Yes, we can teach students as Buehl puts it "when students are taught to apply strategies to text, their comprehension of those texts improves" (Buehl, 37). It's just a matter of when to teach students the strategies and many see that the school's main focus is often passing certain exams. Yes, it's important for students to pass that exam but if we were to teach them the right way to comprehend then there would be an improvement in such scores. So as future teachers, we have to give the time to teach students to comprehend within a given discipline. Anywhere from teaching them the strategies to approach a text to giving them time in class to voice their own thoughts of what they read. This doesn’t have to be taught all at once, but more as putting a few reminders throughout the semester of what to do so over time students would then be able to do this on their own.

           Lee & Spratley mention that “less than 10 percent of 17-year-old, regardless of race/ethnicity or SES, are able to comprehend complex texts” (Lee & Spratley, 2). This is such a low percentage that as teachers we have to see that something is not being taught correctly in the sense that students aren’t understanding a text. This is when teaching how to comprehend comes in handy, as Lee & Spratley mention “beyond these general strategies, disciplinary literacy also requires knowledge of topics in a particular field” (Lee & Spratley, 3). So students also have to have a background knowledge about subjects they studied or else they are going to be lost in a classroom.

         One thing did catch my attention and that was the Comprehension of Mathematics text in both the readings of Buehl and Lee & Spratley. It never occurred that there was more than just using equations. As a Teaching of Mathematics major, it was a different reading both the articles about teaching students how to comprehend math text. I was finally able to fully understand the connection between Literacy and Mathematics. As Buehl, mentions “readers must read mathematics sentences differently and more intensely than they read sentences” (Buehl, 63). From my own personal experience, I often used a Math textbook as guidance in order to fully understand what I was learning in the class and as well as extra practise problems. Lee & Spratley explain that “reading a wide array of mathematics-centric and mathematics-related texts in the classroom can generate lifelong interest and support learning to reason mathematically” (Lee & Spratley, 15). So even though Mathematics is a language of its own, as a future Math Teacher, I have to encourage students to decipher math texts and ask themselves questions as they go. This is what we need in the classroom to get students into the mode of thinking about a text when they read. We have to find ways to teach comprehension in all the classroom and from their students are going to learn better and critically of their readings. 

Reading to Learn—Becoming the Page Master

The last five weeks of this course have brought to my attention an epidemic in the world of education that I think we have all acknowledged at some point in our academic careers—perhaps not in the grand scale of a nation-wide problem, but absolutely at a personal level. When is the last time you really had to focus on an article you were reading, which forced you to have to reread, slow down your reading in order to comprehend (even though you really wanted to fly through, or skim the article to get the gist of it), perhaps even use context clues to understand a word you kept encountering and couldn’t figure out, but which was paramount to grasping the material? For myself, this was a reality for all of the material we had assigned for our CI course this week alone—as a student only just entering the world of education, I feel especially responsible for focusing on the content of the articles in order to catch up to all of my peers who have been studying education for their undergrad degree. Now, imagine a high school student who is taking a diverse load of courses—geometry, advanced placement US history, American Lit, biology, in addition to an additional class or two… Lee & Spratley explain that “each academic discipline or content area presupposes specific kinds of background knowledge about how to read texts in that area, and often also requires a particular type of reading” (2). Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of that highschooler, who may not have been taught the kind of discipline that we, as college and graduate students, have [mostly] mastered, but even worse, imagine not knowing how to go about reading a text, not having the repertoire of skills required to tackle dense, content-laden texts that assume that you already have an inkling as to what they are discussing. Especially in high school, many subjects build upon each other, so that student may very well have encountered crucial information that was never retained, thereby “if you don’t know content, you will have a difficult time understanding the texts and if you don’t understand the texts you are unlikely to understand the content” (Lee & Spratley, 3)—thus the vicious cycle compounds the situation and becomes a common theme in other subjects as well.

It is important that as teachers in training, students like the one we have imagined are not thought of as a lost cause. Beuhl helps us to understand that students have developed poor habits as a result of both students and teachers losing sight of the importance of engaging with texts for comprehension as opposed to merely finding information for the completion of assignments and then regurgitating it for exams (Beuhl, 32). It can seem overwhelming to undo years of skimming texts and reading and forgetting, but Lee and Spratley are reassuring in explaining that becoming capable and confident readers of academic content-area texts lies in the creation of a culture of high expectations through building routines, routines which help establish students’ expectations for what they do, how they do things and why (Lee & Spratley, 17). This is where the demystification process of reading support comes into play, where we deploy strategies and disclose a variety of thinking tools to students while showing them how to effectively use them and then practice until mastery and confidence is achieved.