Literacy in School

          After reading the first chapters in Content-Area Writing and Content Area Reading, I have really come to appreciate the importance of being literate in the classroom. I am studying to become a social studies teacher, and reading and writing are major components in that content area. It has really come to my attention that I will be just as responsible as any english teacher to ensure that students are comprehending what they are reading. The authors of the Content Area Reading text do a great job in laying out a strategy to teach students how to read like a historian. I really liked the questions that Doug Buehl has laid out for the Wisconsin sate-wide project called "Thinking Like a Historian". This question outline emphasizes cause and effect, change and continuity, turning points, "through their eyes", and "using the past". I have been a beneficiary of these techniques as a student, and want to use the same tactics for my future students. I personally have always hated when teachers would make me read history books, then answer questions about the reading, and then finally talk about what we were supposed to have read and answered in class. The assigning and telling technique was ineffective for me, and I am sure it would put my students to sleep as well.
          Writing is equally important in students' literacy. I found it interesting that the authors of the Content-Area Writing textbook seemed to put little importance on what standardized test scores show about a students' ability to write. I agree with this as well. Even as recently as my last MTLE exam, I found myself writing about topic that I could not connect with. I personally like writing, and writing that essay was extremely painful for me. The authors gave the example about students from Illinois having to write about inline skating. I am from Illinois, and know first hand we call it rollerblading, and nobody does that in Chicago as the authors pointed out. Since kids write all the time whether they are passing notes, keeping a journal, or talking on facebook, all teachers need to be able to do is find a topic that would be engaging for the students to write about. Writing is a skill that everybody will need to have nobody what their profession is. I think the authors do a great job in pointing out how important being able to write a scholarly essay is, but at the same time they do a great job in pointing out that just because the test scores are bad doesn't mean students do not know how to write.