Math? Literacy? Equal Parts?

This reading by Leigh Hall entitled “Teachers and Content Area Reading: Attitudes, Beliefs and Change” has opened my mind to thoughts that I have not given a lot of weight to before. This paper brought to the front of my mind a lot of questions I had about literacy in the mathematics classroom. I came into this class wondering what if anything I could do in the math classroom to support literacy efforts amongst my future students and that was the focus of a couple paragraphs in this paper. Similarly to the Study by Bintz, I found/ find myself wanting to blame the teachers who came before me for the lack of literacy skills of my students. But after reading this varied content, it is as much my problem as it was theirs and my job is to do the best I can for the students I have. The idea I picked up and have seen through the education courses I’ve taken so far, is to meet your students where they are and to help them each grow. The goal is not 100% on a test or passing the most recent version of standardized tests but rather to see growth in a variety of areas throughout the course of the year. Sure, I want to see them pass the class, but did they finally learn what a fraction was? Or did they have a light bulb moment in relating fractions and their corresponding pictures? These are necessary goals and benchmarks to measure student achievement. How this relates back to literacy goes back to the core of the student.  Have they learned new strategies to combat their illiteracy, have they gained new confidence reading in front of their peers? These little things are ones I can execute in my future classroom. I can use the strategies in this class to guide my teaching to push students to be better readers and comprehenders of difficult texts. I also really enjoyed the part where one of the studies showed students having to tutor a student in literacy in their grade level and content area. I feel like this practice forces pre-service teachers to create relationships with other students and provides for them (us) the application that goes along with the process.



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