January 14: Blog 1

I think that content literacy is an important issue for us as future teachers to focus on. However, I believe that before we can look too deep into the literacy problems in our specific content areas we must look at our student's basic literacy deficiencies. I think that there is a serious problem with the way in which the children read and write. Before we begin to look at the task of teaching our students to be competent in the literacy of the content areas, I believe that these general deficiencies must be attended to.
I suppose that my perception is that students are already going to enter the classroom with literacy problems and correcting this is going to be one of our main tasks. Yes, I do believe that content literacy is very important; I believe that it can be taught. However, I also believe that the students need to be taught at a basic literacy level by us as well. I do not have the answers to this problem; all I know is that during student teaching I saw severe flaws in the writing and reading skills of the students on a very broad scale. Teaching them to read and write in the content is important but it is more than a little pointless if we don't also emphasize the basic skills that make for good literacy habits. In my experience, the literary content of history can be rather boring and useless if you are not taught how to use it. Looking just at the important facts and dates and not reading and analyzing deeper into the text are often skills that students lack in their history content literacy.

From a social studies viewpoint, I think that the most effective reading occurs when the student can not only understand (and remember) the dates, names, and periods of the unit, but also the deeper concepts of what they are reading. I think that those in the history fields get to focus on the facts and figures while failing to show students the how and the why of history. Effective student readers should be able to answer two questions after they read something in the history field: So what? and Who cares? These two questions are more important to me than memorizing any date or name and spitting them back out. Students should be able to read a history text and tell the teacher why it is important, not just who was in it and at what time it took place. I realize that in the current system of teaching to high-stakes testing and the end of course exams the students are required to know these facts, but I do not see why history teachers can't teach them to analyze what they read in the field as well. I think that students get turned away from history because we do not show them how to understand what they are reading.