Ch. 12- Teach Writing Your Way

        This chapter helped me to see writing in a different light. Very similar to the author of the chapter, I always wrote one single draft, fixed a few misspellings here and there, and then resubmitted practically the same copy without really learning anything about myself and my writing skills. While this behavior has mostly me to blame, it is also somewhat the fault of my teachers, who allowed me to continue writing in this way. I always complained about having to write multiple drafts, stating that “I never had anything to fix.” This is the same mentality that I have in a lot of areas of my life, and it is really just an excuse not to look in and see my faults and the places where I need help. This halted my progress and improvement as a writer and a student. When I am a teacher, I plan on asking my students to write short answer and essay responses to some of my exam questions for practice on the AP test. If I allow my students to do the same thing that I have always done, then they too will be stuck in a rut, never improving their writing skills, and never quite able to achieve the goals that they want to reach. I will encourage my students to read their writing out loud to themselves, as well as seek peer and teacher revisions before writing their final draft of any paper.

            I also noticed that this author was a lot like me, in that I don’t really ever plan my writing. I start with a thesis statement, and see where it takes me. Even as I go to college I have been spending the last several years writing a young adult fiction book, and each time I go back to begin writing again I surprise myself with new ideas and new directions for the book to go in. I believe that this process is very valuable and greatly improves the writing that I put forth. The same idea goes in a science classroom. One must have patience and be willing to fail and start over, especially when performing experiments in which the hypothesis is almost never correct. Just write another hypothesis and begin again until you reach success. 

Ch. 14- Unleashing Potential with Emerging Technologies

                While reading this chapter, I couldn’t help but laugh at all the parts where the author was describing a technology that is very common now. MySpace was one that really cracked me up, simply because it is essentially obsolete now. I also personally think that most teachers know what a blog is nowadays, especially considering the fact that most of my English teachers have asked us to use a blog at one time or another (hint hint… this class right now!). I definitely feel that blogs are a very good resource for allowing students to think through their ideas and thoughts that they have in class or while going through a reading assignment. I am not only rather shy and dislike speaking in class, but I am also very absent-minded, and writing my thoughts in a blog after reading is a great way for me to get my thoughts down before I forget them all upon returning to class. I also like the idea of the students being under the pressure of a larger audience to motivate them to use better writing. When a student knows that his or her writing is going to be on display for other people to see, they are far more likely to take pride in the work that they do rather than blowing it off and throwing out a random answer at the end. Plus, the idea of not having a specific number of posts to make is very appealing to me, for that same reason. Students are a lot more likely to have meaningful posts if it is written when they really have something to say, rather than in response to a question posed by someone else.

                Another idea that I had not really thought about was the podcast method. I think that recording the group discussions is an incredible idea, especially when a particular group has a very good discussion that should be shared with the rest of the class. Sometimes the best answers come out in those small groups, where shy students are not so intimidated and all of the students have the ability to bounce ideas off of one another without being overwhelmed by such a large group. Recording these sessions would also give me a great insight into the thoughts of my students and give me a chance to make sure that everyone is participating in those discussions and staying on task. I am not sure how I would go about using these ideas in a science classroom however, and I would really like some input on the matter (perhaps from Jess!) as to how I could do that.

The Skin That We Speak

                As the author of this passage spoke about the little girl Shannon who said “I ain’t writin’ nuttin,” I thought back to some of the other students in my freshman English class in High School. While the majority of my English classes were honors or AP, my freshman English class included several other students that did not move on to those higher-level classes, and they greatly resembled Shannon. I imagine that many of them grew up with that same mentality, and were “permitted to fail.” Even up into high school, they were permitted to fail, and that is the reason that most of them did not move up into the honors and AP level courses.

Sometimes, I worry that in my own classroom I will unknowingly give my students permission to fail, and that my students will fall through the cracks one by one. I really like the idea of demanding success from my students. I plan to work in a lower-income neighborhood, so I am expecting that this may be hard work. I will not accept my students considering themselves victims, and I plan to make sure that they always try the assignments. I know that as a science teacher, there will be many students who don’t understand the complex subjects in the class, especially in the required freshmen gen. ed. classes. Rather than allowing my students to get away with “I don’t understand this,” I will make sure to poke and prod my students for some sort of attempt at the assignment until I am sure that they have come to some form of answer. I think that helping students think through difficult concepts step by step is a good way to provide scaffolding for them to develop their critical thinking skills. I plan to assign regular short answer papers for my students to think through and write out processes and cause and effect ideas, so that they can understand that all parts of science are interrelated. I may also use activities to help my students learn how science relates to their own lives. After using these activities to give them ideas, I plan to ask my students to write a short paper on a particular subject that is important to them, and relate what we learned in class to that subject. By providing these connections and allowing my students to pick what they want to write about, I believe that they can learn to truly enjoy writing and to be fascinated by science each and every day.

Ch. 8: English Language Learners in the Classroom

         Unfortunately, I really didn’t feel like this chapter pertained to me very much at all. The format of the whole thing threw me off (it was kind of corny!) with the interviews and people responding to each other like it had been rehearsed, and just the fact that they spent half of the chapter talking about the differences between English and other languages like Spanish and Chinese. I feel like this doesn’t have very much to do with my science classes, simply because the students will almost have to know English in order to participate. Even then, the students are practically learning a whole new language when they begin to learn the terminology of Science. I felt like I couldn’t use about half of this chapter, though I could certainly relate to it because of my experience in learning Spanish in high school, as well as in learning science terms.

            One of the points that was brought up in the discussion was scaffolding. I think this is a brilliant idea and I have learned about it in several of my education classes so far, so it is nice to see another connection here in this chapter. While the context of the word in this chapter is slightly different, the idea of scaffolding applies very well to science, especially since most science classrooms begin at the molecular level and build up to the population level. This way, a student can use prior knowledge to learn a new concept by building on to what they already know. For example, in my Gen Biology lab that I TA for, we took one lab to learn about DNA and what it actually is and does for our body. The next week, we learned about the genes on our DNA, and how those determine what your physical traits look like. By remembering what we discussed about DNA previously, the students were able to more quickly understand what a gene is and were able to use that as a bridge to the new information they were learning. All in all, while this chapter didn’t have much to do with me, I still found some of its tips and strategies helpful, especially when teaching students the whole new “language” of science.

Ch. 4: The Essence of Understanding

             This chapter was very interesting to me, and it discusses one of the reasons why I love science so much. I have found in my experiences that when you read something, your brain skips pieces of it and doesn’t always hang on to everything (or even most of the passage) that it read. The reason that I love science so much is that it almost always comes with a very heavy hands-on aspect to the class. It is never just read-and-lecture, there is always something to be tested, something to be examined and explored; something that the students can do to further engrain the concepts and ideas into their long-term memory. In particular, the labs that we did in high school were particularly interesting and I can still remember almost all of the concepts learned in those hands-on lab days. My teacher would give us the lab report the night before, and we would have to go home and read it. After reading over it, we would come back to class and the teacher would discuss the concepts with us and make sure that we understood what it was we were supposed to do. Once we started the lab, which was always fun and had to do with something pertaining to our daily lives, we would begin to see how the concepts applied to everything around us. Filling out the lab report at the end along with the expansion and critical thinking questions with our groups only helped to further our understanding of the ideas presented that day.

                The same applies to some of the labs that I am a TA for at Olivet. I TA for an entry-level Biology lab, and the particular lab that I work in has an excellent professor. She is very enthusiastic and will even interrupt the “pre-lab lecture” to elaborate and find ways to wow the students so that they can connect the information with their emotions. This helps the students to really think about their lives and how it all connects together, everything from the food we eat, to the trash we throw out, and to the children we will someday have. These connections help to establish discussion and really allows the students to truly engage in the subject, so that they will always remember the importance of Life Science.

Ch. 6: Of Times, Teens, and Books

                This chapter, as interesting as it was, had several parts that did not really seem to relate very much to my area of study. Since I am teaching in a science classroom, I’m not entirely sure how I would go about finding graphic novels that relate to science. I’m sure they are out there, but it may not be worth the trouble of finding them, especially since a science classroom focuses on hands-on work, leaving little room to be assigning books to read outside of the school-issued textbook. I do happen to think that audiobooks could be a very good option for those students who are auditory learners, especially since they don’t have a lot of time where they get to use their auditory learning in the classroom. When I give textbook reading assignments to the class, it would be useful to know that the auditory learners in my class can also complete the reading assignment in the way that they will learn it best.

                I do also realize that selection and censorship will have a big part in the books that are allowed in my classroom. If, by chance, I wind up teaching in a religious school, there may be issues either with highly conservative parents or even the school and curriculum itself in regards to controversial topics such as evolution and stem cell research. In this case, certain textbooks that talk about those particular topics may be censored and taken out of those schools and replaced by curriculum that teaches solely creationism. This I believe takes away a child’s ability to make their own decisions, and takes away the opportunity for a great writing assignment. My biology professor presented us with several different degrees of belief in the subject, ranging from creationism to evolutionism and everything in between. Then, after being fully informed, we were given the choice of what we believed in and we had to write a paper explaining why we believed that. I think this is a valuable experience not only for practice in decision making and beliefs, but also in practicing good literacy skills.

Ch. 3: Multiliterate Youth in the time of Scientific Reading Instruction

          This chapter got me thinking a lot. I had heard about using the internet to enhance

learning, however I have never heard of using video games… until now. With the type of schools I

would like to teach in, I feel like this is a very interesting option to help with literacy problems in low

-income schools where many of the students are illiterate. Having grown up as a “Digital Native,” I

am very much inclined to using technology in my classrooms. I also happen to really like playing

video games as a means of relaxing after a long day, especially since so much of my school work

involves reading that my eyes and brain become tired by the time I’m done with my homework.

Since video games are typically a past-time, it seems that they could be another way to “trick”

students into learning. If I have certain students that are not particularly keen on reading a book, I

may actually try this method of helping them become more literate.

                As I was reading, I also began to think about the issue that was first presented in the beginning of this chapter. Why is it that our definition of actual reading is so different now than the culture of our students? As was mentioned in the chapter, I certainly agree that it has to do with the time period of those in charge. The people that are currently in positions such as district supervisor and those even higher up on the “education totem pole” grew up in an era where the most important resource for learning was through reading books. As the author mentioned, the technology we have today was not around when those people were in school, and so they do not know how to learn using technology. This causes an educational generation gap that can only be fixed by us, the future teachers of America, who have grown up with enough technology to bridge that gap.