My favorite reading this week was Ch. 5 in D&Z, Tools for Thinking: Reading Strategies Across the Curriculum. It outlines different teaching strategies for different purposes. D & Z did a great job at providing examples, particululary examples for reading in other content areas! Some examples, (such as coding text) are things I already do and just did not realize it. I always considered myself an ‘active reader’ but sometimes debate its effectiveness compared to time consumption. Reading some of these strategies helped reinforce my attitude that good learning is often time consuming and that that’s okay. Some strategies (Sketching my way through text) I found to be even targeted for math and science.
Ch. 6 did have some useful information but honestly, for myself, I use many of the strategies in Ch. 5 even when I’m reading textbooks. The closing of this chapter (Find a better textbook) really reminds me of my mentor teacher, who writes nearly all of his course materials in entirety. This is (not surprisingly) very very time consuming. On the other hand, I have the impression that were these materials turned into a textbook… It may be one of the best for physics. (Like Feynman for high schoolers!)
For the Content-Area Literacy, I can already tell how I feel about reading in content courses is in transformation. I’m a huge reader, and a huge part of what I read is on physics. There were already some reading activities I had planned for my future class, but haven’t decided yet how I was going to do that. Also, when I initially came up with some of these activity ideas, it was simply because they are things I love doing. (ex: sections of the Feynman Lectures) Now I’m starting to actually be able to justify the importance of activities like this, rather than ‘because I like to do it, so they will too.’ I do believe students enjoy learning, so after they gain the skills of reading to learn-- they will enjoy reading too!
and…. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to keep this under 300 words.
Lisa, I understand about the 300-word limit! Still, I really enjoyed reading your post from this week's readings. I agree with you that sketching my way through text can be extremely helpful for math and science classes! I often used this technique when I was learning something particularly difficult, and it really helped me visualize what was happening. Just a side note, I really like how your post is very conversational. Thanks for posting!
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