Blog #7 Webinar 8

Prompt #7

How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students in reading? Is this one of your strengths? A weakness?
Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards? If you have, how is that going? If you haven't, why not? What support do you need?

I do not feel prepared at all to effectively teach students how to read. I mean, what would possibly have prepared me to do so? I have never taught reading or writing. My background is in math, science, and engineering. I passed the math AEPA, not reading or English. I realize that reading is a fundamental skill, and I will do my best to help kids in whatever way they need, but seriously I have no idea how to teach someone to read. So yeah, I guess its a weakness. I can tell you that I do not walk into my math class planning on how to teach kids how to read. I have to assume a fundamental level of reading, just as I have to assume a fundamental level of math. I simply do not have time! Now, of course, after school or before, if a kid comes to me with reading problems, I will try to help them, but frankly I am not sure how. It has not really come up I guess. Reading is important in a math class obviously. If you cannot read the problems, you are not going to be able to understand them and come up with the right solution. I try to go over the necessary vocabulary, but I can tell the kids have major problems remembering the terms. I want to try to find ways of teaching them to better comprehend the words behind the math, but so far have struggled to do so.

Yes, as a department, we have not only started to plan to the Common Core Standards, but we have also started to implement them in our classrooms. It is going decently so far. I think as teachers we struggle the most with trying to increase the rigor of the problems and presenting the Depth of Knowledge level 4 problems to kids, when we ask them basic questions and they do not seem to have even been in your class since day 1. It is a bit frustrating just given the time constraints that we have. I mean, there is a certain amount of curriculum we are expected to teach over the course of the semester and it feels like we are behind constantly. To ask us to try to implement these higher order problems, when the kids don't get the basic concepts is tough to fit into the time schedule. Of course, hopefully, after a few years the kids coming up will have been exposed to this kind of learning and will, hopefully, be better prepared for it.