Struggling Mathers
This past year was my 26th in this business. I spent 11 of those as a middle school language arts and social studies teacher. I spent 5 years as an instructional coach. I taught alternative ed and GED for 2.5 years. All of my working life I'd been concerned with the input side of literacy - reading. This year, I am teaching high school math.
I am a complete newbie at teaching high school Algebra. And I feel like it. I spend long hours poring over content trying to understand the most sensible route to making this abstract subject comprehensible and engaging for my freshmen. They were placed with me at the beginning of the second semester this past year to repeat semester 1 because they had failed it. I am certainly no expert and lean on my new peers in the math department for help.
This is one reason why I am thankful to be reading Jennifer Allen's book, Becoming A Literacy Leader. Specifically, she opens with her call to creating a climate where "creating ongoing opportunities for shared experiences and conversations among staff" is the way forward in navigating the myriad demands we face as teachers.
One of the most striking parts of my experience has been a fresh set of unbiased eyes on a traditional subject. All my years of literacy instruction have given me a different perspective on this whole math thing. I watch students "get it" when I sit with them one-on-one and we read a word problem out loud together. They start to make sense when I ask them a few good questions to help them reflect and verbalize what they know from the problem. As much as I leaned on my team, I believe I brought perspective to our conversations.
It's like "good" readers vs. struggling readers. You know. All those things we know those good readers are doing in their heads, like, predicting, connecting the text to things they know, making a movie of the action in their mind, reading for a specific purpose, scanning, skimming, re-reading... the list could go on. I am finding that struggling mathers are not doing the things that "good" mathers are doing.
That the difference between them often lies not in some innate ability, but a collection of habits that they don't have yet and are not employing to help themselves. I find myself often modeling my thinking out loud for them. They apply few of the Standards For Mathematical Practice (which I am only just getting to now, as you can imagine).
This is only one example of how I am "seeing" and wrestling with literacy in math.
Just as Ms. Allen notes in chapter 2, as "learning to read should be a joyful experience," so should learning to math. My attempt this summer while reading Jennifer's book is to find parallels to help foster and lead in literacy in the math world. I know I have tons of math resources available to me - I've spent a lot of time reading them these past few months - but I want to specifically think about my context, my assignment, my kids and how I can help them navigate math help and instructional resources. I think Ms. Allen's book is the perfect platform for developing the questions I want to ask in order to explore this further.