Farewell!

via GIPHY

Wow, I mean what a semester. I have learned so much from this course and I’m not just saying that because I know Mr. Robinson is going to read this! I think the best place to start is from the beginning! Going into this course, I’ll be honest I was dreading it. I had no clue what “content area literacy” meant and figured we would probably be writing a lot of essays about who knows what. So that was my mindset going into the first class but it very quickly changed for the better. On the first day, Mr. Robinson posed a question to our class: is literacy only the job of ELA teachers? After a semester in Content Area Literacy, a concept I now understand, I can confidently say no, it is not just the job of ELA teachers; all teachers have a part in literacy regardless of content.

There is no doubt in my mind that as future teachers of content classrooms, we owe it to our students to bring literacy into our classrooms. We are constantly compartmentalizing things, what you need to understand for math is different from social studies, which is different from art, however literacy is not one of those things that should be compartmentalized!!! Every single aspect of life requires literacy. There is absolutely no avoiding it! You can’t have most jobs without being able to read, you can’t order off a menu if you can’t read, you can’t build a desk if you can’t read the instructions, etc. The list goes on and on. It is imperative that our students are able to read in all areas of their lives, not just read but also comprehend, and if we don’t do something to make that a part of our classroom, we are doing them a huge disservice.

Now, will this actually carry over into my years of teaching to come? I really, really hope so! I can’t 100% say yes, but currently I will be very disappointed with myself if literacy is not a huge part of my future math or science classroom. Reading “Teachers and Content Area Reading- Attitudes, Beliefs and Change,” one thing that stood out to me was that teachers “appear to believe that teaching reading could be worthwhile.” So if teachers believe it is worthwhile, why isn’t this always implemented? The problem is that teaching literacy in a content course is not the way that things have always been done and going against the grain is hard. If I were honest, I would need a support system backing me if I were to actually do this. I would need help. It sounds easy when we have talked about it in class, we’ve even been given different strategies to implement this, but when I think about actually doing this, I’ll admit it is overwhelming. There is so little time to go over the entire curriculum so that my students pass their standardized tests so that I can keep my job. I know it would be really hard. But I also know it would be very much worth it. So while that’s not really an answer, I do aim to make literacy a constant in my classroom but I won’t know until I try. All in all, it has been an incredible semester and whatever my future classroom holds; I know I will hold the concepts I learned in this course closely as I go forward.

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