Final blog post

Growing up in a family of educators, I have always heard the term “writing across the curriculum” but I never understood what that actually meant. Does writing even have a place across the entire curriculum? As a preservice teacher, this has been something that interest me. I want to teach math, and if writing does have a place in mathematics, then how can I best incorporate it? Coming into this semester, I was genuinely excited about this class because honestly, I didn’t see the importance of literary in mathematics. However, here we are 15 weeks later, and I can say, with certainty, that there is a place for literacy within mathematics.

When we think about mathematics, most people don’t think about literacy or literature. However, literary is embedded throughout mathematics. One huge piece of literacy is text, and we can see texts in a multitude of different way across mathematics. A text doesn’t have to be a book, poem, or article, in fact, in mathematics, a text looks more like a graph, chart, or number line. Although these texts may look a little different, we can use the same reading strategies to break them down and understand them. Throughout this semester, we did many activities to understand this idea. One that I had a particularly hard time with but ending up learning the most from was the think aloud. When charged with the task of finding a piece of literature that I would give my students, I felt at a loss. I want to be a math teacher, I thought there was absolutely no way I would ever give my students a piece of literature. However, as teachers and as humans, we interact with literacy daily. As math and social studies and science teachers, it may not necessarily be our job to “teach reading” but whether we like it or not, our students will be interacting with literature in our classrooms, and it is our job to teach them how to read those texts. So, going back to those think alouds, although I may have never gotten so frustrated over an assignment, at the end of the day, I can now see what a mathematical text and how to analyze that with my students in order to better their understanding.

Being a preservice teacher is quite an interesting experience. We are constantly caught between being a teacher and a student. While we are participating in activities in class, we are also thinking about how we could potentially implement them in our own classes on day. Over the course of the semester, we did many different activities that I see myself using as a teacher myself, one of these being the “tweet the text” strategy. We used this strategy for our mini lesson, and while it may not have been the most smooth lesson, I could see myself taking this strategy and applying it in a more structured way in my own classroom.

Another one of my big takeaways from this semester actually comes from the book. We covered this early in the semester, but it’s something that stood out to me. We can talk about the importance of literacy and ways you can implement it successfully all day, but what about those students in your class who struggle to read in the first place? Our book, Subjects Matter, tells us that in order "to help our students understand and learn from the tasks we assign them, we must work with their reading process" (278-279). This is so important in any classroom and subject area. When we assign our students a text, we must work with them and make sure they understand the process. Whether this is a poem or a graph, is our students can't read it, there isn't much they can learn from it. 

Ultimately, this course has opened my eyes to a different perspective on literacy in the mathematics classroom. However, as I have seen in different articles, the idea that literary belongs in a mathematics classroom isn’t widely accepted. I think this is something that’s just going to take time. I read some research about children’s literacy and mathematics their studies showed that “Using children’s literature in math classrooms has been found to not only improve student performance, but attitudes towards math as well (Mink & Fraser, 2005).” The benefits and need of literacy in the mathematics classroom are abundant, but we as math teachers must first realize that it is in fact our job to teach a type of literacy. At the end of the day, if our students can read, they can do anything. Although on the surface literacy and mathematics may seem like oil and water, once you dig a little deeper, you can see that the two are a lot more connected than you would think, and I have this class to thank for opening my eyes to this idea.

WC: 812

One final GO DAWGS for good measure.