The Challenges Await

Throughout both of our readings for today, I compared it a lot with my personal experiences in school. As an aspiring math teacher, I excelled more in this subject and didn't take to fondly of subjects involving intense reading. I now believe this is because I was in part illiterate in other subjects. I could read and understand more of the text as a mathematician rather than a scientist, historian or an author. In the book, Content-Area Writing, it stressed the importance of how engaging students in writing can take different forms and is important in all contents and throughout a students life. I found this reading very interesting because it provided me with insight into how I can personally better my writing skills, as well as taking them into my teaching profession. I have struggled often with my writing and I know that it is an aspect I would like to work on, but often it falls short of my priorities because I was never taught to enjoy writing. This will play an important role as I begin entering the classroom because I will strive to better my writing while encouraging constant forms of writing for my students so they can learn and understand the importance of writing, within math as well as other content-areas. One aspect of this reading that challenged me as I go forward, is to make sure the writing in my class is engaging as well as a constant use of varying intelligences that are apart of writing. Writing takes many forms in different content-areas so teaching multiple will help in keeping the students engaged.

In our second reading for today, Content-Area Reading, I was again challenged in how this type of teaching or lack thereof played an important role in my life. I often have found myself disinterested in reading as it is a challenging thing for me. Whether it be the pace in which I read or a lack of comprehending I have really struggled with picking up a book just for fun. Due to this being a missing aspect in my life, I have struggled in other areas, such as writing, vocabulary, and overall knowledge. As a young student, I was engaged in many books and truly enjoyed this hobby, but as time grew on I wasn't as strong as my fellow classmates so I opted out of this hobby. I however, excelled in mathematics where others were not. I kind of blew this off thinking that it wasn't that big of an aspect missing from my everyday life. As I read this book, as well as discovering it over the years, I have realized the importance and emphasis reading should be within the classroom. This book has challenged me to incorporate this in my life and in the classroom by also encouraging and emphasizing it in the life of my students. Through the every changing world, new literacies have come about which bring on the task of having teachers be more aware of how we can better suite our students to strive to become literate as it will influence their life more than it may have ours. Along with writing, teaching reading in our specific content has to be engaging. Otherwise, like it did mine, this simple hobby or task can often be lost in a student's life. Through teaching reading, content-area teachers need to use the text and the different literacies that play into a classroom to highlight how the "content determines process" theory comes about. All in all, these readings have challenged me to make my classroom an engaging area for my students to learn through different processes, and to encourage the reading and writing methods found in my mathematics class.