That was the theme of chapter three in the textbook. I appreciated this chapter. I have noticed this problem a lot even in my classroom - not just reading words but understanding what all the words mean. I can't imagine how it must be to teach English where that is constantly the problem. In my math class, students are constantly taking notes, doing examples as a class, but when it comes time to do them by themselves, they freeze. They can't do it solo. This is an issue that I am currently struggling with and I feel as if most new teachers do. Thus I was excited to read the chapter. Perhaps there would be some useful pointers that I could actually implement! Perhaps there was some small tid bit that would change the way I am teaching in my classroom. Sadly, I was yet again disappointed by this book and its lack of focus on how math teachers can implement these strategies in their classrooms.
The most useful part of the chapter discussed what skilled readers can do: preview, summarize, use clue words, pointer phrases, etc. These are all the things that my students SHOULD be able to do. But most struggle with them. Another one that I thought of was pulling out the main idea or the bigger picture. Connecting one topic with another. I often get tons of complaints from my students regarding the fact that I move onto new things each day. But really it’s all the same. There is a theme per unit. I am fully aware that this is the fault of the teacher, however, I am not sure how to fix this. We discuss our agenda for the week each Monday. We discuss the unit before it starts. I come up with sets so that it can relate to their lives. And yet its not all good enough because after working on it for 2 weeks, I still have students that don’t realize that when they are talking about slope-intercept form, they are talking about a line!!!!
And here in lies the problem. What do I do? I feel as if I was not given many, if any at all, strategies to fix this problem!!! Now I realize that my students don’t know how to read the notes they are given (sometimes I truly wonder what the point of notes are…why not just do example after example because none of my students ever reread their notes…) BUT what are my options? There were suggestions such as think pair share, which I have tried occasionally. Each of you do a problem, then turn to your neighbor and see if they get the same thing. But yet again, my students don’t see the point of this. They aren’t working together to solve the problem. They first do it individually and THEN they share. Its that damn big picture issue again! I need to start visually showing my objectives on the board with each subtopic below…perhaps that’s what I will do this week. Ready. Set. Go.