Reaction to articles

For me personally, these articles were reminders of what literacy and reading is really like for certain students. The article by Elizabeth Jaeger showed the extent of what schools would do due to pressure from test scores. Adapting a scripted reading program to improve literacy scores isn’t necessarily a bad thing however limiting teachers in their teaching methods can be dangerous. What happened to differentiated learning and no one shoe fits every student? In my experiences teaching in an urban district where the majority of the students are not proficient in literacy, I have seen first hand what pressures the administration has to improve their scores. This filters down to the teachers which eventually goes right to the students. Some students base their entire year success on passing the test. It doesn’t matter if they made 2 years of growth in literacy, if they are still not proficient, their year was unsuccessful. The issue here is the reliance on test scores. While I completely disagree with the use of standardized testing, I have yet to come up with a better solution. How do you keep schools accountable and still create a system that is fair for all? Now that I have gone off track a bit, I think I should return to the issue of reading programs and the use of them. Do they work? The short answer is Yes they do. Most reading programs are based on research so there is some backing to its success. However, do they work for everyone? Well, no. The mistake that the school district made was to take out all teacher input and teacher modifications to what worked and what did not. Using the program as a guide instead of the law could have been greatly beneficial to the students. Knowing how to use something is just as important as the thing itself. This ties into the thing I’m most curious about. This is simply how to teach literacy. Since there are so many different ways to do so, I question my ability to be able to correctly assess a student best way to learn literacy. I simply hope that with enough determination and hard work, I will see improvement in my students.

On a different note, the wiki article had many definitions of literacy, but almost all of them included the ability to read, write, spell, listen, and speak. These definitions are expanded to being computer literate to mathematically literate. The bottom line for all of these definitions is the ability to be educated in the current methods of communication to function as a person in society. Recently, using the computer has been the preferred choice of communicating to others, from email to video calls to blogs, etc. Therefore, there has been a greater push to create a computer literate generation in the schools. Being literate now is different from being literate many years ago and I’m sure it’ll change in the future.