Blog 5

Today is a great day to write about chapter 5 of Readicide because it's the day after elections. That means the politicians' ads will stop showing on my TV. Gallagher sounds like a politician to me in chapter 5, and I'm glad to see the day that his agenda stops showing up so often in my life! While I don't discount everything that Gallagher has to say in his book, I must say that his repetition and skewing of data make me less likely to take his ideas seriously.

Gallagher draws our attention to Finland--they finished first in a recent international reading study of 57 countries (115). Buried in the same paragraph is the fact that they are ahead in math and science as well. By the time we get to the next page, though, Gallagher has forgotten all the rest. "How did the Finns build the best readers in the world? By eliminating standardized testing and emphasizing the importance of reading and critical thinking, by nurturing deeper thinking and creativity, and by leading their students away from the drill-and-kill instructional approach that is currently permeating American schools" (116). News flash: those changes didn't only improve scores for the Finnish in reading, but their math and science performance was certainly improved by the same elimination of standardized testing, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking, nurturing creativity and deeper thinking, and leading students away from drill-and-kill instruction. Gallagher misses opportunities to raise issues that all American teachers should think about because he is interested in talking about how the Finns do what he promotes in his book about reading.

Earlier in the chapter, Gallagher had me interested. Creativity used to be the best kept secret of education in the United States. Now, we're giving up that prized edge for the sake of testing (114). I'm on board with all of that because it relates to every discipline. Then, out of left field comes Gallagher's interpretation and conclusion, "We are intentionally surrendering our 'secret weapon,' and in doing so, we are killing readers along the way" (115). Come on, Gallagher! It's about more than readers. Does it take creativity to read? Does it take creativity to solve society's problems? I'm much more convinced of the latter than the former.

I think Gallagher suffered from what my undergraduate professor called "waning exuberance" while he was writing Readicide. His earlier chapters are longer than his later chapters, and the later chapters mostly repeat the content of the earlier chapters. It bothers me that Gallagher would publish a book that is only book-length because he repeated his material and then make even more money than he already has by doing so.

For many reasons, I find it hard to take Gallagher's agenda seriously, but mostly because it is exactly that: an agenda. At least he doesn't hide that fact like some politicians do.

online math courses

Gallagher was quite repetitive in chapter 4; I thought he could have made his point in a few pages. So, I'm going to introduce you to my inquiry paper topic.

Take the following equation, the Quadratic Formula, which is used in Algebra II (probably Math 2 in GPS, but I can't promise that). You probably remember it with a song: "negative b, plus or minus, square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a" to the tune of some famous song that I can't remember the name of right now.

What does it take to put that equation on this blog page? It's an image, a .gif to be exact. So, when a math teacher creates a test, he or she typically uses an equation editor to format the symbols. Then, the equation editor creates the image, and the teacher drops the image onto the document. Once the image is created for a particular equation, it cannot be edited on the webpage if you don't like it. You have to go back to your image creating software and make it work there. Have you ever worked with images in a word processing document? Probably so. Can you imagine the labor required to create an image of an equation for every single question on your quizzes, tests, and other documents? That's not even talking about graphs....we'll stick to this one image for today.

Now, what if you are teaching an online math course? You have to create images for each equation that you want on your BlackBoard page, but you're used to the process because you do it all the time. What about the students? When they do their work, will you require them to learn how to create the images for the equations? Not all of them will be math teachers, but they'll hate math forever after they learn how to create equation images just for your one course!

As I see it, there are several options for teaching students to communicate in online math courses. First, we can teach them and require them to create images of their equations. That would look like the equation above. Second, we can have them scan their handwritten work, which will allow them to show their steps without learning how to type it all out. Third, we can require only answers to the problems without showing any work (let's be honest, we know that's not a good option, but it sure is the easiest!). Fourth, we can teach them to use the characters available to convey what they mean. If I wrote an email to a math buddy of mine, I'd show the Quadratic Formula above by typing

x = [-b + - sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)]/2a

Would you rather teach students to create images of equations, or would you prefer to teach them to type their equations using the available characters?

I've taught an online course, and my lessons were handed to me my first year. My 8th graders from all over the country couldn't have typed anything close to the Quadratic Formula, but they weren't expected to because they were in pre-algebra. I struggled to read their work, and I debated all summer with myself about whether I should teach them how to type what they mean. That course is the inspiration/frustration for my inquiry paper.

Somewhere along the way, we have to teach students how to type what they mean. That's where literacy comes in for me. Symbols are a huge part of math literacy, and creating the symbols they want is a problem for online math students. If we are going to have them create images, then we have to teach them how to do it (they don't teach math for a living after all). If we're going to have them scan their documents, then we have to make sure they know that going into the course so they can have all of the technology available to do it. If we're going to teach them to type using the available characters, then someone has to teach them that somewhere along the way. If you are their first online math teacher, then you get to teach them how to do it.

I located some research that confirms my suspicions that there are no good options for math teachers using online media. People are creating equation editors for online media, and I've used a couple of them. The code looks like HTML with bracket tags that all have specific meanings. (I tried to show you a tag here, but I don't know the code to make it show the brackets like the ones above the comma and the period. The webpage is reading my brackets as code!) If you want to see HTML code, click "View" on the menu bar at the top of your screen. Then, select "View Source." That code is what was created behind the scenes by blogger to show this page. The new equation editors for online media will help teachers a lot, but what about the students? Will it be standard practice to teach that coding knowledge at the beginning of a math course, or will the teacher make a "How to Type Your Math Equations" document that illustrates various codes and tags?

Now, enrolling in a good online math course will get you an introduction to computer coding as well. Eventually, we'll stop teaching students how to use the editors because they'll learn the coding at such an early age that we will be able to assume they know it already when they get to our courses. In the meantime, though, we'll need to think about how we equip students to convey their ideas. It sounds like literacy in math class will be informed by literacy as it relates to learning computer code.

I guess another option is to never teach an online math course...!

(My apologies to the English and social studies folks out there who use standard text to convey ideas in your disciplines; these issues might never cross your path except for my inspiration/frustration about them.)

Blog 3

My husband found a list years ago called something like "The Top 100 English Novels." He decided to read as many of the books on the list as he could find, and he's been able to get his hands on over 90 of them. He can talk about the stories, many of the authors, and even other books by those authors. My husband was never required to read the books on that list for a course, and he was never graded on his understanding of the stories, the lives of the authors, nor the other books written by the same authors. But, he loved the experience! He's also the man who read books for his college courses more than once most of the time.

I have been given books a lot in the last several years. My dad gave me Wait Till Next Year, and schools I've worked at have given me a book almost every summer to read. After we got married, I brought my summer reading books home to my husband, who I knew would appreciate them more than I would. Given an entire summer to read a single book, I have not managed to make it happen since high school. It took me a long time to finally read Wait Till Next Year, and I liked it. After that, I remembered a book from high school that I liked. I bought it and read it again. Now, that's saying something about a book! (Or maybe it's saying something about the person who reads the book...!) Maiden Voyage has resonated with me in different ways both times I've read it.

My husband has experienced the "reading flow" more times than he can count, and I have found myself surprised by how time has flown when I read only a handful of times in my life. When I compare myself to my husband, I realize how far away from "loving" reading I really am. Is it the reading flow that makes a person love a book? Or is it overanalysis or grades that make one hate a book?

Gallagher wants to split the time between reading for coursework and reading for pleasure, but I wonder if it's too late to get kids to enjoy reading by the time they get to middle or high school. Is it possible that they have already decided what relationship they will have with books by that time? If not, then maybe we would do well to spend more than 50% of the time letting them choose their own books to read without being graded on their work.

Blog 2

Not until page 57 did Gallagher finally identify his audience (English teachers), and it is not me (a math teacher). Until then, I kept getting offended by his agenda that seemed to champion some values and not others. I support our English and reading teachers in their efforts to flood children with books that are interesting and fun alongside the books that are academic. I also support them in asking students to read longer, more challenging books. Finally, I am glad when I see students carrying a book along with their textbooks because they are going to do sustained silent reading in a class.

However...

I want my students to do math during the summer, and I want my non-math colleagues to do real-world math throughout the day. Math skills are lost in the summer just like Gallagher says that reading skills are lost. Math is important in disciplines that are not specifically called math just like reading is important across the curriculum. I find myself feeling the need to defend my subject and its importance when I read Gallagher. He comes across to me as either arrogant, ignorant, or short-sighted, but maybe that's because he's talking to someone else, certainly not me. I don't dismiss Gallagher simply on the grounds that he's not talking to me, but I will keep that in mind in the remaining three chapters of the book.

I think it's fair to say that I'm much more interested in disciplinary literacy than I am in general reading. I want kids to be able to read and to know who's who in politics and government (Why doesn't Gallagher ask who is supposed to teach his students about al Qaeda?), but I also want to empower kids who could be good at math with the time and resources to develop those skills.

In my first school placement, I observed students in a computer lab on three different days. I saw 7th graders working through lessons keyed to their math standards on a program called "Ascend." The 8th graders were working on their standards using Ascend in the lab the next day. From a math teacher's perspective, I thought Ascend was of reasonable quality and user friendly. Another day, I was in the lab when a language arts class was working on their reading skills in a program called "Reading Plus." If any language arts or reading teachers read this blog, I would love to hear what you think of Reading Plus. I was shocked to see students working on reading speed in Reading Plus, especially when I realized that I could not keep up with some of them! I haven't yet read anything from Gallagher about reading speed, but I'll read with interest about its value if he has anything to say about it.

Blog 1

In the Introduction and first chapter of Readicide, I find myself cheering one moment and irritated the next.

First, I cheer Gallagher on when he argues against NCLB, especially when he itemizes the disaster that was called the "Texas Miracle." I also cheer him on when he challenges us all to "hard talk." I don't mind hard questions that demand from ourselves authentic educational endeavors, even if it's harder work than what we've been doing.

Gallagher also irritates me, though. I'm a math teacher, and my goal for my statistics students was that they be able to read a newspaper with the inevitable statistical information they would find there. Gallagher's use of statistical charts is frustrating because those charts are unclear to the reader. Examples of these unclear charts are on pages 3, 15-16, and 21-22. I actually looked carefully at all three of these sections, and I'm still not sure I know what he is talking about. On page 3, does the chart tell me that 54% of nonliterary readers read literary texts? If so, then 4% of avid readers read in the same category of "literary text." What is a "literary text" anyway? Part of statistics is learning how to present your data in a readable way, and Gallagher did not do that here.

On pages 15 and 16, Gallagher replicates two charts with such fine print that most people will not be able to read the most important labels--those he refers to in the text. In the third paragraph that Gallagher calls "The Paige Paradox," he attempted to point out some of the most appalling results of the data in the charts. First, he mentioned the thirteen states that have African-American students reading three years below grade level in fourth grade. As best I can figure out, he counted the states that fall between 20 and 30 points on the left of the chart. What about the state that is more than 30 points (therefore more than three years) behind grade level? I'm pretty sure we'd want to count them, too, in the way he summarizes the chart. What I still don't understand is his statement about the eighth grade group and the 36 states with students two or more years behind. The chart doesn't even show all of the states, and it certainly doesn't show 36 states with students 2+ years behind. Another problem with his two statements of summary for the chart is that he has compared fourth graders with eighth graders and which states are exactly three years behind and which are two or more years behind. That's no way to write about data.

The last section that bothers me is about the stagnant reading scores for eighth graders on pages 21 and 22. In particular, the last chart bothers me most, but I think I can figure out what he means. Gallagher says that the gap between poor and nonpoor eighth grade students in 2002 is 23 points. As best I can figure, he hasn't actually given us data for the nonpoor group specifically. He's mixed a lot of data, so I tried to subtract the scores from the first two charts to get the differences shown in the second chart. But, the numbers don't work. I think there's data that says nonpoor 8th graders in 2002 scored 272 points, but we don't have it here. Similarly, there must be data about the nonpoor 8th graders in the other years, too.

My point is this: Gallagher wants me (among others) to be convinced that reading is being killed by government and by schools as well as others, but his own writing only serves to confuse me not convince me.

I don't like to read. There, I said it. I never have liked to read.

The idea of this reading class made me roll my eyes when I heard about it from a colleague years ago. But, the longer I taught, the more I became convinced that reading has a place in mathematics classes. The problem with word problems is not the math usually, but the words themselves. The problem with tests in general is not the problems, but the directions many times. I've spent the last four years working with students who struggle to succeed in math, and I've concluded that their inability to read that has made a large contribution to their struggles.

So, I'm convinced that reading is important in math, and I'm convinced that students don't know how to read in math. But, Gallagher's poor use of math did not help me get convinced at all. It only made me ask, "What about mathicide?" I'm okay if we only talk about the killing of arithmetic and data interpretation skills. What makes reading so important and math not important enough for its own course? Why do we have EDRD but not EDMH? For that matter, what about a course to help us foster those skills that make "expert citizens" called EDEC? Even if citizenship is not tested or valued by the government, math skills are.