I am borrowing the title of chapter two because I agree so strongly with the idea that our students are not learning how to think and therefore we have endangered their minds. I don't really know if it started with NCLB or before then, that teachers stopped expecting students to think. Instead it seems like most of the test that are given ask the students to regurgitate information. Students expect to be given a study guide that mirrors the test questions. This falls in line with the fact that so many of them can not read for information. If the wording is different they can't decern the meaning of the question. Mr Gallagher is an English teacher and obviously writes about reading from his disciplines perspective and I am coming at it from the science classroom (specifically chemistry classroom.) To truely say that a student has mastered any science standard they must be able to apply that standard. But if a student is unable to decipher the meaning of the content in their text or any other reading you present to them it is hardly believable that they can master the standard. I know the state test are generated from these standards, but it is difficult to go deep enough into any of them for the students to have time to construct any true knowledge. I know I am talking in circles, but that is how I feel about the paradox of these standards and test. The GPS that we teach require much more time than we have to be mastered by students. Especially when the students arrive in chemistry unable to read the content. They may be able to decode all of the words, but are not familiar with many of the meanings. Or they have so many misconceptions about the subject as well as some word meanings. As an example, I asked them to discriminate between the relative size of electrons and protons, ( this is lanquage from the GPS) the only idea of the meaning of discriminate that my students had was related to race and being treated unfairly. So I guess they think protons and electrons are mean to each other because of their size. They are not good at using context to determine word meanings.
Something that I found useful from this chapter is the idea of Articles of the Week. I think this could very easily be adapted for use in a science class serving two purposes, increasing their reading and integrating real world science issues into the classroom. Once again, this will take time away from the timeline for covering all the standards. I want to have time to make what we do in class important to their lives. I think I will just have to make time for these kinds of activites.
