I just created my first podcast as a reflection on:
Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?.
The audio clip is available here and the script of the audio is available here.
Enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
In the heat of DCCAS testing...
We are now in the heat of DCCAS testing and I'm looking for ways to get students to do well on the testing. One of the main problems I believe students have is with interpreting and reading into the word problems. There are effective strategies in attacking word problems and I'm always looking for ways to help students get over the phobia of doing word problems.
So, as a follow up to my last post... here is a reading guide that I plan to use in my class later this week to help students attack some word problems on the DCCAS.
Click here for the document. Many thanks to the head of our math department for providing this great reading/study guide.
I believe this will get students to critically think about word problems that they encounter on standardized testing and I'll see how the lesson goes later this week...
-MF EDOOMCATOR
So, as a follow up to my last post... here is a reading guide that I plan to use in my class later this week to help students attack some word problems on the DCCAS.
Click here for the document. Many thanks to the head of our math department for providing this great reading/study guide.
I believe this will get students to critically think about word problems that they encounter on standardized testing and I'll see how the lesson goes later this week...
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?
As I read through our assigned book Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children, I keep wondering how can I use critical literacy in my classroom? How can I use critical literacy in the context of a math problem? I took a class that touched on critical literacy early on in my graduate work at AU, but it feels like an eternity ago...
So, it's nice to realize that there are many opportunities in my own classroom investigating into "texts". For instance, my students are always asking me why we don't use the textbooks very often in my class? Hmmmm... why is that? Earlier this year, one of the teachers at our school created a set of word problems for the students to practice with. I was astonished that most of our students couldn't even begin to understand the problem relating to golf because they have either never seen it before or have NO IDEA how it is played or scored. I had to step back and spend some time explaining the game to them. Once they realized, it was just like mini-golf... some of them started to get it! Just like many instances in our provided textbooks, the golf word problem was lacking context for the students understanding.
To create context in my own classroom, I recently assigned a mini-project where students had to create their own word problems related to their interests and there is a sampling of pictures below. Our focus was to critically view linear functions (y = mx + b) in 4 different views: as a story, an equation, an input-output table, and a graph.
(I typed up a few samples of the created word problems below the pictures since they are hard to read.)
"There are 20,000 soldiers in Iraq. 5,000 were killed. An average of 8 soldiers are killed each day. Write a model representing the number of soldiers left in Iraq depending on the number of days."
"The owners of Club Mandingo are trying to bring "TCB" to a concert at the cost of $500 and the tickets are $5 each. How can you model the owner's profit depending on the number or tickets sold?"
-MF EDOOMCATOR
So, it's nice to realize that there are many opportunities in my own classroom investigating into "texts". For instance, my students are always asking me why we don't use the textbooks very often in my class? Hmmmm... why is that? Earlier this year, one of the teachers at our school created a set of word problems for the students to practice with. I was astonished that most of our students couldn't even begin to understand the problem relating to golf because they have either never seen it before or have NO IDEA how it is played or scored. I had to step back and spend some time explaining the game to them. Once they realized, it was just like mini-golf... some of them started to get it! Just like many instances in our provided textbooks, the golf word problem was lacking context for the students understanding.
To create context in my own classroom, I recently assigned a mini-project where students had to create their own word problems related to their interests and there is a sampling of pictures below. Our focus was to critically view linear functions (y = mx + b) in 4 different views: as a story, an equation, an input-output table, and a graph.
(I typed up a few samples of the created word problems below the pictures since they are hard to read.)
"There are 20,000 soldiers in Iraq. 5,000 were killed. An average of 8 soldiers are killed each day. Write a model representing the number of soldiers left in Iraq depending on the number of days."
"The owners of Club Mandingo are trying to bring "TCB" to a concert at the cost of $500 and the tickets are $5 each. How can you model the owner's profit depending on the number or tickets sold?"
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Critical literacy through Comedy?
So, as I read about the four resources model on literacy, I was struck by the statement "Effective literacy draws on a repertoire of practices that allow learners, as they engage in reading and writing activities, to critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral -- that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people's ideas -- and that their designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways."
It made me think and wonder about how often students simply "cut and paste" information from websites to use as references in research. I've seen students using the computers in my class to do research on-line and I wonder if they ever question the validity of the resource. A part of critical literacy is reading through and analyzing the text for what it is... Who wrote it? Do they have an agenda? Is their view slanted?
Since I used Wikipedia as a resource in my profile to reference MF DOOM, I figured I would pass on this piece of concern dealing with how reliable is Wikipedia? Should I trust Wikipedia?
To continue with the YouTube and multi-modal text tone of this blog, here is an example of a text that is not "ideologically neutral". This Yahoo article titled "Colbert, O'Reilly face off on both shows" indicates that O'reilly mutters "This was a huge mistake, me coming on here," during the interview on the Colbert Report.
Does he mutter that statement? Why does the article choose to use the word "mutter"? I certainly believe that there is a tone to this article in their views of O'reilly vs. Colbert which might determine their choice for the word mutter.
Anyways, here is a clip of the interview... enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
It made me think and wonder about how often students simply "cut and paste" information from websites to use as references in research. I've seen students using the computers in my class to do research on-line and I wonder if they ever question the validity of the resource. A part of critical literacy is reading through and analyzing the text for what it is... Who wrote it? Do they have an agenda? Is their view slanted?
Since I used Wikipedia as a resource in my profile to reference MF DOOM, I figured I would pass on this piece of concern dealing with how reliable is Wikipedia? Should I trust Wikipedia?
To continue with the YouTube and multi-modal text tone of this blog, here is an example of a text that is not "ideologically neutral". This Yahoo article titled "Colbert, O'Reilly face off on both shows" indicates that O'reilly mutters "This was a huge mistake, me coming on here," during the interview on the Colbert Report.
Does he mutter that statement? Why does the article choose to use the word "mutter"? I certainly believe that there is a tone to this article in their views of O'reilly vs. Colbert which might determine their choice for the word mutter.
Anyways, here is a clip of the interview... enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Welcome to MF EDOOMCATOR
As a first reflection on the course so far, we were presented with the idea of social discourses which can limit students exposure to a way of speaking, thinking, living, etc... I immediately thought of an instance just a few days ago in my class where a student (let's call him Alex) was a portfolio panelist for another student's presentation (let's call him Ricky). While Alex was providing feedback and questioning Ricky, several other students nearby were commenting about how "professional" Alex was sounding and about how Ricky kept calling Alex his "dog" or "son" and how inappropriate that was. I was really struck by the way that Alex changed his normal discourse from being Ricky's "son" or "dog" and became a very serious minded professional in a formal setting. It really amazed me to see how Alex was emulating the way he has seen my (and I'm sure other teachers) discourse in the class during our portfolio presentations.
Speaking of things social... A lot of my students have been endlessly talking about myspace this year. Here's is a humorous clip from Dimitri Martin's segment on "trendspotting" from the Daily Show poking a little fun at the world of online social networking. Enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
Speaking of things social... A lot of my students have been endlessly talking about myspace this year. Here's is a humorous clip from Dimitri Martin's segment on "trendspotting" from the Daily Show poking a little fun at the world of online social networking. Enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR
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