Blog Post #1 - Alee

 Comments on Buehl Ch 3 

This chapter focused on texts and how gaps in our background knowledge can impact our willingness to continue engaging with a text. In the chapter we got some text excerpts and I didn't have much of an issue understanding those excerpts because I already had some combination of text-to-self, text-to-text, and/or text-to-world knowledge regarding those topics. However, I can definitely recall times when I have not been able to fully grasp a text. The types of text that as you keep on reading you end up more confused and demotivated to keep on reading, because we don't have the background knowledge required to make sense of that text, it can be hard for that text to keep us engaged. 

This brings me to talk about something I have called "The Scale of Author-to-Reader Match-up". While reading the section titled "The Match Between Authors and Readers", I felt like I should extend the idea using my own schema. Because I like to think visually, I created the figure below to represent how I conceptualize each author-to-reader relationship. 

One thing that I want to note is that I purposefully framed this concept as a scale rather than a strict ternary. I don't like limiting the author‑to‑reader relationship to only three categories, because there are other relationship that fall somewhere in between the three categories in the figure above. A ternary oversimplifies how differently authors and readers actually relate.

When I was doing observation hours, my co‑teacher often talked with me and her colleague about how many students entered 9th grade unable to do the types of problems the standards expected them to know. Instead of following the planned schedule for the school year, she frequently had to reteach or revise material that students were supposed to know already. This gap in knowledge can come from many different reasons, but it made me think a lot about how I would handle similar situations, especially since they’re so common in math classes. 

I’ve thought about giving some kind of pre-assessment at the beginning of the school year, not for a grade, but to see whether students know the content they’re expected to know. These pre‑tests would help me understand where each student currently is. I’m still unsure about exactly what I would do to fill in those gaps, because it feels ambitious to think I can teach last year’s missing content while also staying on schedule with the current year’s standards, but how could I expect students to continue on with their academic knowledge if there are gaps that will get in their way of future learning.

The section "Teaching to the Match in Mathematics" was definitely a little daunting for me, because I understand those students who want to know exactly what to do for a concrete example, and then replicate that process for similar problems. But I want students to figure things out, not because they have past problems to copy, but because they conceptually understand the material and can apply that understanding to a variety of problems. What makes me nervous is knowing that my own gaps in reading math textbooks and building conceptual understanding might affect the students I teach. 

I just want to leave off this section with a link to Quantum magazine which has news related to math and science. The articles try to present the information in a much more digestible way, which is really difficult to find for math related topics. You definitely need some math background on certain topics, but they really try their best to not have writing filled with a bunch of jargon. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/

 

 Comments on the Finding Fred podcast

I just wanted to mention how much I agree with what Kamau Bell said about the situation where he mistakenly assumed someone’s sexual orientation while filming, and people wanted to cut that moment out of the show, but Bell was adamant about leaving it in. I believe he took inspiration from Fred Rogers, because they talked a lot about how Rogers was always transparent with his viewers and never talked down to them. I think that kind of transparency is really important to have with students. There will definitely be times when we make a mistake while teaching or when a student asks a question we don’t know the answer to. In those moments, we should pause and either apologize for the mistake or let the student know that we’re unsure. Students should see that even though we are teachers, we are still learners, and that they have so much to teach us as well. Instead of taking the position that we are the adults who know everything, we should open up the classroom so students feel comfortable teaching us and their peers.