The Importance of Literacy in the Classroom Then, Now, Always

I'm not sure how many of my class colleagues have had a first or second career, or even more. I am on my third. I thought I was going to film school for a masters in screenwriting and then I was introduced to house framing. I loved building and designing houses. Years before though I even used to think one day I might teach English at the high school or college level.

Well here I am teaching carpentry in high school with my B.A. in English literature. But what's happened is I've poured what I've learned as a professional carpenter/general contractor and writer/editor over the past 35 years into my classroom and shop. My bent on being a successful builder turned on the premise that expert technical skill is almost always trumped by expert technical skill combined with the ability to communicate well in your discipline (read content area). This has been my approach in my building career, and it is the lens through which I teach my students carpentry.

Before I began this class, my students were doing weekly reflective journals, reverse resumes, and study techniques demanding their ability to research text using the tools the textbook offers---the section subheads, skimming for key words, glossary, and index. However the last time I was in a high school classroom, I was a high school student. I was completely unaware of how much in conflict the way we teach literacy in the present day classroom was with how today's student is so wired for multiple media stimuli which can require reading, but at a much shallower level and shed of the higher order thinking demanded by the great themes in literature.

We are at a critical point in this conflict where the great themes themselves may be re-discovered by this generation if we as teachers infuse our content areas in such a way that it is not only relevant and therefore exciting, but that we make the environment in which our students learn one that allows this to happen. I love Gallagher's idea of a topic flood, filling the classroom with other options of content reading for students to explore as "high interest" reading without analysis, the word wall, QAR Chart, read alouds (with high school students no less!), and shared read alouds. All these strategies seem to slice across generational lines and engage my students in my content area simply because it helps them draw up their passions for carpentry and building.

I've mentioned before, my students are book-shy. To be clearer---they hate what they call "bookwork." They also seem to shut down when vocabulary is intentionally taught. Rather the new words need to be embedded in the hands-on work itself where they can see the words at work. It is then that they will accept,learn and use these words while in the act. So it seems different content areas gather different students with varying styles of learning. I have to truly recognize what works with my students in my content area if I am to get any traction that translates to engaged learning. This is quite a human adventure.

In the "If we are to find our way out again..." quote Gallagher is calling the "political worlds" the state curriculum/test-required worlds which instruct a teacher how to analyze literature for example. What he calls the "authentic worlds" are the classrooms in which we teach. He is saying we must have the courage to use our own sensitivities inside our classrooms to know when to emphasize what works for our students' learning and when to de-emphasize a state curriculum, for instance, that requires a book to be analyzed to death. He is also saying we must "do what is right for our students" by teaching them how to enjoy reading without so much contrived structure and analysis being imposed by the teacher. What is right is to teach students how to do this on their own---how to comprehend, how to figure out contextual clues, how to form their own opinions about what they read, and how to read for fun something that interests them and giving them the time to do it in school.

Kelly Gallagher's message is timely given how electronic media has changed reading and competed for its time. But for today's students to learn to associate reading as a positive way to spend their time, for them to experience its deep rewards, the weight of responsibility lays on all teachers as the ones who best can initiate the changes which must occur in the classroom---the "authentic world."