I think that these readings address something that we struggled a bit with in class. The idea that especially in high school science, we are focused so much on content that we forget how fundamental the literacy foundation is. When a high school teacher is faced with the problem that a student may not have enough the basic reading skills to focus on content himself or herself… what do we do? It seems that all teachers are reading teachers at anytime. I recall working at the zoo and having a girl (about 9 years old) tell me that she wanted to be a biologist and what should she concentrate on a school? What would help her the most? I wasn’t even considering being a teacher yet, however my immediate reaction was “I’m a scientist and I can tell you the most important thing to get really good at is reading. I read everyday, papers, journals, notes and without excellent reading and writing skills my job would be very hard.”
Literacy and science are fundamentally intertwined. We can’t escape it. This is quite a realization for a student teacher like myself because I could probably choose to ignore that in order to make things easier for me. But, the only way to get away with that is to leave those students behind that need me the most.
