Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Week 7: The Year the College Professor Returns to School... The Week After


Calls to Return & Literacy

On what was my final week of work, I received a call asking me to consider a position at a nearby high school.  I responded that I would reply by Friday.  Needless to say, I did not accept the offer. First, I thought it would send the wrong message to the wonderful group of eleven and twelve year olds I had the privilege to teach since August. I did not want them to believe that they did something wrong; that I was jumping ship for 'better' kids elsewhere. Second, this group of eleven and twelve-year-olds number 19. Even with a brief exchange of classes, I taught only 31 students. It would be difficult to exchange 31 for 100+.  Third, and most importantly, I was troubled by my teacher-senses.  I have been the new teacher in enough settings - middle school, high school, and college/university -  to know that if there is something worth having, it is quickly snatched.  The outgoing teacher's desk is bigger, newer and better? Then, it's mine. She had newer, cleaner versions of the class textbooks? Switched. Likewise, she had a better schedule, or a class someone desired, swapped.  So I had to wonder what was it about these set of classes that other teachers did not want.

Teachers learn early not to go jousting about asking questions. You trust your teacher-senses. Mine were banging, clanging, and ringing.  My senses were triggered yet again when someone suggested a position at another high school.  But an interesting thing happened since I have been home - I have not been home.  I have been busier now than when I worked for pay.  There seems too much to do.  As a board member of the area Literacy Volunteers of America, I have grown intrigued by current literacy rates and trends, and have begun working on various projects and grants.  This work takes me back to a graduate Problems & Trends course I taught at an area university. Our topic? Literacy. That was several years ago.

Literacy entails much more than simply knowing how to read and write.  Literacy invades all aspects of our lives.  It accompanies the various printed and written material that we interface daily.  There's computer literacy, visual literacy, functional literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, information literacy, and technology literacy.  There is cultural literacy, financial literacy, environmental literacy, historical literacy, geographic literacy, legal literacy, numeracy literacy, musical literacy, scientific literacy, global literacy, multicultural literacy, and it could be argued Facebook literacy, among several dozen more. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy measures functional English literacy using three types of literacy—prose, document, and quantitative—since it believes that "adults use different kinds of printed and written materials in their daily lives" (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/literacytypes.asp).  ETS (Educational Testing Service) utilizes the three types of literacies above with the addition of health literacy, which measures how well you can understand and use health-related information. ETS describes "literacy as a set of practical tools to facilitate work on the job, at home, and around the community and that use real-world literacy tasks" (http://www.ets.org/literacy/research/literacy_types/).

Each literacy council, adult learning center, English to speakers of other languages program, and community organization choose which literacies to focus.  The majority focus on the following big three:
  • Prose literacy – the ability to understand and use information found in newspapers, magazines, novels, brochures, manuals or flyers.
  • Document literacy - the ability to find and use information in forms, schedules, charts, graphs and other tables of information.
  • Quantitative literacy - the ability to use numbers found in ads, forms, flyers, articles or other printed materials to get the information you need. 
They then select one or more that fit with their mission or purpose. Thus, for example, the organization I work with secured a grant to focus on health literacy and it has been an eye-opening experience.  There are so many things that people who are well versed in health literacy take for granted. For example, reading and understanding the labels on food.  You must know percentages and be able to interpret them appropriately and then use that information to make wise decisions about whether or not to eat the item.  If you suffer from hypertension (even using proper medical terms for ailments fall under this literacy - we all know people who use 'sugar' to refer to having diabetes. But do you have sugar 1 or sugar 2?) and the item you are considering eating indicates that its sodium intake is 75%, do you purchase it? Do you eat it? Since 75% means that this food item contains 75% of your daily recommended intake of sodium, you may want to steer clear of that item.  If you are on a 1500-calorie diet to maintain your hypertension, how do you determine what a 350-calorie candy bar will do your eating plan? Math.

Can you read the following and properly explain the implications of eating the following? This is one aspect of health literacy. Fun stuff!

Though a brief foray into literacy, I hope I have piqued your curiosity and invite you to explore others. The  problems we face as a nation within the educational arena are numerous and mounting, and literacy plays a major role.  According to the August 13, 2012, post on PBS.org's The Rundown: A Blog of News and Insight (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/08/education-olympics-how-does-the-us-rank-1.html) the United States ranks 7th in high school graduation (see The Education Olympics graphic to the right courtesy of Certification Map) even though we once ranked first.
Literacy rankings are harder to pinpoint. One report said the US ranked 7th when compared to world countries, others said 15th, 17th, 21st and 27th. However, there appears general consensus that the literacy rate within America is 99%, or not. "Rates of literacy in the United States depend on which of the various definitions of literacy is used. Governments may label individuals who can read a couple of thousand simple words they learned by sight in the first four grades in school as literate. Other sources may term such individuals functionally illiterate if they are unable to use basic sources of written information like warning labels and driving directions. The World Factbook prepared by the CIA defines literacy in the United States as "age 15 and over can read and write."(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States)

According to a presentation given in DC on December 7, 2010, Secretary General Angel Gurria of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)  stated that "[o]verall, the U.S. comes out as an average performer in reading (rank 14 in OECD) and science (rank 17) but the U.S. drops below the OECD average in mathematics (rank 25). Also, there is a very wide gap between the top 10% and the bottom 10% of 15-year olds in the U.S, similar to that observed between top and bottom performing PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) countries. Unlike most other federal nations, the U.S. does not yet (emphasis is mine) collect PISA data for individual States, but we understand that there are important regional differences in performance." (http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/presentationofthepisa2010results.htm)
This brings us back to the Common Core and how its use will or may eventually lead to the US collecting PISA data for individual states but it is late and I have to go... 

TTYL (Yes, this is a type of literacy as well!) LOL!

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