In Harvey "Smokey" Daniels and Steven Zemleman's textbook Subject Matter, they give several examples of what proper content-area reading does to students of a particular high school in Illinois. Being able to properly read and, more importantly, understand what is being read is a skill students of any classroom need to have tucked into their pocket. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many schools today. Therefore, teachers of this day and age need to be able to properly teach their students how to read critically in the content area.
Daniels and Zemleman use these ten examples of what happened to a class of students who were properly taught how to read the text Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal/. 1) One activity stated is how two students, Michael and Antonio, used to bring the concern of where the meat, used in fast food restaurants, came from. They created fliers based on a selected section of their school reading on the issue. The two boys used these fliers as conversation starters with the patrons of the McDonald's the boys chose to start their "petition." This is some sort of literacy learning because what is written forces the reader to think about what they are reading and not let the words enter in one eye and go out the other. 2) Antonio shows some sort of literacy learning through his attempt of annotating one page of his copy of Fast Food Nation. Even if his attempt was not properly executed, he at least was able to use the information he learned from reading through the book with his class. 3) The four students who wrote a picture book they illustrated as well shows that they were able to take the information they learned in their classes and create a resource for younger ages about what goes on when it comes to making the Happy Meal from McDonald's. 4) Another student wrote to her representative based on the disturbing images she read in Fast Food Nation. This is a pro-active form of literacy learning. This student was able to take information and raise it as an area of concern for the government to look into. 5) Another thing Jaisy did to take a pro-active stance against ridding the world of such horrible situations was that she had a petition for people to sign in order to stop such violent acts from continuing. 6) Another activity would be in how the students took the food from their cafeteria and found where on the food pyramid each food item belonged to see how balanced their meals were. 7) Some of the students who read this book went out and did outside research of local fast-food places. 8) Other students kept food journals to help them see what type of food they were putting in their bodies. 9) As a continuation of their primary learning, some students searched the internet for more information about the food they were putting in their bodies from certain restaurants and from home-cooked meals. 10) Teachers had some students act out two different situations concerning foods and employees of fast-food restaurants.
The students from the examples above were changed in a variety of ways. Some were not effected what so ever as to what happens to the animals used in the kitchens. The extreme opposite of these students, there were several students who could not handle eating any form of meat because of the violent forms of preparation it took to get them from point A to point B. Then there were the kids who found themselves in the middle of the issues extremes. They thought it was terrible the way the meat was prepared, but that did not stop them from eating any form of meat.
I have never participated in any projects or units which made me react as much as the students in the textbook from the high school in Chicago. I was home-schooled my entire life, therefore I was the only student in my class, making any sort of "revolution" in my class a rather difficult thing to achieve. If I had to choose just one instance of literacy learning and any activities which accompanied it in my school experience, I would have to go back to my senior year of high school. My mom allows us, my siblings and I, to chose what type of literature course to do for the year. I chose to do a course in which by the end I was, supposedly, to have written an entire adventure novel consisting of nine-to-twelve chapters. Safe to say I have yet to finish the novel, but I learned how a novel is created and that writing of any kind takes hard work and determination. This is one reason I chose English as my content area. I wanted to continually learn how to properly construct the written word in order to captivate my audience the way I had been captivated by the novel which accompanied the course to show how to write an adventure novel.
As a English teacher, I hope to open the eyes of my students to the wonders of the written word. I chose my subject area of English because I have always had a passion for literature and composition. By teaching I am able to share my passion of reading and writing with the young minds coming into my room to be able to shape their attitudes and thought processes about reading and writing. Hopefully my students will have the same type of hype about reading and writing as the students in the examples above had about the slaughtering of animals for fast-food places.
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