10/11 post by Romana for Jorge S., Ursula, Jackie, and David

Skills for Writing Improvement by Romana Ruggiero

This week, our texts focused on improving writing skills in our discipline. “Writing Next” provided us with twelve suggestions for how we, as teachers, can help students become better writers as a result of the material we incorporate into the classroom. “Write Like This” emphasized the importance of modeling our process of writing to students and provided us with the Real World Writing Purposes worksheet to illustrate the benefits of guides. Finally, “Whose Community is This?” used an engaging and immensely informative math lesson on predatory loans to show us how productive and beneficial relevant, real-world math applications are in strengthening and empowering community.

What I really enjoyed about “Writing Next” is it made me reflect on my experiences as a student and as a tutor and learn how interwoven writing and mathematics are. When I first the Process Writing Approach I had a clear idea of how this would look like in a literature class, but it took some time to think through how my teachers applied this in math. From what I remember, the closes we got to a relatively strong application of this was in my Calculus class. Our teacher had us work on an AP free-response example in pairs, and then he would go through it and address concerns when he returned our graded work to us. Until then there was still collaboration, but not as much as then because they were a more direct application of what we learned. An application I don't think is very helpful is writing in a word processor. There is a word processor called LaTeX that is used universally to write reports, books, and even worksheets for classes. Everyone that I've talked to has had the same frustrating experience with this because it is their responsibility to be able to use this. This doesn't help strengthen the understanding of the material because the objective is to first produce an error-free code, then have the code accurately represent what one would write on paper. As a result, students fall into the ideology depicted below because of how extraneous this experience can be.

What applications would you find helpful in strengthening literacy in your discipline?

“Write Like This” and “Whose Community is This?” made me deeply consider what my role will be as an educator. Would I present myself as the only expert/mentor in the classroom like Gallagher advocates, or should I open up the floor for students to step into the role as expert, like Gutstein does? While it is important to be the model to students, I think there should be flexibility and understanding that some processes work better for one person than they do for another. There are plenty of ways to go about a problem in math and I will show students what I find most helpful and why, but I won’t force them to adapt if what they’re doing is right in a different way. On the other hand, Gutstein gave students the ability to explore the process on their own, had a group discussion, and then came in and provided the students with the explanations. This is an approach I gravitate towards because I want my students to practice how to problem-solve and figure things out on their own to prepare them for the future, similar to how Gutstein did. 

My biggest takeaway was from Gutstein’s article. Yes, incorporating relevance and social justice into lessons is vital, but how can we make space for/interweave these meaningful lessons into all levels of math and history? And how do we make sure that we aren’t just incorporating social justice into underserved communities but also privileged communities to make them aware of the privilege they hold and the role they need to take to advance social causes? How can we make this so that it connects to the Common Core, taking away the barrier between academics and the real world?