Never stop learning because life never stops teaching

When my nineteen-year old son asked me earlier this year why I am going back to
school I replied to him that it is for career advancement. He followed up his question with
another soul-searching inquiry - will your job pay you more if you get more years of
education?. Deep within me, the practicality of my decision to get an advanced
certificate in adolescent education, even after years and years of graduate schooling in
engineering in Asia where I spent some thirty years of my life, reverberates into the inner
core of my adult life. I know in my heart that I am in this profession of teaching, not for
the money but for the love of learning and the joy of imparting my knowledge to my
students.
Stepping onto the first day of my SEDC 710 class, I was confronted with a Do
Now question on the board about my understanding of literacy. With a little thinking of
the question and a very vague idea of what to expect from this course, I scribbled the
following answer Literacy is the ability to read and understand simple text and explain
it to others correctly. It's a very simplistic answer which involves three action words
read, understand and explain. I told myself is that all to what literacy is?. In a
seeming act of making me crave for more (by not giving a formal definition of
literacy) in this course, my professor started to talk about some kind of connection
between literacy and identity through George Ella Lyons poem Where Im From.
When she instructed the class to write our own Where Im From poem after assigning
two important readings by James Gee and Margaret Hagood, I chuckled to myself and
whispered This is my chance to impress my professor that I know something about
literary writing even if I am not born and educated here in the US.

Still thinking that the course is nothing more than a class on LITERATURE, I was
baffled and shocked by how dense and complex the first readings were. It never occurred
to me before that literacy can be used to promote social justice through the the critique
of existing social and political problems and the posing of alternatives and that in order
to define literacy, one has to discuss discourse philosophically in length and breadth.
In the weeks that followed, the assigned readings helped me establish a growing
and clearer picture of why the course title is Building Foundations of Literacy in
Adolescent Education and not Literature 101. With an emphasis on the use of
academic language in specific content areas as required and needed to meet national and
state standards, the image of my role as a content-area teacher as literacy teacher
started to take form. I got bombarded with more theories and techniques from the classic
Blooms taxonomy to Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix to UDL Strategies. Luckily, there
were a lot of opportunities for practice with the class, the STEM (science, technology,
engineering and mathematics) group and with my content-area partner Dylan Bryant
which helped me get better traction.

I also got supplementary and useful tools,

techniques and motivations from This is Disciplinary Literacy by Releah Cossett Lent,
120 Content Strategies for ELL by Jodi Reiss, and Lessons from Research with
Language-Minority Children by Luis C. Moll and Norma Gonzales for specific target
groups of students. The Literacy Data assignment also gave me a wider, birds eye-view
of comparative literacy status and initiatives in the Mega-States and a more personal
outlook on the closer-to-my-heart STEM literacy and course-taking patterns in US highschools. My focus on this assignment helped me get a better understanding and validate

my desire to be an effective teacher in this very much in-need area of American

education.
To be a teacher, one must be able to impart to his students the same passion and
yearning for learning that I so possess. However, to be an effective high school teacher, I
must be able to prepare and equip my students for the demands and rigor of college and
career in order for them to be successful in this increasingly competitive technologybased world. Hopefully, this will help alleviate human suffering and lead to the
formation of a more just world. Just like Will Brown in Travelling Together Over
Difficult Ground: Negotiating Success with a Profoundly Inexperienced Reader in an
Introduction to Chemistry Class by Cindy Litman and Cynthia Greenleaf, I want to reach
out to more Eduardos in my chemistry classes in the Harlem charter school that I am
teaching right now. I hope to negotiate success with them and help them get to college
and hopefully, break the cycle of generational poverty that has beset the community for
so long. Equipped and motivated by Alfred Tatums Teaching Reading to Adolescent
Black Males, I want to touch lives and effect change through literacy, not only of black
males, but also of black females who are so underrepresented in the STEM fields. As the
United Negro College Fund slogan puts it succinctly, A mind is a terrible thing to
waste, not only do black lives matter, but black minds matter equally as well

Literature Cited:
Hagood, Margaret C. (2002). Critical Literacy for Whom? Reading Research and
Instruction, 41 (3) 247-266.
Litman, Cindy and Cynthia Greenleaf . (2014) "Traveling Together Over Difficult
Ground: Negotiating Success with a Profoundly Inexperienced Reader in
an
Introduction to Chemistry Class" in K. Hinchman and H. SheridanThomas, Best
Practices in Adolescent Literacy Instruction, Second Ed., The
Guildford Press.
Tatum, Alfred W. (2005). Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the
Achievement Gap, Stenhouse Publishers.