In chapter 1 of Content - Area Writing, Daniels, Zemmelman, and Steineke explain that writing paves the way to fulfilling employment. They go on to write about how HR departments in the corporate workforce want to hire young people who come out of schools and colleges who know how to use words well on paper, or in the digital ether. This relates to the fact that our job as educators is to prepare our youth to be ready for the world beyond high school, and also beyond college. We should encourage them to be active citizens who know how to voice their beliefs and opinions through writing. We are shaping the future of our community through our students.

Our students today are writing more ways than we think. What if we counted the number of words our students texted every day? Add that with the notes they write back and forth to eachother, comments on twitter, instagram, facebook,etc. I don't like that we are putting so much focus on banning electronics in our school, when we could be using it to our advantange. One of othe 8th grade English teachers at our school incorporates technology on a day-to-day basis into her lesson. Her students are very engaged and love going to her class. Not only does she incorporate technology, but she also creates relevance in the content that she is teaching. When giving a writing assignment, students pick the prompt and she approves it. I believe that giving students options creates interest and results in better work.

At first I thought that teaching students how to write was a job for English teachers, but now I know that we should be incorporating it into each of our disciplines. This book tells us that when students have been steadily making their thinking visible in writing, they are likely to score better on all kinds of tests. Writing, regardless of what subject you are teaching, reinforces information. I am excited to learn some of the strategies this book has to offer for incoprating writing into all subjects. It is also important that we understand the difference between writing to learn and public writing. I plan to use many of the writing to learn strategies in my future classroom.

Content Area Reading was a little frustrating to me. I agree with the points that Vacca and Vacca make in this chapter, but am frustrated with the fact that we are teaching so much to state standards and focusing much of our curriculum on getting kids ready for standardized testing. We should be teaching our students to think critically and comprehend readings rather than getting them ready to take multiple choice tests. I do not think that all of standardized testing is bad, I just think that we put too much focus on them. I believe that if we taught our students to enjoy reading and really take meaning out of what they are reading, we would see major improvements on our standardized test scores. North View Junior High, the school I worked at last year, did a great job of this. Creating relevance and choice in reading helped to shape a culture for that school, and made a huge difference in all subject areas.

Reading is important for all subjects. In math we have word problems. In every subject we have text books. I am planning to teach Spanish, and if my students do not have the skillset to read and write in English, it will be near impossible to teach them to do so in another language! With that being said, the first chapters of our texts leave me feeling excited to learn more about how to best incorporate content-area reading and writing strategies in my future classroom  in order to benefit mystudents.