Eyes Past Print

My school does a literacy strategy called "Eyes Past Print with Voice Support" (EPP). We are told that research shows people need to read for 20 minutes a day in order to maintain their level of literacy. We are afraid many of our kids get far less than even that. In order to maintain them and also to model reading from (hopefully) fluent readers, each teacher reads to his or her students for a minimum of 5 minutes per class period, simultaneously providing the text for the students to read along. My instructional coach described the process in some detail here.

I'm a math teacher. It's hard to find "math" reading that is interesting/engaging for anyone, let alone high schoolers who have a vested interest in demonstrating their boredom to you. What's not so hard: finding cool stuff that was written by people who had to use math when they did whatever it was they're writing about. Example:

Phil Plait, physicist, astronomer, and blogger, writes a blog for Discovery Magazine. A recent post, Two Moons Circling, offered and discussed an amateur astronomer's picture-set of one of Jupiter's moons passing in front of another from our Earthly vantage point. It truly is a remarkable series of pictures, with expert commentary by Dr. Plait. I found it because I follow Dr. Plait (BadAstronomer) on Twitter.

In my world, however, it takes more than just reading. Go read just the first paragraph of Two Moons Circling. I'll wait ... I guarantee you that first paragraph is enough to tune out 90% of high schoolers in any setting. The information is necessary to the story, but there are no explosions. Snooze.

So, I read the first paragraph quickly and then stopped. Then, I stepped into the middle of the room, right among the chairs. I told them to assume I was the sun and they were all planets and moons orbiting me. I admitted to them that I liked the idea of being the center of everything they've ever known. I showed them how the planets' and moons' orbits are not shaped like a sphere, but rather like a disk. I named a student and called him Jupiter. I named another two and called them Ganymede and Io. Through exaggerated hand movements, I demonstrated how the two rotate around the one, again on the same "disk." Then I read on.

The rest of the blog post discusses the interesting things to notice in the picture, then saves the best, perhaps most-relevant factoid for the end: the photos were taken from hundreds of millions of kilometers away (600 or so, actually). Yes, I had to convert that to miles for them. That's okay. I finish by telling the kids that if they want to see Jupiter for themselves, all they have to do is walk outside at night. At present, the giant planet is the brightest object in the Southeastern sky in the early evening. With a pair of binoculars, you can see the moons described in the blog post.

Why did this work? Because although the reading depended on math for its existence, it didn't write about math itself, which is -- frankly -- boring. Also because there was a picture to go along with the reading. Also because this is a subject I am passionate about. But finally because -- using the previous two becauses -- I succeeded at least a little bit in making it relevant to them. "You, you, and you are the planets and moons." "An amateur, like you, took these pictures." "You can go see these things for yourself."

Many of our teachers read from novels for their EPP, and more power to them. I don't think I can pull that off. I am a fluent reader, of course, but my passion is not novels. My passion is knowledge -- about the heavens, about our physical world, and about human nature. Sometimes, I figure out how to make those things about math, at least a little bit. Any chance I get to share that knowledge with these kids is a good day.

*Note: the photo above, credit NASA/JPL/University of Arizona, is not the photo described in the blog post, but does show the shadow of Jupiter's moon Europa passing over the gas giant. It's a pretty cool picture, too.