The Reading Wars?

I just read an article in The Atlantic, "The Radical Case for Teaching Kids Stuff," by Natalie Wexler. The idea is that students should not learn reading skills in a content vacuum. Reading skills develop when students are given deep and meaningful content to read about, especially if that reading is part of a larger exploration of a subject.

The studies and anecdotes she cites suggest that students are interested in the complex world around them, and their interest in the world will propel them to be interested in school and become better readers. She talks about content like trees and birds and Mesopotamia and Greek myths. She does not say that these subjects must seem immediately "relevant" to the kids. The content is not "American Idol" or text messages or ice cream sandwiches. This is very different from a message that I receive as a math teacher, that kids must see how the math is relevant to them on a personal, immediate level or else they will not be interested in it. (BTW - I have never noticed that to be true in my own classes.)

This seems particularly relevant to me to be because of a tweet from a week ago, saying that in math you need to learn the basic ideas first, and apply them afterwards, just like you need to learn to read first, and then read to learn afterwards. She disagreed with that on the reading side.

I wonder - does she have a view on math education? If it is in line with her view on reading education, she would believe in "content-rich math." But how would that be interpreted? Is the content a series of multiplication facts followed by the distributive property? Or is "rich content" a deep understanding of relationships in math, and the relationship between math and a broader understanding of the world from an analytical perspective?

I wonder - this is a bit of a call for back to basics -- schools should teach stuff! If this idea catches on (and the article I read made it seem like a reasonable one - but I have not seen the other side yet), and schools move away from standards and into a back to basics approach, will math get caught in that tide yet again? Because I see her call for a deep and rich, contextualized approach to learning science, humanities and reading. And that I what I want for math teaching as well. But I worry that the tag line -- "schools should teach stuff" -- will be misinterpreted as a call for dry, repetitive, meaningless math.

Well, we've been down that road before, and we are getting better at fighting our way out of it.