Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman instructs students on atoms, matter and, she says, how they “influence the world around us.”
But Hackman also has another responsibility in class: developing students’ reading skills. For about 20 of the 80 minutes of almost every class, she engages her chemistry students in literacy skills, she said: closely reading passages from their textbooks, “breaking apart” prefixes and suffixes for relevant vocabulary and identifying root words. During a recent lesson, she discussed the word “intermolecular,” dissecting its prefix, “inter,” and connecting it to other words with that same prefix.
