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| Hearsay: |
A reading program for kids in the US leaves this this mother/author (mauthor?) with a bad taste in her mouth. Ah, collecting points. Just like eating and professional sports, our need for accumulation can turn anything joyous into brutal competition and crushing defeat.
Accelerated Reader, introduced in 1986, is currently used in more than 75,000 schools, from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. The Web site for Renaissance Learning, which owns the program, describes it as a way to build “a lifelong love of reading and learning.” As a novelist and mother of three passionate readers, I’m all for that. But when I looked closer at how the program helps “guide students to the right books,” as the Web site puts it, I was disheartened.
Many classic novels that have helped readers fall in love with story, language and character are awarded very few points by Accelerated Reader. “My Antonia” is worth 14 points, and “Go Tell It on the Mountain” 13. The previous school year, my daughter had complained that some of her reading choices that I thought were pretty audacious — long, well-written historical novels like Libba Bray’s “Great and Terrible Beauty” and Lisa Klein’s “Ophelia,” recommended by her college-age sister — were worth only 14 points each. “Sense and Sensibility” is worth 22.
“You have to read the Harry Potter books” she said, exasperated. “They have all the points.”
She was right.
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August 31st, 2009 at 8:25 am
The books seem to be given a numeric point score based on word count.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:33 am
That seems like the easiest way to assign the points, but it does reward length above all else. Much as I personally enjoyed the Harry Potter books, their length was not their strongest feature, and I think other factors like age level and reading difficulty (if not questions of “classics” and “canon”) should probably be taken into account.
August 31st, 2009 at 10:54 am
That is bizarre and doesn’t take into account so many factors. One of my children randomly chose to read The Half-Blood Prince because I said that if she finished it she could see the movie. She doesn’t much like magic or wizardry or boarding school tales or stories of Good and Evil or any of the elements that typifies HP. But she diligently waded through that book over the course of 6 months or so and finished it in time to see the movie. She’s gotten much more out of many other books, mostly shorter rather than longer, non-fiction as well as fiction, but she absorbs every word and nuance. She deserves a million points for that imo.