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| Hearsay: |
What that’s so crazy it just might work, ah-yuk! Turns out kids want to read, they just don’t want to be told what to read. You’d think we’d have taken the clue from every other fucking aspect of life that kids don’t want to be told about.
For the past three years, Dr. Ivey has been involved with a project at a Virginia school in which 300 Grade 8 English students were allowed full choice over their reading with few strings or work attached, other than classroom discussions about shared themes and small group conversations if several students had read the same book. The goal was to get every student engaged in reading – the kind that you do in your own free time.
“It’s [about] the experience we have all had as adults when we forget to eat or go to the restroom because we are so into what we are reading,” Dr. Ivey says. “And that so rarely happens in school, and it certainly hardly ever happens with the whole-class-assigned novel.”
The results, she says, have been overwhelming. “We couldn’t keep up with the need for books,” she says. Even in classes with struggling readers, students read an average of 42 books over the course of the school years, some as many as 100. And even with their options open, students didn’t stick with Twilight and Gossip Girl series for long – as their appetite for reading grew, so did their interest in more challenging reads, coming to class for example to debate the ending of Walking on Glass by science fiction writer Iain Banks.
There’s a perception, Dr. Ivey says, that “when you give choices, they will choose something that’s not good for them. But that is not the case at all. We wouldn’t have kept kids from reading Captain Underpants. But quite frankly even our least experienced readers didn’t choose books like that.”
On the other hand, my boy would love to live on pasta and Pez, but I make him finish his spinach and oranges. Why? Because I don’t want his teeth to fall out and his body to waste/bloat away. It’s also why I dictate what we’ll read together (he can read Pokemon books on his own time): so his mind doesn’t end up looking like a McDonald’s patron. So where’s the line? For me it’s this: if you want me to read to you, or hang out with you, while you read, you don’t read tv tie-in shite bought at Scholastic. It doesn’t have to be high lit (we’re reading the Warriors series right now and it reads in parts like it was factory farmed), it just has to have a decent story and not lead to brand loyalty outside books.
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March 30th, 2010 at 12:29 pm
The most disturbing thing in that article is its tacit admission that most kids don’t read outside school. The schools’ role then changes from equipping kids with skills to getting them to read books.
We don’t let kids choose which equations to solve, because we’re trying to equip them with a set of skills.
That article seems confused as to the aims of an English curriculum at the high school level.
March 30th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
While I agree with Andrew, I also feel that many school curriculums need to be updated. How often are newer, potentially great texts sacrificed to teach The Handmaid’s Tale or To Kill A Mockingbird every year? I think teachers should have to include at least one contemporary novel each year (say, written within the last 15 years). Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s not great. (But of course the classics should also still be taught. I think the answer is to increase the required fiction reading of kids at all grades.)
March 30th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Mel, I think you might be dramatically over-estimating the size of current curricula. When I was in HS we ‘did’ 1 Shakespeare play, 1 Ancient Greek play (or 1 modern play, like the Crucible), 1 novel, and a handful of stories/poems/essays. And nothing else. It wasn’t until OAC (grade 13) that we did any CanLit aside from The Stone Angel, and then it was in its own course, and we were allowed a choice from a set array of books on top of the set works we were to study. It’s not like university where you’re sometimes covering a book a week.
March 30th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Hi August, I definitely remember the grade school days in which that was the case. However, I’d still make the argument that kids can and should read more on their own time, and that there is room for more fiction at each grade level. I remember spending whole weeks doing nothing in Language Arts/English but watching a movie, and while that’s a nice treat at the end of the year or before Christmas vacation, I think there’s definitely room to pack more fiction into class. Surely they could assign a book to be read over the course of a month or two, with a few classes to discuss this book before assigning the next? It would encourage kids to read continually, as opposed to cramming all their reading into a couple hurried sessions the day before the class on the subject. Just some thoughts.
March 30th, 2010 at 5:45 pm
What I don’t get is, what does Dr. Ivey have against Captain Underpants?!
March 31st, 2010 at 7:13 am
I agree, Mel, that giving the kids new and different books would be a good thing. But, as I understand it, teachers find this very difficult to do, as the books have to be approved, and any new book stands a chance of raising the ire of some parent who objects to the content.
I’m inclined to suspect that letting the kids read what they (and their parents) want is the easy way out.
March 31st, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Sigh. There is no easy way out right now if you are a teacher who cares passionately about literature, as the vast majority of my colleagues are, for there is still a solid curriculum you have a responsiblity to teach and that requires teaching proper analytical skills, writing research essays about novels which have thoughtful secondary sources providing shades of meaning for students to uncover for themselves. All in all, I think we are still doing a very good job, even with the battered copies of To Kill A Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. But yes, there is something happening culturally right now, especially amongst very young readers (ask any booksellers how demographics have changed over the last ten years and they will tell you the same thing) and reducing it to the fault of educators or the fault of parents is not going to solve it. There are a whole array of reasons which are impacting how young people read: the impact of videogames, the lack of nutrition (i.e. breakfast), environmental toxins, the impact of prescription drugs, the devaluation of education as a priority, peer groups and corporate loyalty taking on more importance than family, and yes teaching methods too. For instance, raw data and statistics are becoming increasingly more important for gauging a student’s success and even a school’s success as now the funding formula for all schools is tied in directly to how many students attend a school which makes education a buyer’s market for helicopter parents and their children. Sigh.
March 31st, 2010 at 4:01 pm
This discussion reminds me of Daniel Pennac, whose book Comme un roman tells about the way he started reading to his classes in a French secondary school. The kids never read on their own, but when he started something like Patrick Suskind’s Perfume (not on the curriculum) a few minutes a day–taking care to stop at a suspenseful spot–he got them reading.
There are a lot of distractions out there, not the least being pressure to think in 150 character segments. But peoople of all ages like to be read to, and doing so in class may be a way to hook kids on a book, and getting them to talk about it.
March 31st, 2010 at 6:52 pm
I am a recently retired English teacher of 40 years in secondary classrooms, the last 30 of which were in middle school (grades 7 and 8) in Blue Earth, MN. The only times I assigned and taught whole-class novels were the four years I worked in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, where the curriculum was completely dictated by the state department of education. Otherwise, all reading skills were addressed in whatever literature/reading series the local district was using. I required every one of my middle school students to read a minimum of one book per quarter (outside of class) and to prepare a review of it. Students were able to choose their own books from a particular genre and select their review from a variety of options. Our middle school also heavily promoted the yearly lists of books nominated for the Maud Hart Lovelace award for books geared to YA readers. I was able to work closely with our media center staff to help students find good books to read and had also built up a good-sized classroom library. Independent reading was also one of our school-wide goals and students who were not in a music group actually had a 45-minute period devoted to just sitting down with a book. Our students were also able to test their comprehension with the Accelerated Reader program; I used this with several of my 8th grade semester reading classes. I learned that when students got to choose their own books and how they wanted to report on them, they became more enthusiastic and engaged readers and even discovered some great books outside their comfort zone.
April 1st, 2010 at 12:03 pm
The Maud Hart Lovelace award! Terrific! If you only knew how much time I spent reading the Betsey/Tacy/Tib books.
While they are deeply rooted in l’Amérique profonde, they really opened the world for me. I still remember the comments about how in German the word for hair was plural while in English it was singular: what? languages make distinctions like that? How interesting.
And the way that Betsey hides her valuables under her corset cover on her trip to the Great World in 1914 is something I remembered on my own first trip abroad in 2000 when I bought a little pouch for my passport etc.
Loved the books: are kids still reading them?