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conuly
I'll link and c+p it in a second, and I'll also quote (and snark) some of the more interesting comments, but before I even get to that part I want to say something.
I've often found that, online, the people I disagree with have much worse writing skills than the people I *do* agree with - and to quote one of my new favorite characters, Clementine, I am not even exaggerating!
This is doubly (and hilariously, and ironically, and sadly) true when I disagree with the self-proclaimed Defenders of Language. It's bad enough that one can't correct another person's spelling without making a huge error in their own comment, but these people who go on and ON about how much learning the "cannon" did for them cannot even tell the difference between "would have" and "would of", or between a full sentence and a barely comprehensible fragment. I'm not cherrypicking. I refuse to quote *all* of them just because they're hypocritically less literate than they claim to be, but keep this in mind when reading the comments: The critical ones are almost all like that. I don't claim to have perfect writing either (I never was clearly taught about commas and semi-colons, I freely admit that), but at least I don't claim my education is better because it involved some classics. (At least this group, unlike the ones who threw a hissy fit over the teaching of the specific jingle "I before E", seem to have enough reading comprehension skills to understand the article. That's a change.)
Any comments in bold are left by me.
Click for article!
Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like
By MOTOKO RICH
JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.
But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.
Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.
Captain Underpants would get slightly more respect in the comments if they used the proper term "Graphic Novel".
But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: “I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own.”
This is going to come up later in the comments. I'll leave my comment now - it seems to me, looking at the entire sentence, that Jennae clearly knows the rules and deliberately chose to use textspeak to add emphasis to that word. It's not ignorance, it's a stylistic choice. Is it an appropriate one? Maybe, maybe not - it depends on if she was writing a formal essay or if, as I somewhat suspect, she was typing or writing in a semi-personal journal where the emphasis is, rightly, on organizing your thoughts rather than worrying about the spelling. Shocking as it is to contemplate, there's a time and a place for the red pencil.
The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.
In New York City many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of reading workshop. Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing.
This isn't that new. We called it SSR when I was in the fourth grade. Ramona Quimby did this a few years before I was even born! She called it SSR as well because she thought DEAR was childish, a girl after my own heart.
In September students in Seattle’s public middle schools will also begin choosing most of their own books. And in Chicago the public school district has had a pilot program in place since 2006 in 31 of its 483 elementary schools to give students in grades 6, 7 and 8 more control over what they read. Chicago officials will consider whether to expand the program once they review its results.
None of those places, however, are going as far as Ms. McNeill.
In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.
But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.
“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”
And it's not just that book. ANY book, no matter how "classic", is going to have some people who don't get into it or who just don't like it. There's nothing to be done for it - and I, for one, don't see much point in slaving over a book that I don't like. It's not like there's a book shortage out there. I can get another book about 1930s Alabama and racism if I need to, but can I ever get those two hours back? (For the record, I loved To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, but now I think it's a bit overhyped.)
Critics of the approach say that reading as a group generally leads to more meaningful insights, and they question whether teachers can really keep up with a roomful of children reading different books. Even more important, they say, is the loss of a common body of knowledge based on the literary classics — often difficult books that children are unlikely to choose for themselves.
Now, we're going to see the word "children" often in the comments, even applied to high schoolers. The word is barely appropriate for 12 year olds, and not at all for 18 year olds, but it'll keep coming up. Ignore it.
“What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”
Well, fuck you too, Diane. And if they don't pick up Moby Dick, not now and not when they're out of school either, where is the loss? Truly, has anybody ever been harmed by not reading Moby Dick?
Indeed, some school districts are moving in the opposite direction. Boston is developing a core curriculum that will designate specific books for sixth grade and is considering assigned texts for each grade through the 12th.
Joan Dabrowski, director of literacy for Boston’s public schools, said teachers would still be urged to give students some choices. Many schools in fact take that combination approach, dictating some titles while letting students select others.
Even some previously staunch advocates of a rigid core curriculum have moderated their views. “I actually used to be a real hard-line, great-books, high-culture kind of person who would want to stick to Dickens,” said Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” But now, in the age of Game Boys and Facebook, “I think if they read a lot of Conan novels or Hardy Boys or Harry Potter or whatever, that’s good,” he said. “We just need to preserve book habits among the kids as much as we possibly can.”
In Search of a Better Way
As a teenager growing up just a few miles from Jonesboro, Ms. McNeill loved the novels of Judy Blume and Danielle Steel. But in school she was forced to read the classics. She remembers vividly disliking “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Still, she went on to teach it to her own students.
In 1999 she moved to Jonesboro Middle School, where more than 80 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches. Teachers there stuck to a curriculum prescribed by the county. Working with students designated as gifted, Ms. McNeill began teaching familiar novels like “Lord of the Flies” and “Mockingbird.” But she said, “I just never felt that they were as excited about reading as I wanted them to be.”
Lord of the Flies is a miserable book to read. I've never gotten past the first chapter.
Ms. McNeill, an amateur poet whose favorite authors include Barbara Kingsolver and Nick Hornby, wondered if forcing some students through a book had dampened their interest in reading altogether. She tried “literature circles,” in which a smaller group chose a book to read together, and had some success. Then, in early 2008, she attended a professional seminar in Atlanta led by Nancie Atwell, the author of “In the Middle” and “The Reading Zone,” popular guidebooks for teachers that promote giving students widespread choice. “In the Middle” has sold nearly half a million copies since it was first published in 1987.
An Eye-Opening Experience
Over the last two decades, Ms. Atwell, along with Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has emerged as a guru of the reading workshop approach. Ms. Atwell brings 45 teachers a year to her base of operations, the Center for Teaching and Learning, a small private school she founded in Edgecomb, Me., an hour north of Portland. Last September Ms. McNeill spent a week there with four other English teachers, each of whom had paid $800, observing Ms. Atwell’s work.
That first cool fall morning, 17 seventh- and eighth-grade students assembled for their reading and writing class in a large room overlooking a grove of birch and maple trees. Shelves of books ringed the room. The students flopped in forest green beanbag chairs set in a circle on the carpeted floor. At the front Ms. Atwell sat in a rocking chair, a small stack of volumes beside her.
Now, in the interest of fairness, note that there are only seventeen students in her class. (It's also a gifted class.) That's bound to make a difference in grades.
Ms. McNeill watched closely, taking notes. After a session in which the students edited poems they had been writing, Ms. Atwell ceded the rocking chair to students, who gave short talks recommending books to their classmates.
One eighth grader presented “Getting the Girl” by Markus Zusak, the author of “The Book Thief,” a best-selling young-adult novel about the Holocaust that had been one of the boy’s favorites. He highlighted the book’s unusual line breaks and one-word sentences, concluding, “It’s a fun, good read.”
When Ms. Atwell resumed her seat in the rocking chair, she pitched several titles she had read over the weekend. She held up “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” the novel by David Wroblewski that had been anointed by Oprah Winfrey.
“It is just incredible,” she said, leaning forward. “It is about signing, dog-breeding, muteness, adolescence, the beauty of the American Midwest.” Before she could even lay it back on the floor, Maura Anderson, an eighth grader, asked if she could take it to start reading that afternoon.
In a 30-minute reading period that followed, each student hunkered low in a beanbag chair. Ms. Atwell moved quietly among them, coming in close for whispered conferences and noting page numbers to make sure each student had read at least 20 pages the night before.
One girl had “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, while a boy a few seats away read Khaled Hosseini‘s novel “The Kite Runner.” Another boy was absorbed in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” by Tim O’Brien.
Throughout the week the teachers observed Ms. Atwell open each class with a mini-lesson about a poem as well as one in which she talked about research on how the brain learns to read fluidly.
Despite the student freedom, Ms. Atwell constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk: no “Gossip Girl” or novels based on video games. But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer.
At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.
No wonder they hate school, they're prisoners. Can't pee alone, and can't choose what to read when they do.
Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”
Ms. Atwell reminded the teachers that she had once taught in a public school and faced strict requirements. “There is nothing that we are doing here that can’t be done in any public school,” she said. “The question is, how do you tweak these hidebound traditions of the institutions?”
Choice as a Motivator
Literacy specialists say that giving children a say in what they read can help motivate them. “If your goal is simply to get them to read more, choice is the way to go,” said Elizabeth Birr Moje, a literacy professor at the University of Michigan. Ms. Moje added that choices should be limited and that teachers should guide students toward high-quality literature.
Though research on the academic effects of choice has been limited, some studies have shown that giving students modest options can enhance educational results. In 11 studies conducted with third, fourth and fifth graders over the past 10 years, John T. Guthrie, now a retired professor of literacy at the University of Maryland, found that giving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topic helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Color me totally not surprised. Even if this weren't the theme of the article, I'd still expect these results.
“The main thing is feeling in charge,” he said. Most experts say that teachers do not have to choose between one approach or the other and that they can incorporate the best of both methods: reading some novels as a group while also giving students opportunities to select their own books.
But literacy specialists also say that instilling a habit is as important as creating a shared canon. “If what we’re trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome’ and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readers, we don’t all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom.”
Why should we read Shakespeare? See it performed, same as we don't read Mozart. One fascinating aspect of Thursday Next's world is that, in their love of literature, they've turned Richard III into an interactive piece along the lines of Rocky Horror. I sorely wish I could go to one, it sounds like so much fun in the book!
Ms. McNeill returned to Jonesboro determined to apply what she had observed. She knew she was luckier than some of the other teachers in the Edgecomb program, who were saddled with large classes and short periods. She had no more than 20 students in any class, for 100 minutes every day.
Trying to emulate the relaxed atmosphere of Ms. Atwell’s classroom, Ms. McNeill pushed the desks out of their rows and against the white cinderblock walls. She placed a circle of carpet swatches on the tile floor and put a small wooden rocking chair at the front.
Her principal, Freda Givens, was supportive, persuaded by Ms. McNeill’s enthusiasm. But Ms. McNeill warned her: “I am not sure how it’s going to pan out on the standardized tests.”
Ms. McNeill started to build her classroom library. All told, she spent about $1,000 of her own money buying books, many of which were titles she had seen in Ms. Atwell’s classroom, including “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”; “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy; and several novels by the young-adult favorites Walter Dean Myers and Sarah Dessen.
Modeling herself after Ms. Atwell, she began conducting sales pitches for books in her warm drawl and invited her students to do so, too. Every day Ms. McNeill allotted 30 minutes for the students to read on their own. Chatty, but firm if she detected that someone was not reading, she scooted from student to student on a lime-green stool, noting page numbers on a clipboard chart. She asked questions about the books and suggested new ones.
Many students began the year choosing books she regarded as too simple, and she prodded them to a higher level. After Khristian Howard, an earnest seventh grader, read “Chaka! Through the Fire,” a memoir by the R&B star Chaka Khan, Ms. McNeill suggested that she try Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
This is an important note. A lot of the comments are going to whine about kids not reading challenging books, but note the role of a teacher encouraging them to read harder stuff than they'd choose on their own.
Khristian, who found the book tough at first, ended up writing an enthusiastic six-page entry in her journal. Ms. McNeill went on to suggest “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, a book, Khristian wrote, that she “really didn’t want to come to an end.“
To help teach concepts like allegory or foreshadowing, Ms. McNeill began virtually every session by dissecting a poem that the class then discussed. One morning this spring Jabari Denson, an eighth grader, read aloud “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. The class spent 15 minutes teasing out the metaphorical meaning of a line about “places with no carpet on the floor.”
She required that the students record their impressions of each book, citing specific passages and analyzing themes. Jennae often wrote four or five pages in her tightly packed print. A year earlier she had been bored by reading and had little to say about books.
But now new worlds were opening. In January she read “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” a novel by Ned Vizzini about a depressed teenager who ends up in a psychiatric ward. “After reading this book, I have decided that I want to be a psychologist,” Jennae wrote in the spiral-bound notebook where she kept her journal. The book, she continued, had changed how she viewed mental illness.
“I think people that are labeled ‘crazy’ aren’t crazy at all; they just see the world differently than others,” she wrote. “They don’t really know how to express it correctly so nobody else knows how to accept it so they lock them away in a psych ward.”
The book taught her something and caused her to think. Who could ask for more than that?
Ms. McNeill did hit some snags. In January two of her students failed a state writing assessment. Over dinner one night with her husband, Dan McNeill, she confessed her fear that Ms. Givens, the principal, might not let her continue with her radical approach. But Ms. Givens did not interfere.
Ms. McNeill knew that students who were now being asked to write much more frequently about their reading might be tempted to copy the work of others. In March one of her most reluctant seventh graders plagiarized a journal entry about “Tomorrow, When the War Began,” a novel by John Marsden about children coping with an invasion of Australia. The boy did not even bother to remove the words “The Horn Book, starred review,” from the printout he pasted into his notebook.
She admonished the boy and asked him to redo his entry. She was discouraged to see that he wrote only one paragraph that amounted to not much more than a plot summary, concluding, “I highly recommend this book to young teens who like this kind of stuff.”
My mother blames this sort of thing on book reports. You see them on Amazon as well. Kids are taught to write book reports in this format and they're never taught NOT to. But, to deter the critics, let me say that anybody who calls John Marsden's series there not "challenging" enough has clearly never read it. My mother, my sister, we were all of us addicted to this series, and I'm counting the days (weeks, months) until Ana's old enough to share it with her. (It'll be a long wait.)
To Ms. McNeill’s chagrin, several students, most of them boys, stubbornly refused to read more challenging fare. One afternoon this spring she pulled her stool next to Masai, an eighth grader who wore a sparkling stud in one ear, as he stared at a laptop screen on which he was supposed to be composing a book review. Beside him sat the second volume in the “Maximum Ride” series, which chronicles the adventures of genetically mutated children who are part human, part bird. He was struggling to find anything to write.
“I keep trying to get you to read things other than James Patterson,” Ms. Atwell said, tapping the book’s cover. “But if you are going to write a book review of substance, you are going to have to find substance in the book.”
In staff meetings with fellow English teachers, Ms. McNeill showed them her students’ journals and explained her new teaching methods. A few were curious, but none were ready to give up their textbooks or class novels.
You can't convince some people.
Some colleagues suggested that Ms. McNeill was only able to teach this way because of who was in her class. “Ms. McNeill has the freedom to do that because she teaches gifted students,” said Linda White, an eighth-grade teacher.
I'm not sure myself that that's necessarily true - it seems to me that this would work even better with kids who are struggling - but I certainly don't have the data.
But in May Ms. McNeill felt vindicated when she received the results of her students’ performance on standardized state reading tests.
Of her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-grade class, only 4 had reached that level. Of her 13 current seventh graders, 8 scored at the top.
However, the small class size probably helps a lot.
In the final week of school Helen Arnold, Jennae’s mother, sent Ms. McNeill an e-mail message thanking her. “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class,” Ms. Arnold wrote.
Ms. McNeill knew she had not succeeded in persuading all of her students to read deeply or widely. But she was optimistic that she would capture a few more in the coming school year.
A week after her students left for the summer, Ms. McNeill boxed up the class sets of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” along with “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, keeping just three copies of each for her collection. She carted the rest to the English department storeroom.
And of course, the comments.
Before you click the link, note that a lot of the comments disparage comic books (and graphic novels don't exist). I still don't understand whence this scorn. Now, my uncle, back before he did all those drugs, used to be (my mother says) quite bright. And the whole class was shocked when he did superwell on his reading assessment in elementary school because "all he reads are comic books!" Of course, he read them voraciously and probably read some that were "above his level", and there's the difference.
Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, makes the point that it's the content, not the delivery that matters - if we tell great stories by television, they're still great stories. People forget he made that point in the book, but he did.
If everyone is reading something different, what is the common tread of the literature class, reading? Their should be some choice buy students and the teacher, but students need to be exposed to different types of literature and story telling. There is more to a literature class than instilling a love of reading. If in the end you raise a generation that reads everything sold in a supermarket and nothing else where is the education. I was not a stellar college student by any means and work in a company with a lot of recent college graduates. I am always amazed at their complete lack of general knowledge about the world. I truly think this is a result of lax standards in high school.
We are producing students who have expertise in a narrow spectrum but on a whole are very ignorant. The are being cheated out of an education and the country lacks a well informed populace. The demagoguery of recent politics is a harbinger of our future unless we produce change the way we educate all students from kindergarten to university. We need some choice but we also need a solid core curriculum in all subjects.
Do you see what I mean about bad writing skills? Talk about lax standards! This one was painful to read.
I'm in library school right now and I just read how the "Wizard of Oz" was once considered "trash".
I've heard the same thing about Jack London and about Dickens. I don't think that Captain Underpants is ever, even in 150 or 250 years, going to be considered great literature, mind, but I think this comment is worth it for the perspective.
Well, add another stone to the grave of American literature and the tradition of the great books. I read Harold Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" about this topic 15 years ago as an undergrad studying literature in Boston. I was dismayed then. Granted, I had the wonderful opportunity to study great books at private school before then, I came to University already well-read. It's a shame to think that after all this time, we are inclined to discontinue the heritage of those important and so human ideas to today's youth. Especially in communities that sorely lack a foundation in letters. To think, I'd of learned nothing about the grand scope of humanity without the Greeks, nor the importance of poetry from the English Romantic poets, the travails of the poor in Dickens, the lay of the land in Twain, Thoreau or Frost, or the flow of the street from likes of Langston Hughes and William Patterson, Allen Ginsberg. I could go on for a good hour I think. I do not think that much of what is written today-with it's discursive prose and lack of history-can do what these books can. There is no greater loss, indeed, then the foundation of our ideas and inspiration in the West and the uniquely American heritage they bestow on the present day. I'll keep my Odyssey and Chaucer for my kids, thank you.
If you're going to be a literature snob, please learn to at least be prescriptivist enough to spell and punctuate correctly. "I'd of"? Seriously? (And since when are the Odyssey and Chaucer "uniquely American"? How can this person talk of lack of history with a straight face when she's pulling out lines like this?)
When I was a kid, literature classes were always my least favorite, even though I was an avid reader and straight-A student. This is mainly because I was never and still am not very much moved by works of fiction. Forcing every child to read reams of fiction regardless of interest is probably not that beneficial. A big problem is that many educators reflexively equate quality literature with fiction, ignoring the benefit of incorporating in high school curricula more of the great non-fiction historical works of literature. DeToqueville is just as important as Dickens, and some students with an inclination more to interpretation of facts than of stories would better appreciate the former than the latter.
Let students choose, and let them also choose non-fiction.
This is a good point. I was shocked when Meghan's dad said he'd never read a book in his life. A few questions, though, tracked down his problem not to a dislike of reading but a clear dislike of fiction - he doesn't watch TV or movies either due to this problem! Why should he force himself through fiction if he doesn't like it?
As the article states, left to their own devices, "chick lit" and "comic book type" books. Good grief! The school years are too short to waste the time with comic books in place of "To Kill A Mockingbird" (a powerful and accurate portrayl of race relations in the South until the last 35 or so years and far more valuable than comic books!)
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first: Not only do no comic books ever deal with race relations but, also, as near as I can tell there is only a narrow window in which to read "great books", and that window closes by the end of high school. Maaaaaybe college. Nobody has ever decided at the age of 26 to pick up "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the first time. (And if they had, they surely would get less out of it than if they'd read it at the age of 13.)
But wait, there's more! Same commenter:
This method will only result in students being ignorant of literature, langauge and the breadth of knowledge. Why not ask them if they want to learn math, history or anything else and if the kids say 'no', you just skip it?
Actually, why not? I can honestly say that much of what I learned over the course of 12 years in school has yet to prove useful. Why not allow students to specialize earlier, while still offering the traditional-in-the-US broad approach for those who want a more general education? Heck, why not teach kids useful, well-paid trades? When my sink is leaking, do you know what I don't do? I don't make my plumbers recite a booklist before I pay them.
(She goes on, too. Keep reading.)
I speak as someone who at age 11 set as my summer goal to read all the novels of Hemiingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck --- and I did it. And for those who don't like fiction, well-written fiction of the caliber of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, etc is simply the human story and perspectives told through the eyes of the author.
Okay, now, aside from the nonsense of how fiction can somehow not be fiction - is she saying she chose to read "worthy" books? On her own? Without her teacher forcing her? But somehow no other student will have this experience? Is she totally deluded? (And for that matter, does any of us really think she understood all those books when she was 11? I was a good reader, but I doubt I would have understood, or really enjoyed, any of them at that age! Isn't it better to read a book when you can understand it?)
I could see giving a class a choice of two books, but a completely open choice? Some of these books sound a step above comic books.
Says the man who has most likely never read a comic book in his life.
This article is shocking. Shame on this teacher and the school. Truly the decline of civilization.
Did you get that? Choosing (with encouragement) to read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" instead of being required to read (like it or not) "To Kill a Mockingbird" in high school leads, inevitably, to the decline of civilization. (And I betcha anything that Maya Angelou knows nothing about race relations in the South 40 years ago! Nothing, I say, nothing!)
Assigned reading lists with some choice are the way to go, in my opinion, but we cannot allow children to rot their minds on Captain Underpants and we cannot accept "Text-Speak," whatever that is, as an alternative, healthy form of writing.
Upcomment she talks defensively about the "cannon". Don't defend it if you can't spell it, you only look like a fool.
What's really funny is the way she professes to not know what "Text-Speak" is even though she consistently uses the more usual term and the article didn't. I wonder how that happened? (Also, I now have a profound urge to actually read Captain Underpants. I want to see if my brain rots.)
Your article says, ''Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.''
How do ''they'' prove that? Or can they just say stuff without having to prove it. Like a lot of rich pundits and radio broadcasters these days.
And is it really valuable to have an enthusiastic, lifelong reader of the ''Captain Underpants'' series? Who says that person's taste will ever change?
Where's the evidence supporting this belief?
Well, you know, there isn't any evidence, but neither is there any evidence that the "cannon", as they call it, is actually better for you than some of the selections noted in the article. And if anybody actually thinks that a person's taste will never change between school and adulthood, well, I have no words to express how absurd I think this is.
I think all this hate toward Captain Underpants and the like is generally unwarranted. While some children may enjoy these books, it is not wholly unreasonable to expect that if they were to develop a lifelong love of literature from reading such drivel, they would, in fact, not be reading Captain Underpants as adults. A person who loves reading books of any sort will invariably be aware eventually of the existence of the classics. If we as parents, teachers, and students cultivate this love of reading along with a modicum of curiosity, we may expect not only for all these classics to be read, but also a more literate, more thoughtful society.
Thank you.
This was my eight grade son's experience.
His school had a summer reading list of suggested books from which he was supposed to pick one and read. He chose a book and his teacher did not care for it (Chronicles of Narnia). The objection was that it was a "fantasy" book. When I heard that comment, I took a look at the suggested reading list to confirm that the book was in fact on the list.
It was.
I started off feeling annoyed that the district seemed to be leaving reading choices to students and then the teachers were critical. My annoyance was in equal parts. First, about the fact that they gave them choices in the first place, then when he chose one of the suggestions this was not well received. But I also had concerns that they were not being exposed to the "classics" that most adults would recognize from their middle school years (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, for example).
So, C. S. Lewis isn't "classic" enough for his 8th grade son. He thinks that kid should be reading, at the age of 13, Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies. Catcher in the Rye? If you're not at the right stage of adolescent angst, I don't see the point.
What many commenters seem to be missing out on in this article is that this program is designed to spark the love of reading that many kids can't discover on their own. Shoving Shakespeare onto a twelve-year-old who doesn't like reading in seventh grade, and subsequently forcing more and more complex books on him throughout the rest of his school years will not automatically force an interest in reading, just because of repetition. There needs to be something in the beginning that shows him that reading is not torture, it's not designed to be hard. Let him choose to read something that interests him, no matter how simple, and he will enjoy it. Treat it just like a more academic title, in analyzing it and thinking critically about it, and then he will likely have an easier time with reading Shakespeare the same way.
This program is a gateway, not a method to be stuck to throughout a child's education. Some kids need that soft push into literature, through something Captain Underpants (whatever that is), to get them to more complex works like Steinbeck, etc.
Yes, this. This, this, this!
The books typically taught in high schools--Julius Ceasar by Shakespeare, Ethan Fromme, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. aren't the most distinguished artistic works. Rather, they are the works in the literary canon with the least sexually explicit material.
*snickers*
I've often found that, online, the people I disagree with have much worse writing skills than the people I *do* agree with - and to quote one of my new favorite characters, Clementine, I am not even exaggerating!
This is doubly (and hilariously, and ironically, and sadly) true when I disagree with the self-proclaimed Defenders of Language. It's bad enough that one can't correct another person's spelling without making a huge error in their own comment, but these people who go on and ON about how much learning the "cannon" did for them cannot even tell the difference between "would have" and "would of", or between a full sentence and a barely comprehensible fragment. I'm not cherrypicking. I refuse to quote *all* of them just because they're hypocritically less literate than they claim to be, but keep this in mind when reading the comments: The critical ones are almost all like that. I don't claim to have perfect writing either (I never was clearly taught about commas and semi-colons, I freely admit that), but at least I don't claim my education is better because it involved some classics. (At least this group, unlike the ones who threw a hissy fit over the teaching of the specific jingle "I before E", seem to have enough reading comprehension skills to understand the article. That's a change.)
Any comments in bold are left by me.
Click for article!
Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like
By MOTOKO RICH
JONESBORO, Ga. — For years Lorrie McNeill loved teaching “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the Harper Lee classic that many Americans regard as a literary rite of passage.
But last fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign “Mockingbird” — or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.
Among their choices: James Patterson‘s adrenaline-fueled “Maximum Ride” books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the “Captain Underpants” series of comic-book-style novels.
Captain Underpants would get slightly more respect in the comments if they used the proper term "Graphic Novel".
But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: “I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own.”
This is going to come up later in the comments. I'll leave my comment now - it seems to me, looking at the entire sentence, that Jennae clearly knows the rules and deliberately chose to use textspeak to add emphasis to that word. It's not ignorance, it's a stylistic choice. Is it an appropriate one? Maybe, maybe not - it depends on if she was writing a formal essay or if, as I somewhat suspect, she was typing or writing in a semi-personal journal where the emphasis is, rightly, on organizing your thoughts rather than worrying about the spelling. Shocking as it is to contemplate, there's a time and a place for the red pencil.
The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on.
In New York City many public and private elementary schools and some middle schools already employ versions of reading workshop. Starting this fall, the school district in Chappaqua, N.Y., is setting aside 40 minutes every other day for all sixth, seventh and eighth graders to read books of their own choosing.
This isn't that new. We called it SSR when I was in the fourth grade. Ramona Quimby did this a few years before I was even born! She called it SSR as well because she thought DEAR was childish, a girl after my own heart.
In September students in Seattle’s public middle schools will also begin choosing most of their own books. And in Chicago the public school district has had a pilot program in place since 2006 in 31 of its 483 elementary schools to give students in grades 6, 7 and 8 more control over what they read. Chicago officials will consider whether to expand the program once they review its results.
None of those places, however, are going as far as Ms. McNeill.
In the method familiar to generations of students, an entire class reads a novel — often a classic — together to draw out the themes and study literary craft. That tradition, proponents say, builds a shared literary culture among students, exposes all readers to works of quality and complexity and is the best way to prepare students for standardized tests.
But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.
“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”
And it's not just that book. ANY book, no matter how "classic", is going to have some people who don't get into it or who just don't like it. There's nothing to be done for it - and I, for one, don't see much point in slaving over a book that I don't like. It's not like there's a book shortage out there. I can get another book about 1930s Alabama and racism if I need to, but can I ever get those two hours back? (For the record, I loved To Kill a Mockingbird as a kid, but now I think it's a bit overhyped.)
Critics of the approach say that reading as a group generally leads to more meaningful insights, and they question whether teachers can really keep up with a roomful of children reading different books. Even more important, they say, is the loss of a common body of knowledge based on the literary classics — often difficult books that children are unlikely to choose for themselves.
Now, we're going to see the word "children" often in the comments, even applied to high schoolers. The word is barely appropriate for 12 year olds, and not at all for 18 year olds, but it'll keep coming up. Ignore it.
“What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”
Well, fuck you too, Diane. And if they don't pick up Moby Dick, not now and not when they're out of school either, where is the loss? Truly, has anybody ever been harmed by not reading Moby Dick?
Indeed, some school districts are moving in the opposite direction. Boston is developing a core curriculum that will designate specific books for sixth grade and is considering assigned texts for each grade through the 12th.
Joan Dabrowski, director of literacy for Boston’s public schools, said teachers would still be urged to give students some choices. Many schools in fact take that combination approach, dictating some titles while letting students select others.
Even some previously staunch advocates of a rigid core curriculum have moderated their views. “I actually used to be a real hard-line, great-books, high-culture kind of person who would want to stick to Dickens,” said Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University and the author of “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” But now, in the age of Game Boys and Facebook, “I think if they read a lot of Conan novels or Hardy Boys or Harry Potter or whatever, that’s good,” he said. “We just need to preserve book habits among the kids as much as we possibly can.”
In Search of a Better Way
As a teenager growing up just a few miles from Jonesboro, Ms. McNeill loved the novels of Judy Blume and Danielle Steel. But in school she was forced to read the classics. She remembers vividly disliking “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Still, she went on to teach it to her own students.
In 1999 she moved to Jonesboro Middle School, where more than 80 percent of the students are eligible for free lunches. Teachers there stuck to a curriculum prescribed by the county. Working with students designated as gifted, Ms. McNeill began teaching familiar novels like “Lord of the Flies” and “Mockingbird.” But she said, “I just never felt that they were as excited about reading as I wanted them to be.”
Lord of the Flies is a miserable book to read. I've never gotten past the first chapter.
Ms. McNeill, an amateur poet whose favorite authors include Barbara Kingsolver and Nick Hornby, wondered if forcing some students through a book had dampened their interest in reading altogether. She tried “literature circles,” in which a smaller group chose a book to read together, and had some success. Then, in early 2008, she attended a professional seminar in Atlanta led by Nancie Atwell, the author of “In the Middle” and “The Reading Zone,” popular guidebooks for teachers that promote giving students widespread choice. “In the Middle” has sold nearly half a million copies since it was first published in 1987.
An Eye-Opening Experience
Over the last two decades, Ms. Atwell, along with Lucy M. Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has emerged as a guru of the reading workshop approach. Ms. Atwell brings 45 teachers a year to her base of operations, the Center for Teaching and Learning, a small private school she founded in Edgecomb, Me., an hour north of Portland. Last September Ms. McNeill spent a week there with four other English teachers, each of whom had paid $800, observing Ms. Atwell’s work.
That first cool fall morning, 17 seventh- and eighth-grade students assembled for their reading and writing class in a large room overlooking a grove of birch and maple trees. Shelves of books ringed the room. The students flopped in forest green beanbag chairs set in a circle on the carpeted floor. At the front Ms. Atwell sat in a rocking chair, a small stack of volumes beside her.
Now, in the interest of fairness, note that there are only seventeen students in her class. (It's also a gifted class.) That's bound to make a difference in grades.
Ms. McNeill watched closely, taking notes. After a session in which the students edited poems they had been writing, Ms. Atwell ceded the rocking chair to students, who gave short talks recommending books to their classmates.
One eighth grader presented “Getting the Girl” by Markus Zusak, the author of “The Book Thief,” a best-selling young-adult novel about the Holocaust that had been one of the boy’s favorites. He highlighted the book’s unusual line breaks and one-word sentences, concluding, “It’s a fun, good read.”
When Ms. Atwell resumed her seat in the rocking chair, she pitched several titles she had read over the weekend. She held up “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” the novel by David Wroblewski that had been anointed by Oprah Winfrey.
“It is just incredible,” she said, leaning forward. “It is about signing, dog-breeding, muteness, adolescence, the beauty of the American Midwest.” Before she could even lay it back on the floor, Maura Anderson, an eighth grader, asked if she could take it to start reading that afternoon.
In a 30-minute reading period that followed, each student hunkered low in a beanbag chair. Ms. Atwell moved quietly among them, coming in close for whispered conferences and noting page numbers to make sure each student had read at least 20 pages the night before.
One girl had “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult, while a boy a few seats away read Khaled Hosseini‘s novel “The Kite Runner.” Another boy was absorbed in “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” by Tim O’Brien.
Throughout the week the teachers observed Ms. Atwell open each class with a mini-lesson about a poem as well as one in which she talked about research on how the brain learns to read fluidly.
Despite the student freedom, Ms. Atwell constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk: no “Gossip Girl” or novels based on video games. But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer.
At the end of the first day the teachers discussed the demands of standardized testing and how some had faced resistance from administrators. Ms. McNeill said her students had so little freedom that they even had to be escorted to the bathrooms.
No wonder they hate school, they're prisoners. Can't pee alone, and can't choose what to read when they do.
Suddenly she was overcome with emotion as she contrasted that environment with the student-led atmosphere in Ms. Atwell’s class. “It makes me sad that my students can’t have this every day,” she said, wiping away tears. “These children are so fortunate.”
Ms. Atwell reminded the teachers that she had once taught in a public school and faced strict requirements. “There is nothing that we are doing here that can’t be done in any public school,” she said. “The question is, how do you tweak these hidebound traditions of the institutions?”
Choice as a Motivator
Literacy specialists say that giving children a say in what they read can help motivate them. “If your goal is simply to get them to read more, choice is the way to go,” said Elizabeth Birr Moje, a literacy professor at the University of Michigan. Ms. Moje added that choices should be limited and that teachers should guide students toward high-quality literature.
Though research on the academic effects of choice has been limited, some studies have shown that giving students modest options can enhance educational results. In 11 studies conducted with third, fourth and fifth graders over the past 10 years, John T. Guthrie, now a retired professor of literacy at the University of Maryland, found that giving children limited choices from a classroom collection of books on a topic helped improve performance on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Color me totally not surprised. Even if this weren't the theme of the article, I'd still expect these results.
“The main thing is feeling in charge,” he said. Most experts say that teachers do not have to choose between one approach or the other and that they can incorporate the best of both methods: reading some novels as a group while also giving students opportunities to select their own books.
But literacy specialists also say that instilling a habit is as important as creating a shared canon. “If what we’re trying to get to is, everybody has read ‘Ethan Frome’ and Henry James and Shakespeare, then the challenge for the teacher is how do you make that stuff accessible and interesting enough that kids will stick with it,” said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. “But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach. As adults, as good readers, we don’t all read the same thing, and we revel in our idiosyncrasies as adult readers, so kids should have some of the same freedom.”
Why should we read Shakespeare? See it performed, same as we don't read Mozart. One fascinating aspect of Thursday Next's world is that, in their love of literature, they've turned Richard III into an interactive piece along the lines of Rocky Horror. I sorely wish I could go to one, it sounds like so much fun in the book!
Ms. McNeill returned to Jonesboro determined to apply what she had observed. She knew she was luckier than some of the other teachers in the Edgecomb program, who were saddled with large classes and short periods. She had no more than 20 students in any class, for 100 minutes every day.
Trying to emulate the relaxed atmosphere of Ms. Atwell’s classroom, Ms. McNeill pushed the desks out of their rows and against the white cinderblock walls. She placed a circle of carpet swatches on the tile floor and put a small wooden rocking chair at the front.
Her principal, Freda Givens, was supportive, persuaded by Ms. McNeill’s enthusiasm. But Ms. McNeill warned her: “I am not sure how it’s going to pan out on the standardized tests.”
Ms. McNeill started to build her classroom library. All told, she spent about $1,000 of her own money buying books, many of which were titles she had seen in Ms. Atwell’s classroom, including “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle”; “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy; and several novels by the young-adult favorites Walter Dean Myers and Sarah Dessen.
Modeling herself after Ms. Atwell, she began conducting sales pitches for books in her warm drawl and invited her students to do so, too. Every day Ms. McNeill allotted 30 minutes for the students to read on their own. Chatty, but firm if she detected that someone was not reading, she scooted from student to student on a lime-green stool, noting page numbers on a clipboard chart. She asked questions about the books and suggested new ones.
Many students began the year choosing books she regarded as too simple, and she prodded them to a higher level. After Khristian Howard, an earnest seventh grader, read “Chaka! Through the Fire,” a memoir by the R&B star Chaka Khan, Ms. McNeill suggested that she try Maya Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
This is an important note. A lot of the comments are going to whine about kids not reading challenging books, but note the role of a teacher encouraging them to read harder stuff than they'd choose on their own.
Khristian, who found the book tough at first, ended up writing an enthusiastic six-page entry in her journal. Ms. McNeill went on to suggest “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” by Betty Smith, a book, Khristian wrote, that she “really didn’t want to come to an end.“
To help teach concepts like allegory or foreshadowing, Ms. McNeill began virtually every session by dissecting a poem that the class then discussed. One morning this spring Jabari Denson, an eighth grader, read aloud “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. The class spent 15 minutes teasing out the metaphorical meaning of a line about “places with no carpet on the floor.”
She required that the students record their impressions of each book, citing specific passages and analyzing themes. Jennae often wrote four or five pages in her tightly packed print. A year earlier she had been bored by reading and had little to say about books.
But now new worlds were opening. In January she read “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” a novel by Ned Vizzini about a depressed teenager who ends up in a psychiatric ward. “After reading this book, I have decided that I want to be a psychologist,” Jennae wrote in the spiral-bound notebook where she kept her journal. The book, she continued, had changed how she viewed mental illness.
“I think people that are labeled ‘crazy’ aren’t crazy at all; they just see the world differently than others,” she wrote. “They don’t really know how to express it correctly so nobody else knows how to accept it so they lock them away in a psych ward.”
The book taught her something and caused her to think. Who could ask for more than that?
Ms. McNeill did hit some snags. In January two of her students failed a state writing assessment. Over dinner one night with her husband, Dan McNeill, she confessed her fear that Ms. Givens, the principal, might not let her continue with her radical approach. But Ms. Givens did not interfere.
Ms. McNeill knew that students who were now being asked to write much more frequently about their reading might be tempted to copy the work of others. In March one of her most reluctant seventh graders plagiarized a journal entry about “Tomorrow, When the War Began,” a novel by John Marsden about children coping with an invasion of Australia. The boy did not even bother to remove the words “The Horn Book, starred review,” from the printout he pasted into his notebook.
She admonished the boy and asked him to redo his entry. She was discouraged to see that he wrote only one paragraph that amounted to not much more than a plot summary, concluding, “I highly recommend this book to young teens who like this kind of stuff.”
My mother blames this sort of thing on book reports. You see them on Amazon as well. Kids are taught to write book reports in this format and they're never taught NOT to. But, to deter the critics, let me say that anybody who calls John Marsden's series there not "challenging" enough has clearly never read it. My mother, my sister, we were all of us addicted to this series, and I'm counting the days (weeks, months) until Ana's old enough to share it with her. (It'll be a long wait.)
To Ms. McNeill’s chagrin, several students, most of them boys, stubbornly refused to read more challenging fare. One afternoon this spring she pulled her stool next to Masai, an eighth grader who wore a sparkling stud in one ear, as he stared at a laptop screen on which he was supposed to be composing a book review. Beside him sat the second volume in the “Maximum Ride” series, which chronicles the adventures of genetically mutated children who are part human, part bird. He was struggling to find anything to write.
“I keep trying to get you to read things other than James Patterson,” Ms. Atwell said, tapping the book’s cover. “But if you are going to write a book review of substance, you are going to have to find substance in the book.”
In staff meetings with fellow English teachers, Ms. McNeill showed them her students’ journals and explained her new teaching methods. A few were curious, but none were ready to give up their textbooks or class novels.
You can't convince some people.
Some colleagues suggested that Ms. McNeill was only able to teach this way because of who was in her class. “Ms. McNeill has the freedom to do that because she teaches gifted students,” said Linda White, an eighth-grade teacher.
I'm not sure myself that that's necessarily true - it seems to me that this would work even better with kids who are struggling - but I certainly don't have the data.
But in May Ms. McNeill felt vindicated when she received the results of her students’ performance on standardized state reading tests.
Of her 18 eighth graders, 15 exceeded requirements, scoring in the highest bracket. When the same students had been in her seventh-grade class, only 4 had reached that level. Of her 13 current seventh graders, 8 scored at the top.
However, the small class size probably helps a lot.
In the final week of school Helen Arnold, Jennae’s mother, sent Ms. McNeill an e-mail message thanking her. “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class,” Ms. Arnold wrote.
Ms. McNeill knew she had not succeeded in persuading all of her students to read deeply or widely. But she was optimistic that she would capture a few more in the coming school year.
A week after her students left for the summer, Ms. McNeill boxed up the class sets of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” along with “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, keeping just three copies of each for her collection. She carted the rest to the English department storeroom.
And of course, the comments.
Before you click the link, note that a lot of the comments disparage comic books (and graphic novels don't exist). I still don't understand whence this scorn. Now, my uncle, back before he did all those drugs, used to be (my mother says) quite bright. And the whole class was shocked when he did superwell on his reading assessment in elementary school because "all he reads are comic books!" Of course, he read them voraciously and probably read some that were "above his level", and there's the difference.
Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, makes the point that it's the content, not the delivery that matters - if we tell great stories by television, they're still great stories. People forget he made that point in the book, but he did.
If everyone is reading something different, what is the common tread of the literature class, reading? Their should be some choice buy students and the teacher, but students need to be exposed to different types of literature and story telling. There is more to a literature class than instilling a love of reading. If in the end you raise a generation that reads everything sold in a supermarket and nothing else where is the education. I was not a stellar college student by any means and work in a company with a lot of recent college graduates. I am always amazed at their complete lack of general knowledge about the world. I truly think this is a result of lax standards in high school.
We are producing students who have expertise in a narrow spectrum but on a whole are very ignorant. The are being cheated out of an education and the country lacks a well informed populace. The demagoguery of recent politics is a harbinger of our future unless we produce change the way we educate all students from kindergarten to university. We need some choice but we also need a solid core curriculum in all subjects.
Do you see what I mean about bad writing skills? Talk about lax standards! This one was painful to read.
I'm in library school right now and I just read how the "Wizard of Oz" was once considered "trash".
I've heard the same thing about Jack London and about Dickens. I don't think that Captain Underpants is ever, even in 150 or 250 years, going to be considered great literature, mind, but I think this comment is worth it for the perspective.
Well, add another stone to the grave of American literature and the tradition of the great books. I read Harold Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" about this topic 15 years ago as an undergrad studying literature in Boston. I was dismayed then. Granted, I had the wonderful opportunity to study great books at private school before then, I came to University already well-read. It's a shame to think that after all this time, we are inclined to discontinue the heritage of those important and so human ideas to today's youth. Especially in communities that sorely lack a foundation in letters. To think, I'd of learned nothing about the grand scope of humanity without the Greeks, nor the importance of poetry from the English Romantic poets, the travails of the poor in Dickens, the lay of the land in Twain, Thoreau or Frost, or the flow of the street from likes of Langston Hughes and William Patterson, Allen Ginsberg. I could go on for a good hour I think. I do not think that much of what is written today-with it's discursive prose and lack of history-can do what these books can. There is no greater loss, indeed, then the foundation of our ideas and inspiration in the West and the uniquely American heritage they bestow on the present day. I'll keep my Odyssey and Chaucer for my kids, thank you.
If you're going to be a literature snob, please learn to at least be prescriptivist enough to spell and punctuate correctly. "I'd of"? Seriously? (And since when are the Odyssey and Chaucer "uniquely American"? How can this person talk of lack of history with a straight face when she's pulling out lines like this?)
When I was a kid, literature classes were always my least favorite, even though I was an avid reader and straight-A student. This is mainly because I was never and still am not very much moved by works of fiction. Forcing every child to read reams of fiction regardless of interest is probably not that beneficial. A big problem is that many educators reflexively equate quality literature with fiction, ignoring the benefit of incorporating in high school curricula more of the great non-fiction historical works of literature. DeToqueville is just as important as Dickens, and some students with an inclination more to interpretation of facts than of stories would better appreciate the former than the latter.
Let students choose, and let them also choose non-fiction.
This is a good point. I was shocked when Meghan's dad said he'd never read a book in his life. A few questions, though, tracked down his problem not to a dislike of reading but a clear dislike of fiction - he doesn't watch TV or movies either due to this problem! Why should he force himself through fiction if he doesn't like it?
As the article states, left to their own devices, "chick lit" and "comic book type" books. Good grief! The school years are too short to waste the time with comic books in place of "To Kill A Mockingbird" (a powerful and accurate portrayl of race relations in the South until the last 35 or so years and far more valuable than comic books!)
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first: Not only do no comic books ever deal with race relations but, also, as near as I can tell there is only a narrow window in which to read "great books", and that window closes by the end of high school. Maaaaaybe college. Nobody has ever decided at the age of 26 to pick up "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the first time. (And if they had, they surely would get less out of it than if they'd read it at the age of 13.)
But wait, there's more! Same commenter:
This method will only result in students being ignorant of literature, langauge and the breadth of knowledge. Why not ask them if they want to learn math, history or anything else and if the kids say 'no', you just skip it?
Actually, why not? I can honestly say that much of what I learned over the course of 12 years in school has yet to prove useful. Why not allow students to specialize earlier, while still offering the traditional-in-the-US broad approach for those who want a more general education? Heck, why not teach kids useful, well-paid trades? When my sink is leaking, do you know what I don't do? I don't make my plumbers recite a booklist before I pay them.
(She goes on, too. Keep reading.)
I speak as someone who at age 11 set as my summer goal to read all the novels of Hemiingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck --- and I did it. And for those who don't like fiction, well-written fiction of the caliber of Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, etc is simply the human story and perspectives told through the eyes of the author.
Okay, now, aside from the nonsense of how fiction can somehow not be fiction - is she saying she chose to read "worthy" books? On her own? Without her teacher forcing her? But somehow no other student will have this experience? Is she totally deluded? (And for that matter, does any of us really think she understood all those books when she was 11? I was a good reader, but I doubt I would have understood, or really enjoyed, any of them at that age! Isn't it better to read a book when you can understand it?)
I could see giving a class a choice of two books, but a completely open choice? Some of these books sound a step above comic books.
Says the man who has most likely never read a comic book in his life.
This article is shocking. Shame on this teacher and the school. Truly the decline of civilization.
Did you get that? Choosing (with encouragement) to read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" instead of being required to read (like it or not) "To Kill a Mockingbird" in high school leads, inevitably, to the decline of civilization. (And I betcha anything that Maya Angelou knows nothing about race relations in the South 40 years ago! Nothing, I say, nothing!)
Assigned reading lists with some choice are the way to go, in my opinion, but we cannot allow children to rot their minds on Captain Underpants and we cannot accept "Text-Speak," whatever that is, as an alternative, healthy form of writing.
Upcomment she talks defensively about the "cannon". Don't defend it if you can't spell it, you only look like a fool.
What's really funny is the way she professes to not know what "Text-Speak" is even though she consistently uses the more usual term and the article didn't. I wonder how that happened? (Also, I now have a profound urge to actually read Captain Underpants. I want to see if my brain rots.)
Your article says, ''Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.''
How do ''they'' prove that? Or can they just say stuff without having to prove it. Like a lot of rich pundits and radio broadcasters these days.
And is it really valuable to have an enthusiastic, lifelong reader of the ''Captain Underpants'' series? Who says that person's taste will ever change?
Where's the evidence supporting this belief?
Well, you know, there isn't any evidence, but neither is there any evidence that the "cannon", as they call it, is actually better for you than some of the selections noted in the article. And if anybody actually thinks that a person's taste will never change between school and adulthood, well, I have no words to express how absurd I think this is.
I think all this hate toward Captain Underpants and the like is generally unwarranted. While some children may enjoy these books, it is not wholly unreasonable to expect that if they were to develop a lifelong love of literature from reading such drivel, they would, in fact, not be reading Captain Underpants as adults. A person who loves reading books of any sort will invariably be aware eventually of the existence of the classics. If we as parents, teachers, and students cultivate this love of reading along with a modicum of curiosity, we may expect not only for all these classics to be read, but also a more literate, more thoughtful society.
Thank you.
This was my eight grade son's experience.
His school had a summer reading list of suggested books from which he was supposed to pick one and read. He chose a book and his teacher did not care for it (Chronicles of Narnia). The objection was that it was a "fantasy" book. When I heard that comment, I took a look at the suggested reading list to confirm that the book was in fact on the list.
It was.
I started off feeling annoyed that the district seemed to be leaving reading choices to students and then the teachers were critical. My annoyance was in equal parts. First, about the fact that they gave them choices in the first place, then when he chose one of the suggestions this was not well received. But I also had concerns that they were not being exposed to the "classics" that most adults would recognize from their middle school years (Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, for example).
So, C. S. Lewis isn't "classic" enough for his 8th grade son. He thinks that kid should be reading, at the age of 13, Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies. Catcher in the Rye? If you're not at the right stage of adolescent angst, I don't see the point.
What many commenters seem to be missing out on in this article is that this program is designed to spark the love of reading that many kids can't discover on their own. Shoving Shakespeare onto a twelve-year-old who doesn't like reading in seventh grade, and subsequently forcing more and more complex books on him throughout the rest of his school years will not automatically force an interest in reading, just because of repetition. There needs to be something in the beginning that shows him that reading is not torture, it's not designed to be hard. Let him choose to read something that interests him, no matter how simple, and he will enjoy it. Treat it just like a more academic title, in analyzing it and thinking critically about it, and then he will likely have an easier time with reading Shakespeare the same way.
This program is a gateway, not a method to be stuck to throughout a child's education. Some kids need that soft push into literature, through something Captain Underpants (whatever that is), to get them to more complex works like Steinbeck, etc.
Yes, this. This, this, this!
The books typically taught in high schools--Julius Ceasar by Shakespeare, Ethan Fromme, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. aren't the most distinguished artistic works. Rather, they are the works in the literary canon with the least sexually explicit material.
*snickers*
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 07:17 am (UTC)Seventh grade may have had required books, but mainly I remember that seventh grade had a lot of choosing your own books to read. I remember specifically getting permission to count 100 pages of The Mind's I as a "book" when I spoke to my teacher and explained that I really wanted to read it, and it was full of short stories, but it was simply too long for me to finish within the allotted time for our assignment. He looked the book over, decided it was well above my expected grade level, and okayed that (actually, I just asked if I could not read all of it, he chose the 100 pages is sufficient aspect). I ended up using a second 100 pages as another "book".
I actually liked both To Kill a Mockingbird and Lord of the Flies. On the other hand, Moby Dick was one of the only books I was supposed to read but did not. I could not get myself to enjoy it at all, and to this day, I don't care that I haven't read it. I actually did have some choice, but I didn't like the other options either as that was pick one from a small set. However, by the time I wasn't reading Moby Dick I had read Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio entirely on my own (in translation) along with various other classics.
The thing is, different books work for different people. And I've rarely been pleased that I made myself keep reading something I wasn't enjoying. In fact, I really appreciate that when I picked Hard Times to read my teacher said I might not care for it. Sure enough, I really didn't and I asked if I could switch and got permission. I don't recall what I read instead.
I really would rather people enjoy reading than have read anything specific. And I am all for comics and graphic novels. I read tons of comics when I was kid, and these were comics... Archie, Richie Rich, Wendy, Casper, etc. And I had fun and I was reading. I also read tons of other stuff, including some less prestigious stuff to go with my Dante and Dawkins and such. I went through a Nancy Drew phase and a Babysitter's Club phase when I was young. I even read fanfic without any understanding of the culture (if the culture then was like it is now, I have no clue).
I read a huge variety of things. When I was a kid, I I was much more tolerant of bad writing. I'd read almost anything. It ended up serving me very well when I was substitute teaching a fifth grade class. On a trip to the school library one of the kids asked me for recommendations. So, I asked her what she liked, and we started going over what was available. I think my first few recommendations were things she'd already read, but things she had read and liked, so that was a good sign. We ended up finding something that looked appealing for her to try. Not every book ~should~ be about reading something truly deep or important. Sometimes it's about finding something enjoyable to curl up with. And I want kids to learn that.
And they can't and shouldn't all be like me and curl up cozily with East of Eden and really identify with and like the murderer.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 07:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 07:36 am (UTC)Also, I read Flowers for Algernon when I was about 7 or so. I reread it much later and I know that while I did enjoy it and understood parts of it, I totally failed to understand the relationship aspects and to pick up on the significance of the social interactions. I think this is okay. It's okay to read and enjoy a story as a child and miss lots of things that are part of what make up that story. But I think my view of stories about relationships changed a whole lot as I got experience with actually having relationships. Not that you shouldn't read anything with relationships before you're ready for them; you're just going to have a different experience with the story.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 04:38 pm (UTC)It seems that all of my English teachers had the impulse instead to teach other books when TKaM was an option, and I never filled the gap in my knowledge. Now I want to do so, but it's not available as an ebook yet, and I never remember to look for it when I'm in a bookstore.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 10:35 pm (UTC)I am one of the Defenders of Language in that I love Standard American English. I adore its weird rules, I'm a fantastic speller, and I think everybody should learn at least the basics. Do I care about people using it on a day-to-day basis? Not really. I don't write properly all of the time, and I talk funny most of the time.
Oh, and I was one of those kids who wanted to read Worthy Books, and results on that were mixed. For instance, I read War and Peace when I was 12, and I sure as hell didn't understand it, so I don't know that I actually got any benefit that I wouldn't have gotten from a "lesser" book.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 01:38 pm (UTC)(One bonus is that unlike them, you are not contractually obligated to make embarrassing mistakes every time you post or open your mouth.)
For instance, I read War and Peace when I was 12, and I sure as hell didn't understand it, so I don't know that I actually got any benefit that I wouldn't have gotten from a "lesser" book.
Bragging rights...? Maybe? I don't know.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 04:49 pm (UTC)As far as that particular book goes, however, I could have read another canonical classic that was much less difficult to understand, and still gotten quite a bit of benefit. Didn't help that I knew approximately zero about the Napoleonic Wars, Russian society, or 18th-century historiography.
Funny thing: I've tried to read it as an adult, and I just can't make myself do it. I guess the only reason I made it through at 12 was sheer cussedness. I love Anna Karenina, though.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 04:39 am (UTC)Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, makes the point that it's the content, not the delivery that matters - if we tell great stories by television, they're still great stories. People forget he made that point in the book, but he did.
If he made that point, he made it inadvertently. While Farenheit said some things about the form and content of stories, it had nothing good to say about TV.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 02:06 pm (UTC)I guess Bradbury is opposed to television as it is in practice, not as a medium in theory?
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 02:15 pm (UTC)Hardly possible but I really can't find anything I don't agree with you on, here at least.
Date: 2009-08-31 04:54 am (UTC)This is the generation of a new kind of literature. Harry Potter and The Twilight Saga, and so many other series (though not as big as those two), are proving this. They are a gateway to reading. I love, deeply love both Harry Potter and Twilight, they're not junk. And I read a very wide variety of books. I read classics, and having loved To Kill a Mockingbird I understand the point but the more important point that I understand is: CHOICE.
I didn't even learn to read, to a good enough degree, to finish a book all the way though, til 5th grade. I was a slow bloomer, but, BIG BIG BUT, I had a dedicated special education teacher that worked with me for 3 years and never gave up on me. Within a year of it all finally clicking I went from pretty much the lowest test scores in reading in the school in my 5th grade year, to in my 6th grade year being in the top 1 percentile of my school in test scores in reading. Then the next year from my test scores they deemed me at the college level. That's no lie, or stretch of the truth. When I started college I tried taking Reading 101, because it had been a while since I was last in school. Even then it was a bird course, needless to say I got an A, an A+ actually.
Now I read literature of all kinds: Fiction: mystery, horror, paranormal, non-fiction, graphic novels, and yes manga (Japanese comics).
So I read all kinds of stuff, and I read often. If I can I read everyday, if not I catch up for hours of long reading sessions when I have the time. I am a passionate reader. If not for that dedicated teacher I don't know if I would be, I believe not.
Main point: Different strokes for different folks. What more is there to say? These archaic people that want to only use the cannon/old schools methods are going down, and going down hard.
Thanks for writing this. It was interesting, entertaining, and I joined LiveJournal so I could get updates about other things you write about.
Re: Hardly possible but I really can't find anything I don't agree with you on, here at least.
Date: 2009-08-31 01:41 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing this. It was interesting, entertaining, and I joined LiveJournal so I could get updates about other things you write about.
Why, thank you! *blush*
So I read all kinds of stuff, and I read often. If I can I read everyday, if not I catch up for hours of long reading sessions when I have the time. I am a passionate reader. If not for that dedicated teacher I don't know if I would be, I believe not.
That's actually really good to read, and it gives you a perspective I don't have. (My perspective is "I was reading early, and read a lot of "good books" at a relatively early age, through choice, and it doesn't seem to have made me a better or smarter person, so you guys don't know what you're talking about". I think yours is better.)
Re: Hardly possible but I really can't find anything I don't agree with you on, here at least.
Date: 2009-08-31 11:22 pm (UTC)That's very flattering, thanks. I don't know if it was made any difference in my intelligence though, I think in some people (not sure about myself) their intelligence lies in common sense, instinct, and born gift of the capacity to learn. In others I'm sure books are a great way to learn but I have always believed this little quote from (I know overused source) Einstein: "Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything learned in school". I don't really think you can teach true intelligence, to most people anyways (subject to environment of course). But I do know my vocabulary (if not my spelling at all!) has improved exponentially
Thank you for saying that about the knowing what I am talking about, though I know my experience to be only my own, quite possibly my unique, even if only because it happened to me. I know though that everyone is different and if we try hard enough I believe we have the potential to all empathize at some level with other peoples experiences. I get the impression (though I may be wrong) that most of the time when I tell people that story though, for whatever reason one reason or another, they really don't fathom what it must be like for someone that didn't have an easy road to reading. Or they don't want to, consciously or more likely subconsciously. *A little ego here for good measure* In that case, if they understood or tried to understand, it would make them feel inferior in comparison if they didn't do as well as I have, or never have felt the passion about reading that I have for whatever reasons. Maybe. I know that may be stretching things a bit but I was thinking as typing this what could be a reason people would be so obtuse or uncaring about such a thing.
That was all I could think of logically anyways without meanness or uncaring. *shrugs* I don't see the bad in people as much as a lot of people. I just don't jump to judgments unless really founded in evidence or deep instinct, I can spot a sex offender at 50 paces (or more), in person at least.
I like chatting with you though, it's a good mind stretch, gets me thinking. Like everything in the body if you don't use it often, it can be hard to use it well or at all. The brain is included of course, and therefore the mind. ^_~
Re: Hardly possible but I really can't find anything I don't agree with you on, here at least.
Date: 2009-09-01 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-15 08:00 pm (UTC)SSR rocks. So does reading aloud to kids. The teacher I had for 3-5 grade read to us all the time-- both stuff that was "on our reading level" and some that was much more written for adults. Nothing will make you love books like having a good one read aloud to you.