The Null Hypothesis: Boring, but usually true?

As an English teacher, one of my main goals is for my students to become better readers. I've been doing this job for twenty years now, and I have read lots of books and articles about it, and I have tried to figure out how to help students become better readers, and it is truly surprising to me that there is not a clearer consensus about what works best. But there isn't consensus, and as far as I can tell that is because there is no really clear evidence showing that if you do X in your class or in your school, rather than Y, kids will be better at reading.

Like everyone, I have my opinions about what should work, and yet I have to acknowledge that there is the evidence is not very strong that my preferred approach is better than other people's preferred approaches. This uncertainty and lack of clear evidence in support of one approach is in a sense not that surprising, since it's true in a lot of other social science fields (for example, people argue about whether, if you want to win an election, you should spend your money on door-to-door canvassing or on TV ads), and it's easy to imagine reasons for this uncertainty. But at the same time, it is truly remarkable that even in the face of such uncertainty about the best way to proceed, people still, including me, get into highly charged debates about how schools should teach reading. And we all believe our approach is, not only the best, but also is supported by solid evidence.

Some approaches people wrongly claim there is clear unambiguous evidence for

I have seen arguments for each of these saying that there is clear evidence that it works better than current practice at improving reading comprehension:

       a) Lots of free voluntary reading (this is my preference, and scholars like Krashen and Allington have made the case, but the evidence is, I have to admit, not as strong as I would expect. Krashen's go-to stat is that in 51/54 studies, FVR does "as well as or better than" comparison programs; I'd like 54/54 to show it's better!)

       b) Explicit vocabulary instruction (this is often, as in the What Works Clearinghouse's advice on improving adolescent literacy, the very first recommendation, and yet to me the evidence seems weak that explicit vocabulary instruction is any better than just reading and learning words incidentally as you read. People often cite studies showing that if you teach kids key words from a passage beforehand, they will do better at reading the passage--but that seems obvious!)

       c)  Reading non-fiction (the Common Core made this a key feature of its standards, and prominent scholars like Tim Shanahan and Nell Duke have argued that evidence shows that being assigned more non-fiction will make you better at reading non-fiction. This sounds reasonable, but last I checked there was no evidence for it.)

       d) Instruction in reading strategies (Metacognition, using prior knowledge, making predictions, asking questions, identifying the main idea--teachers are told that explicit instruction in these "strategies" will help their students become better readers, but the evidence for this is pretty thin. Natalie Wexler has a lot of fun skewering reading strategy instruction in her book, The Knowledge Gap.)

       e)  Instruction in content knowledge (Natalie Wexler's sharply written book argues, I think correctly, that instruction in reading strategies is mostly useless and argues that what we need instead is to teach facts and content; unfortunately, the evidence for more instruction in content knowledge is not great either. Among other things, there are whole schools devoted to E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge approach, and as far as I can tell they do not get significantly better reading achievement outcomes.)

       f) Systematic phonics instruction, aka the "Science of Reading" (Many people claim that our early grade literacy instruction is outrageously ineffective, is dooming many students to failure, and is a leading social justice issue. And yet, here as in the other examples, including my own pet theory that children should be spend much more in-school time reading books, there is, to my knowledge, no really clear evidence yet of a school or district adopting this practice and obtaining dramatically different results from those of other schools or districts. I am still looking into this question, and there's a chance I'm missing something, but so far it looks a lot like it follows the same pattern as these other approaches.)

Pointing out that someone's evidence is thin is not a way to win friends

By now, I have a lot of experience, in blogs, in person, and on twitter, with asking for good evidence that a particular approach works. It usually follows the same pattern as my remarkable exchange with Tim Shanahan about non-fiction several years ago, or , more recently, of my Twitter exchanges with some education professors about vocabulary or with Natalie Wexler about content. 

Shanahan had written on his blog that kids should read more non-fiction. I said that I wanted to see evidence, and he said:

"Actually there is quite a bit of research showing that if you want students to be able to read expository text, you have to have them read (or write) expository text."

When I suggested that there wasn't great evidence, he responded, with admirable candor:

 "You are correct that there is no study showing that increasing the amount of the reading of informational text has had a clear positive unambiguous impact on reading achievement or student knowledge. "

I still don't get why he and Nell Duke were claiming that there was a lot of good evidence for reading non-fiction, when the only evidence I ever found was against it, but what he was doing is pretty common. People often make exaggerated claims about their preferred curriculum or instructional approach. This makes sense: there's a lot of upside to exaggerated claims about data and evidence, and extremely little downside, since editors and readers don't seem to push back very hard. In fact, I often get the feeling that I am considered rude for pointing out that the evidence is weak. After seeming to admit that I was right and he had been wrong to claim that there was good evidence to back up his claim, Tim Shanahan told me that I didn't understand how research worked or how causal claims were put forward. By that I now think he maybe meant that everyone knows that there's no "clear positive unambiguous evidence" for any particular approach to reading. I just think he's wrong--everyone definitely does not know this--and I am still trying to make sense of this fact myself.

Why don't any of these new approaches yield dramatically different results in the real world?

None of these different approaches seem to make much difference in students' reading abilities--but why not?! It seems to me that a school that builds a strong culture of reading, a school in which students read a lot during school, a school in which they talk about what they read, and read more than students in other schools--it seems to me that such a school should have dramatically better results than comparable schools. And yet the East Side Community School, a wonderful school (with a bad-ass principal) that truly values reading and seems to be doing everything I would want it to, including having its kids read an average of 40 books a year (?!), has test scores that are only somewhat above average. Its test scores are arguably evidence of huge success, given that it has a higher than average number of poor kids, but it isn't totally clear that it's the reading program, rather than the schoolwide culture of caring and engagement or the fact that parents had to apply and send in a letter of interest (which means that its student body is not randomly selected) that leads to the higher than average reading scores. Also, despite the school's apparently amazing culture, its students are still not achieving at the level of a place like Leafstrewn, the district with the most educated parents in the entire country. And the academic literature on what Stephen Krashen calls "Free Voluntary Reading" is pretty good (see his book), but it is not a slam-dunk. I think it's somewhat better than the evidence for the other later-grade approaches I listed above, but I wish it were better. If somebody wanted to argue that my preferred approach didn't have unambiguous empirical evidence, I'd have to agree, just as people like Tim Shanahan admit, when pressed, that their preferred approaches don't have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement." But... why? Why can't we show that any new approach is clearly better than the current practice? The answer, I think, is threefold.

1) Reading is the complex result of many factors

Some of the factors that go into reading skill include: genetic abilities of one kind or another (it seems reasonable to think that there might be some genetic component to a child's verbal aptitude, to their ability to sit and concentrate, to their auditory processing, to their working memory, etc.); the language environment in which a child grows up (conversations with caregivers in early childhood, number of books in the classroom and in the home, examples of literacy in the neighborhood and among peers, traumatic events, etc.); the specific instruction a child receives in grapheme/phoneme relationships; the amount of reading the child does on their own; and probably more.

2) Most of these factors are outside of the purview of school

Children spend far more time outside of school than in it, and even what they do during school hours is largely influenced by their lives outside the schoolhouse. A student's reading ability in 10th grade, or 8th grade, or even 3rd grade, is mostly the result of out-of-school factors. Many of these factors are in place before a student even reaches Kindergarten.

3) Most teachers are trying to do a good job, and the important stuff is pretty obvious

Most teachers are smart, caring people who love their students and want to help their students learn, and most stuff teachers do with kids is basically fine. These preferred strategies are obviously not bad. If you teach them vocab, that's probably good--they're thinking about words! If you teach them reading strategies, that's probably good--they're reading! If you teach them content knowledge, that's probably good--they're thinking about the content you're discussing! If you have them "just read", that's probably good--some of them will actually do it, and reading is very worthwhile! If you teach them phonics, that's probably good--it is true that the relationship between letters and sounds is fundamental! 

And even if you do the opposite, you are probably doing something that's worthwhile. If, instead of phonics, you use the much-reviled "whole language" approach,  you probably, unless you are really out of your mind, will spend at least some time on grapheme-phoneme relationships, since it is totally obvious that those matter. And even if, instead of doing, as I would suggest, a lot of in-class storytime and independent reading, you spend your class time discussing a book that kids are supposed to read at home (and many won't), those kids will still probably read a little bit in class and will still hear everyone else discussing the book in class.

It is obvious that reading is good. It is obvious that the grapheme-phoneme relationship is fundamental to reading. It is obvious that learning new words is good. It is obvious that learning about the world is good. So it is not surprising that most teachers, in their classrooms, do at least some stuff that is useful. That may not be a very high bar--"do at least some stuff that is useful"--but it is high enough, along with the out-of-school factors, to mean that it is really, really hard to show that one particular change will make a significant difference.

 What's the takeaway? Maybe we should be more modest and less certain of our rightness, and maybe we should be focusing more on what matters most?

For me, the fact that no particular change in practice can be shown to have "clear positive unambiguous impacts on student reading achievement" means not that we teachers shouldn't try to do a good job in our classrooms, nor that we shouldn't research and talk and write about the effects of different approaches to literacy, but that we should be more modest and understanding in our discourse. Over the last decade and a half, Bill Gates poured billions of dollars into education reform ideas that were founded, he thought, in solid "scientific" data, but all of which went absolutely nowhere. Gates money and influence has probably had a positive impact in other realms, like the fight against malaria (malaria has killed a large fraction of all humans ever to have lived, and yet between 2000 and 2015 deaths from malaria went down by 60%). Bill Gates should probably be focusing his efforts on public health, not education.

So maybe we too (and by "we" I mean "I") should be spending our time thinking and talking about other stuff--stuff like, for instance, climate change. Our planet is heating up, it's having major impacts on human life and well-being, and we should all be doing what we can to raise awareness of the problem and its potential solutions. I do hope to work on that more*, but I'm still an English teacher, so I will keep thinking about teaching and reading and writing; I will just try to do it, all the more, in a spirit of humility and good cheer. And I will keep reminding myself and others that a lot of what really matters is outside of the schoolhouse. 

*Personally, I have tried to help by advising the Environmental Action Club at my school, by adopting a mostly vegetarian diet and talking about why I did it, by riding my bike to work and telling everyone else how convenient it is and how great it makes me feel, by putting solar panels on my house and telling everyone I know to do the same, by planning a switch to solar-driven electric heat pumps for heating and cooling and telling others how great this will be, by supporting housing and zoning reform that would allow more people to live in great walkable neighborhoods like mine, and by giving money to Environmental causes and political candidates who support them. But none of this is enough, and I should probably be spending my time thinking and writing about climate change rather than literacy education.

Poverty and Educational Achievement: the importance of having enough

Everyone knows that, on average, poor kids do worse in school and on reading tests. Poverty is highly correlated with school success, and in fact despite the perennial search for unicorn schools that can magically bring poor kids up to the level of rich kids, I have never seen any evidence of a school that can bring a non-cherry-picked population of poor students to the level of achievement of many schools full of non-poor students. I've written about this here and here. Today I want to highlight a couple of studies that point to why poverty has such powerful effects. But first, I want to highlight a few common but misguided responses to the fact that poverty plays a huge role in educational achievement. 

The first response is to write off the difference as simply genetic, and therefore impossible to change. Beyond being probably just wrong, this response is not socially acceptable, so you don't see it said explicitly very often, but I do think it's an unspoken assumption that underlies some of our inaction.

Another response is to blame the individual students or their families. If they aren't rich, it's their fault, because they didn't follow Benjamin Franklin's precepts: work hard, be abstemious, and save money. Like the genetic response, this is a mostly unspoken excuse for inaction.

A third response is to blame teachers, or teachers' unions, or schools. This is absurd, since there is literally no school that actually manages to overcome poverty and educate non-cherry-picked students up to the level of low-poverty districts, but its absurdity doesn't prevent its being a favorite idea of education reformers everywhere. They get to cloak their elitism and greed in the guise of social justice.

A fourth response, which is in some ways the most interesting, is to suggest that what sets the rich kids apart is that they are given extra help and cultural "enrichment" by their families. I hear this one all the time from well-meaning colleagues. Rich kids get trips to Europe, and to museums, while poor kids go to the broken down playground down the street. Rich kids go to artsy summer camps in Maine, while poor kids go to the Y. Rich kids get tutoring, while poor kids sit in front of the TV. There may be something to this, but it makes it seem like the difference between poor kids and rich kids is that the rich kids get something extra, and I don't think that's true. 

It's not that rich kids are getting something extra, it's that poor kids aren't getting enough.

When I was a kid, my family did not go to Europe. I didn't attend expensive summer camps. My mom was on food stamps for a while. My parents worried about money. They ended up doing fine, but they were always incredibly frugal. I never had a tutor (though to be fair I did have highly educated parents who were around a lot). What I did have was about a million books, and lost of time to read them, and not many worries about my material comfort. I was pretty sure I was going to get enough to eat.

Two recent studies show the importance of getting enough:

1) Study 1: Kids read better when they're fed better

SNAP is the government program that gives low-income families a debit card with which they can buy food (people still refer to the program as "food stamps"). This is a great program, but it doesn't provide all that much money (less than $150 per person per month). The debit card is credited once a month, and families often find themselves running out of money as the month goes on.

In North Carolina, the money is credited to different families at different times, depending on the last couple of digits of the recipient's social security number. This allows for cool natural experiments like the one in the paper I read. A study by a Duke professor compares students' standardized test scores to when the students' families received their SNAP benefits. It turns out that scores are at their worst just before and just after the benefits are credited, and the scores are best about two to three weeks after the money arrives.

In the words of the study authors:

Student reading test scores appear to peak in the period from the 15th to 19th day post-SNAP receipt, and student math test scores appear to peak in the period from the 20th to 24th day post-SNAP receipt.

This interesting result suggests that nutrition matters to testing--and, by extension, very likely matters to learning as well. It doesn't matter a huge amount (something like 3% of a standard deviation), but it is easy to imagine a relatively small effect snowballing over time and creating a reverse Matthew effect, since if you fall behind by even 0.5% every year, by the time you're a senior in High School you will be behind by 6%, and it's likely that even at peak performance, kids whose families receive SNAP benefits will be less well-fed and more stressed in general.

2) Study 2: The stress of poverty takes up mental bandwidth

This study, by a few economists, two of whom wrote a book about this effect, is a bit further from education, but has larger effect sizes. These scholars did experiments designed to study how the stress of worrying about money affects cognitive performance. The results were more dramatic than I would have expected.

In one set of experiments, the authors asked shoppers at a mall in New Jersey to consider how they would handle a financial issue--for example, “Your car is having some trouble and requires $X to be fixed. You can pay in full, take a loan, or take a chance and forego the service at the moment... How would you go about making this decision?”)--and then, while they were considering the financial issue, to perform some basic cognitive tasks. If the financial issue was relatively easy (e.g. the car only required $150 to fix), then rich and poor people performed equally well on the cognitive tasks. If the issue was more difficult (e.g. the car required $1500 to fix), then rich people scored much, much better on the cognitive tasks, probably because the poor people were worrying about how they would come up with the $1500.

In another experiment discussed in the same paper, the authors gave cognitive tasks to small-holding sugarcane farmers in India before and after the harvest. This is a naturally randomized experiment, since different farmers harvest their sugarcane at very different times, over a several month period, according to when the sugarcane mills, which have a limited capacity, can process their cane.  The time before the harvest is not a time of poor nutrition, but it is a time of financial pressures (for instance, the farmers pawn items at a much higher rate). In this time of financial pressure, the farmers were much, much worse at cognitive tasks than they were during the relatively flush period after they harvested and sold their crop.

In these experiments, poor people who were thinking about money pressures performed far worse on cognitive tests than when they weren't thinking about money, and worse than people who had enough money that they didn't have to think about it.

Fortunately, these studies point to a relatively simple solution: reduce poverty!

It seems obvious to me that the solution to the poverty problem is not better education; rather, the solution to the education problem is less poverty. Just as we know, from studying public health, that the most important factors in a population's physical health and longevity are not the quality of the hospitals and doctors, so, in education, the most important factors in academic performance are not the quality of the schools and teachers. Just as my cousin wants to be an excellent doctor, so I want to be an excellent teacher. But as a society, we need to pay more attention to educational public health, and restructure our society so that, as in other rich countries, poor children are less poor. As a bonus, these policies would make us healthier, too!

The most exciting literacy scholarship being written today

For me, the most exciting literacy scholarship being written today is by a Rutgers professor named Chantal Francois.  Her work documents an amazing urban school that has devoted itself to creating a humane culture of reading, a culture in which reading is valued, in which books are everywhere, in which teachers know students' individual interests, in which the Principal leads by example, and in which students' reading skills increase dramatically.

Francois's most recent article, "Reading in the Crawl Space," has just come out in the Teachers College Record.  It is a vision of where we should be going, a vision of a school that offers everyone what Scout and Jem got at their reading father's knee, a vision of a school that would lead us all, not only to the Common Core's "college and career readiness," but to happier, healthier, more moral lives. Everyone who cares about education should read Francois's work.

Emails from a student

This spring, the excellent Leafstrewn student newspaper (let's call it "The Pequod") ran a column about reading.  The column was written by a former of student of mine.  My former student said, more or less, that he didn't like the books his Junior-year teacher (that is to say, I) had assigned him, and that if students weren't forced to read boring books like My Antonia or Their Eyes Were Watching God (a "real stinker"), and had a little more choice, they might read more.  His nut graf: "I don’t believe that nobody today reads, but I think the problem lies in what students are being forced to read rather than why they aren’t reading. It’s time to revamp English class so that students discover a passion for literature instead of just deciding books aren’t for them."

This student has a point, and I had been worrying much the same thing.  In fact, after a so-so experience with his very class, and after worrying a lot about how many students managed to avoid the assigned reading, I built more choice into my syllabus, and I gave the students a bit more time to read in class. Also, though I have always had very mixed feelings about motivational lectures and the like (my recent conviction that schools should create a "reading culture" is a flower that grows out of a complicated bog of ambivalence), I gave a brief, passionate lecture about how important reading was, and how lame it was not to do the reading, how especially lame it was to use Sparknotes or other cheatsites. These are good  books, I said; read them!

I wasn't sure how well this had gone over, but I was going on the wise advice of my department chair, who had told me that I had to pretend I believed in what I said.  So I pretended. I was happy, then, to get an email from a student at the end of the year that read, in part, "i really enjoyed your class this year. To be honest, i dont usually read my english class books but what you said in the beginning of the year resonated with me and i am proud to say i really did read all the books this year. I am glad i did too because some of them were really great. You are a really awesome teacher. Thanks for the wonderful year!"

I discounted the last bit for the obvious reasons (she probably wants me to write her rec next year, etc.), but I was pretty interested in her admission that she doesn't "usually" read her English class books.  I wrote back and asked if she wouldn't mind elaborating.  (I didn't tell her I was going to be putting her response up on a blog, but I excuse myself by imagining that no one will know who she is--she could be anyone, really!)

I didn't think she would write back with much more detail, but she did.  Here is (most of) her second email:

"Freshman year i pretty much didnt read a single book. I read about 20 pages of ------. Sophmore year I read the beginning half of most of the books we read. i usually just ask one of my friends that have read the book to give me a synopsis and then i improvise from there. i think that there are a lot of people who just copy off of others or use spark notes but i find that i can use clues in the question to guess the answer. sometimes im totally off but for the most part i usually at least get partial credit. Before high school, i could finish all my hw within 20 minutes so i used to read at least a book a day for pleasure.. i used to read literally allll the time. since hs my pleasure reading has been reduced to about a book a semester and over the summers, although this summer i was assigned more reading than usual since I'm taking ----- so i didnt even both bringing any of my pleasure reading books to ----."

There you go.  The problem in a paragraph.  This is a smart kid, too--she was recommended for an English department award--but her ability in English class is probably due far more to the "book a day" she used to read, back when she wasn't given much homework, than to the hours and hours of work and explicit instruction she has received in school.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Literacy

To Kill a Mockingbird has its problems.  An article last year about students who don't read the assigned texts was titled, "The 800-Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom".   It's too hard for many students, and many students don't read it.  I don't love the way it seems to solve the problem of racism by substituting classism, in which the elite White people of Maycomb are mainly good and enlightened, the country farmers are good at heart if not always fully enlightened, the obedient and/or crippled Black people are good, and the people who are bad include the powerful, uppity, separatist Black person (tall, strong Lula, who is a "troublemaker" with "fancy ideas and haughty ways") and the great villain of the novel, Bob Ewell, whose evilness is directly linked to his class status as poor white trash.  I also don't love the way the book glorifies the she-asked-for-it rape defense.

It's not my favorite book, and I wish I wasn't required to teach it, especially to my "Standard" level ninth grade classes.  Nevertheless, in the past couple of days I've found myself thinking a lot about what the book says about reading and school.  Like many of our culture's most beloved books, To Kill a Mockingbird gives a picture of reading and of school (and of explicit instruction in particular) that is as interesting as any broadside in the great education debates.

First, To Kill a Mockingbird shows us a group of young people with a deep culture of reading. When Dill first introduces himself to Jem and Scout, he states his identity in the following way: "I'm Charles Baker Harris.  I can read." Jem, Scout and Dill are left to their own devices most of the time, and many of their activities relate to the books they read.  They share adventure novels (Tarzan, Tom Swift and the like), they act out their plots, and when in the first chapter Dill wants to get Jem to run up and touch the spooky Radley house, he does it by offering to bet "The Gray Ghost against two Tom Swifts".

This culture of reading is independent of school.  As in a lot of other books (the autobiographies of Ben Franklin, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Henry James, etc., and novels like Tom Sawyer and Ramona and Beezus), we see children whose reading is deep and sustaining in the absence of explicit instruction.  What has happened is that these children have been inducted into the society of readers (what a wonderful passage in Crevecoeur calls an "extensive intellectual consanguinity"); once in that society, they have not needed much extra guidance.

How are they initiated?  Not through explicit instruction.  Mockingbird is bitterly satirical about school--mocking the idea that reading can be taught at all.  As Scout tells it, when on the first day of school her teacher, Miss Caroline, "discovered I was literate, she looked at me with more than faint distaste.  She told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore, it would interfere with my reading."

The joke here is many-layered.  First, Miss Caroline sees "reading" as something that should be entirely within the purview of school.  Second, she imagines that reading must be "taught."  Third, her notion, that teaching will interfere with reading, is true, but not in the way Miss Caroline imagines.  It isn't Atticus, but Miss Caroline herself whose teaching will interfere with Scout's reading.

For, as Scout sees it, Atticus has never "taught" her.  He is too tired in the evenings, she tells her teacher, to do anything but sit in the livingroom and read.  But Miss Caroline can't believe it.  "You tell your father not to teach you anymore.  It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind.  You tell him I'll take over from here and undo the damage."  When Scout tries to protest, Miss Caroline cuts her off: "Your father does not know how to teach.  You can have a seat now."

So, either Miss Caroline does not know how to teach, or else "teaching" itself is suspect.  The novel implies the latter, but it's not a simple picture.  For in fact Miss Caroline is not just an old-fashioned teacher with a ruler.  She is also a representative of a new way of teaching that Jem identifies as the "Dewey Decimal System."  This too is a multi-layered joke.  On the one hand, Jem is confusing John Dewey, the philosopher and education theorist, with Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a strict and systematic library classification system, and Miss Caroline's teaching seems somewhat strict and systematic.

On the other hand--and this is where the joke gets complicated, this is where the book raises a challenge to us as teachers--Miss Caroline is really, to some extent, a teacher in the progressive tradition of John Dewey, who believed that learning was largely social and that the teacher should be a member of the community rather than a purveyor of facts in the mold of Dickens's Mr. Gradgrind--and yet her  attempts to guide and model rather than command and instruct are always falling short.  Harper Lee has us laughing at Miss Caroline's reading of The Wind in The Willows, which no one in her class understands or cares about.   She is trying to lead the kids to reading, but she's failing.  Her failure is contrasted with Atticus's success: at the end of the section on school, Atticus reads to Jem and Scout about a flagpole sitter, the kids are rapt, and Jem heads out to the yard to try it himself.

Our challenge as teachers, like Miss Caroline's challenge, is to try to initiate our students into the culture of reading--to get them to join that extensive intellectual consanguinity. Why does Atticus succeed and Miss Caroline fail?  How can we do what Atticus does?  Can school even work that way?

End of Year Assessment

I end the year feeling relatively happy with what I accomplished in my "Honors" Junior classes.  There we have a more or less coherent curriculum ("American Literature"), and I know that most of my students can do things now (recognize and speak intelligently about the most famous works of American literature) that they couldn't before.  Some of my students fell in love with Henry James and Edith Wharton, reading Portrait of a Lady and The Age of Innocence on their own; others loved Vonnegut, Morrison, or Junot Diaz.  They all have a pretty good idea who Whitman, Dickinson and Wheatley are.  They can talk familiarly about modernism, post-modernism, and the Transcendentalists.  They've been to Walden Pond!

I feel much less happy--not to say completely dispirited--about my Ninth grade "Standard" classes.  In those classes I tried many things, and none of them worked very well.  I tried to split the class time between whole-class texts and independent reading.  For some kids, the independent reading was great.  Other kids did everything they could do to avoid actually reading.  The best I can say is that the in-class independent reading worked, like nothing else I've ever done, to reveal the real problems that are often, in a more conventional curriculum, hidden from view.  I now know that some students really, really, really struggle with and dislike reading--at least most books, at least so far.

With a conventional curriculum, it's easier to pretend that you are reading a little bit even if in fact you're not reading at all.  You can use Sparknotes, you can fake the reading homework, you can glean something from what the teacher or other students say, and often you can participate in class discussions and activities.  Failing any of those, you can always claim, or the teacher can imagine, that it is just the assigned book that is failing to fire your interest.  You are a reader, but not of this book--or so you claim.  With in-class independent reading, the non-reader is terrifyingly exposed.  Sitting there with his book is for him a form of torture--and what's worse, public torture.

If actually reading is important to improving literacy, and I can't see how it couldn't be important, then I have to figure out how to get these kids to read.  One thing I might try next year is starting the year with children's books, trying to have everybody in the class remembering--or (for those who struggled terribly in the very early grades, discovering--that reading is really fun.  In the first two weeks maybe we can move from Dr. Seuss to Jack and Annie to Matt Christopher to Roald Dahl to Harry Potter, and some students can stay at the level at which reading is actually fun and not feel bad about reading Matt Christopher instead of Dennis Lehane.

I really, really want my students to learn how enjoyable reading can be.  I asked my freshmen to write about a book they liked this year, and a number of them wrote some variation of: I usually don't like to read, but there's one book I truly loved.  Usually this book was either a Sonya Sones title or The Hunger Games, but I think it's really important to try to help them find more than one book or author that they love.  Some literacy researcher, I forget which, talks about "home run books," books that turn non-readers into readers; my experience this year says that one home run book is not enough. How can I get them to go beyond Sonya Sones?  I need more books, we need to spend a lot of time trying to find books that they like, and some of the kids are going to have to read easier books...

Over the summer I'll think all this through more, but for now I just want to note down four goals I have for next year:

1) I want my students to read more.  To that end I plan to buy a lot more books, including easier ones, take them to the library more regularly, and do more reading in class in a more structured way.  (I will also cut out the non-fiction independent reading unit that I tried this year and that largely failed--the kids did a good job of writing non-fiction, but because the books were just not appealing enough, most of them didn't read much of it.  David Coleman can come in as a long-term sub and do that unit if he wants to.)

2) I want my students to learn more vocabulary.  This year I had them learn vocabulary words drawn from the books we read as a class, and yet they made, as a class, less than a year's progress in their vocabulary level (I gave them a vocab assessment in September and in June).  Next year I am going to have them pay attention to words in the books they read on their own and make their own vocab tests from those words.  I also hope to be very intentional about using a lot of higher-order words in class myself.  Last week I used the word "behoove" a few times, and many of my weakest students loved it.  I'm skeptical about whole-class word lists, but I hope that modeling and encouraging word-love (and upping the reading volume) can make a difference

3) I want my students to do more close reading--in the form of mark-ups, socratic seminars and passage essays.  I need to find difficult, high-interest texts or excerpts.

4) I want my students' writing to be more polished.  They have to get tough with themselves about the mechanics of their writing.  Too many of them produce work that is embarrassingly sloppy, and they just keep on making the same mistakes over and over again.

I still think independent work and independent reading should be a big part of English class, and I want to do even more of it next year, but I now see even more clearly that you have to not only lead a student to books, but create a social system in the classroom that helps him pick out good ones and encourages him to read them.

How can we get kids to read more?

Many parents have asked me how they can get their children to read more, and I think that's the question we all should be asking.  Getting students to read is the most important academic work schools should be doing.  I'll talk about how to support reading below, but first a quick note on why we should be trying.

I saw a little table in a Richard Allington book (the data was from Anderson, Wilson and Fielding's excellent 1988 study) that showed how much time students spent reading outside of school:

Reading Volume of Fifth Grade Students at Different Levels of Achievement

Achievement                         Minutes of                                       Words per

Percentile                            Reading per day                                     year

90th                                           40.4                                             2, 357, 000

50th                                           12.9                                                601, 000

10th                                             1.6                                                  51, 000

This data fits with my sense that below-average students read very, very little outside of school--less than ten minutes a day--and something like an order of magnitude less than their high-achieving peers.  Of course cause and effect are intertwined here--the good readers read more partly because it's more fun for them--but it is easy to imagine that the lower-skilled students are not going to improve that much if they're only reading for a minute every day.

My own observations have convinced me that not much reading happens in school, but that for the reading that does happen, the same disparities exist; good readers are spending much, much more time reading in school than poor readers, and the gap just widens.

Imagine a kid who practices the piano for 40 minutes a day, and another who practices for 1.6 minutes a day.  No matter how high quality the instruction the two kids are offered, the kid who plays 1.6 minutes a day is not going to get much better.  And even if the instruction is not great, the kid who plays for 40 minutes will get better.

So, since reading is the most important academic skill, I believe the single most important thing schools should be doing is figuring out how to  get our weaker students to read more.  How?  I think there are two main things we should be doing: providing kids with books they will enjoy reading; and giving them uninterrupted quiet time to just sit and read.  These two things may seem obvious, but they are not easy, and my own school is not very good at either one.

First, we have to provide students with books.  This is much less simple than it sounds.  In providing books, as with so many other things, school offers a farcically stingy, shoddy, and burdensome imitation of what happens in upper-middle-class families.  Many parents bring their kids to the library, buy them books, suggest books they themselves liked, get recommendations from friends, and so on.

My daughter goes with her elementary-school class to the library every week.  Her mother or I take her to the library once a week or so as well.  She has been read to every night since she was an infant.  She sees her parents and brother reading every day. We don't have television or video games in our house.  There are hundreds of books--her own books--in her room.  When her brother turned twelve a few weeks ago, she got some little sister presents from her parents and grandparents, including at least nine new books, books that were chosen specifically to appeal to her individual tastes.

Even so, she didn't learn to read until she was seven.  She is now a great reader, loves reading, and reads every day, and but I wonder where she would be if she weren't growing up in such a text-rich household.  It is very important that our classrooms--even in high schools!--be places where books are plentiful and appealing.

For  it is not enough that we have books around; we need to make sure that the books are appropriately leveled and appealing, and we need to make individual recommendations.  Again, I think of my own children.  Last fall, my son was bored.  His computer time was up, and he didn't want to go out and play basketball.  I said, "Why don't you read something."

He said, "I don't have anything to read."

I said, "Hm."  We were in our living room, which has a wall like this (and an alcove with two more such walls):

My son's room, twenty feet away, has a wall like this:

And there are several more bookshelves upstairs. We have thousands of books in our house that my son has not read.  We even have hundreds of books at the right level.  And he loves to read.  When he said, "I don't have anything to read," he meant, "I don't have a book in my hands right now to read."

So I went over to our bookshelf and got down one of my own favorite books, about a guy who, with the help of resourceful villagers, survives in the winter in Norway while being chased by Nazis (We Die Alone, by David Howarth).  "Here," I said.  "Try this."

He read it in a day.

Lots of kids seem like reluctant readers, as my son was that afternoon.  But I think most kids would really love to read more, if they were only provided with the books and the time.  We just have to have the books available in the classroom--not only in the library (to which we often don't even bring our classes, and where the books are hardly the main focus).  And we have to have books that they CAN read (not Shakespeare, not To Kill a Mockingbird).  And we have to actually put the books into their hands.

I'm not sure I have ever actually handed a child one of Sonya Sones's books and not had the kid end up reading all of it.  We should be taking our students to the library once a month, at least, and handing them books to take out.  We should have large classroom libraries full of appealing and readable books.  We should have book swaps in our classes every month or so.  We should be distributing books left and right--often actually giving them away.  How much do we spend per child on the photocopying I do?  On air-conditioning?  On computers?  Too much!  We should use that money and give the kids vouchers to bookstores, vouchers that can only be spent by them on real books.  We should give the kids books at the end of the year, to read over the summer.

So do I do all these things?  Not yet, not fully.  Almost none of us high school teachers do.  Why not?  If kids don't read, they will not get better at reading.  But if kids are provided with books and with time, they will read.  And then maybe schools won't have to help kids cheat on their reading tests!

The Most Common Question Parents Ask Me

I chose "Leafstrewn" as a pseudonym for the town I teach in partly because the town is wealthy and has a lot of trees.  I was also thinking of the wonderful passage in The Scarlet Letter in which Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale meet on a "leafstrewn" forest track.  It only occurs to me now that this place is also strewn with a lot of leaves in the sense of pages from books.

This is a literate, text-heavy town.  It's got one of the most highly-educated populations in the United States, if not the universe.  It supports an excellent independent bookstore that destroyed a Barnes and Noble in head to head competition.  We love books and value reading.  And yet...

The most common question I get on Parents' Night is this: "How can I get my child to read more?"  The question comes in different forms ("Why doesn't Johnny read as much anymore?"; "Can you please make Janie read more?"), but most versions have the word "more," and all contain the word "read,"stressed and plaintively elongated.  "She doesn't reeeeeaaad anymore..." The plaintive tones of the question always remind me of the father in Willa Cather's novel who shows the narrator a book and  pleads, "entreatingly," with an earnestness the narrator says he will never forget, to "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Antonia!"

The parents I see at parents night may be unusual--we are in Leafstrewn, after all--but I don't think so. My non-readers come in all types, and they come from all different families.  I have had immigrant parents tell me in their heavily accented English that they despair over how little their children are reading.  I have had upper-middle-class lawyers and professors ask how they can help their children read more--which books will "work"?  I have had blue-collar parents ask me exactly the same thing.

These non-readers come in all types, and there are many reasons for their non-reading.  I have had some of my best, most literary students tell me that they hardly ever read for pleasure over the school year, because they just have too much work.  I have students who seem unable to sit still, because their bodies are going haywire for some reason.  I have students whose IEPs and psychological testing describe cognitive impairments that make for extraordinarily slow processing speeds.  I have students who tell me that they haven't read a book--any book--since sixth grade.  All of these children have trouble reading--and nearly all of their parents wish they would read more.

The parents' question --How can I get my child to read more?-- points to their sense of what's important. They sometimes ask about writing, though not nearly as much as reading, but they almost never ask me about skills, about strategies, about vocabulary.  Instead, what they want is for the kids to do what maybe they used to do until puberty came along, or what maybe they never did, or what they have always done but could do better--that is, read.

In this desire to just, at least, have their children read, these parents are different from the National Reading Panel of 2000, and from the federal government's "What Works" Clearinghouse, which pretends to report on proven educational strategies .  The "What Works" report on adolescent literacy, written by a panel of experts from Stanford and other universities and school systems, goes on for dozens of pages about "explicit instruction" in this and that, but it never once goes to the heart of the matter and says that students should be reading more than they are currently doing.

I believe these parents are right.  Reading is the most important academic skill, and in order for students to get better at reading, the most important thing is that they actually read, and that they read texts that they can read and will read.  I suspect that many of our weakest readers essentially never read, and that attempts to improve literacy are very likely to fail because they will do almost everything except ensure that the students are actually reading. 

Over the next few weeks, I'll post some thoughts about why reading is the most important activity for students to spend time doing, how much our students actually do read, how we could get them to read more, and what we can do with the kids who manage to avoid reading altogether.  These are key questions that I think all English teachers should be asking.  Schools have kids 6 hours a day, 180 days a year.  If kids aren't reading, it's largely our fault.  As Dick Allington says:

“We have typically organized schools such that struggling readers spend large parts of their days in environments where there are few texts they can actually read.  We even create instructional environments, including interventions, that offer very limited opportunities to read.”

How can we make sure that our students are reading more?  How can we help students find books that they will actually read?  How can we make sure students have time to read?  How can we restructure school time so that it ensures actual reading?

David Coleman and Reading

This week the College Board named its new President: David Coleman, who is best known for being the architect and the public face of the Common Core Standards.

The choice of Coleman makes sense, since the SATs and AP tests, like the Common Core Standards, are basically measuring two things, aside from innate ability: 1) the cultural capital students have gotten from their parents; 2) the amount of reading students have done.  The announcement made me look closer at Coleman and his standards, and I was disturbed, if not surprised, by what I saw.

I glanced at the Common Core Standards themselves, and found them to be the usual bland description of what students should be able to do (read increasingly complex texts, understand them, and write interpretively about them), with slight variations according to grade level.  I wasn't making much headway with the Standards themselves.  So I did what my students do: I went to the video.

To see what Coleman himself was like, and how he sees the standards as differing from current practice, I watched a video of one of his talks.  Given many millions of dollars by Bill Gates to promote and publicize the common core standards (which Gates paid to have written in the first place), Coleman has been traveling the country giving presentations, teaching sample lessons, and making films of many of his appearances. The 2 hour presentation I watched was the one Coleman made to the NY State Department of Education in April of 2011.

That speech is notorious among Common Core foes for a line Coleman tossed off as part of his argument against having students do personal writing in the older grades.  According to Coleman, "As you grow up in this world you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think."  Coleman went on to explain that in the business world no one was going to say, "Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood."

That Coleman could say this to a group of educators is shocking, and it deserved all the opprobrium it got.  Our children's liberal arts education should not be defined and limited by what might be required of them in some future career in corporate marketing.

For the purposes of this blog and post I want to concentrate on another aspect of his speech: how Coleman's proposals would affect students' reading.   What I was really worried about, as usual, was reading volume, so I was interested in Coleman's response to audience members who raised exactly that issue.  One of the first questions was about how to, in the questioner's words, "allow the kids at their own levels to be able to grow as learners and readers."  Coleman's response was disturbing:  first he acknowledged that of course students should be doing a lot of independent recreational reading (though he didn't acknowledge that his own standards say nothing about this practice or how to encourage it); then he uttered the following words:

"I must tell you an alarming thing for those who overly bank on that independent recreational reading. We talked to the leading provider of such tools for children. Do you know what grade level student choice of text levels out at? Overwhelmingly, 90% of the selections stop at this level--5th grade. So while we must encourage that work, we must not overly rely on it..."

This is circular reasoning at its most simplistic and blind: kids choose low-level books to read, so reading books they choose will not help them get better at reading.  What Coleman ignores is the possibility that kids are essentially unable to read books above that level.  (Also striking is that nauseating phrase: "the leading provider of such tools for children."  What "tools" is he talking about?  Those things that most of us call "books"?  And could a "provider of such tools for children" be that entity that most of us would call a "children's book publisher"?  I am not sure which would be worse, that Coleman refers to Scholastic, Inc. in such a way, or that Coleman is referring to some other "tools" that some corporation has developed for use in "independent recreational reading."  Either way, I am sure that anyone who is capable of saying, "the leading provider of such tools for children," should not be in charge of directing our country's literacy education.)

Coleman is the kind of guy who talks tough about where we "must" get to, but has no idea how to get there, the kind of guy who fifty years ago would have been cheerleading us into war in Vietnam. Coleman, who has never been a teacher himself, is a classic armchair warrior, like the chicken hawks in the Bush administration; he has never been on the front lines himself, but wants to tell the rest of us where we are supposed to go.

I also want to look at the standards themselves: what do they mean for teaching English in America?

According to Coleman himself, the common core standards make six important shifts away from current practice.  Since my basic position is that the most important thing for kids' academic success is for them to read more, I think it's useful to evaluate any ELA program or proposal in terms of what effect it would likely have on reading volume.  I'd like to consider each of the Common Core's "shifts" in the light of my own preoccupation with how much kids are reading. 

1) The Common Core Standards would reduce the amount of fiction that students read and increase the amount of "informational text."  This is supposed to increase kids' knowledge about the world, thereby increasing their ability to learn other stuff and their ability to read more complex texts.  The problem with this shift is that most students don't, won't, and often can't read the kinds of more complex "informational text" that Coleman wishes they would.  My seven-year-old daughter loves so many books, and none of them are non-fiction.  She is and will be a great reader, no thanks to David Coleman.

2) The second shift Coleman highlights is the increased emphasis on literacy in the non-ELA subjects: essentially, Reading Across the Curriculum.  Here he seems again to have little idea of how to get there; he just thinks kids should be able to read a complex science textbook.  Great; I think so too.  But I don't think you get there by just wishing for it.

3) The Common Core Standards call for schools to use more complex texts.  Based on my experience with Leafstrewn students, this is just more wishful thinking, and will decrease the amount of text that students are actually reading.  Many of our students can't handle the complexity of the textbooks we are giving them now, and giving them more complexity is going to make it even less likely that they will actually read the texts.  Coleman attributes the need for remediation in college to the low-level texts used in high school, while it seems to me that the remediation is needed for the same reason the low-level texts are needed--because students aren't very good readers.  Poor readers will get better by reading more, and giving poor readers difficult textbooks is hardly going to get them to read more.

4) The Common Core Standards call for more text-dependent questions.  This is perhaps the only shift that I actually agree with.  Yes, we should be making our kids pay close attention to the text.  Okay!

5) The fifth shift is away from personal writing and toward writing that focuses on making an argument with evidence.  This strikes me as something that has already happened at Leafstrewn, and I am very skeptical that we need even as much of it as we already have.  I increasingly want to go back to the era I grew up in, when people were championing things like "writing as discovery".  In any case, I am against any curriculum shift that is defended by saying that in ten years our students will be called upon to write market analyses, and I think our students give a shit how they feel, so their teachers should care, too.

6) The sixth shift the Coleman says the Common Core Standards make is toward more explicit vocabulary instruction.  I have spent some time trying to discern the value of explicit vocabulary instruction, and I'm going to devote a long post to it one of these weeks, but I am sure that spending a lot of class time on vocabulary will do nothing to increase the volume of our students' actual reading.  If anything, explicit vocabulary instruction takes time in class when kids could be reading.

This is a longer post than I had intended.  The long and short of it is: thumbs down to Coleman and the Common Core.  For Leafstrewn, probably nothing will change, but for the country as a whole, this man's ascendance is just another depressing aspect of the corporatization of public education.

Is Explicit Instruction Valuable? (or: What Is English Class Even For?)

Last week I wrote that some our students perceive reading to be a negligible distraction from the real "work" of English class.  This week I meant to write about how our weakest, most vulnerable students, those who most need to improve their literacy skills, may manage to get through the schoolyear without reading even a single book.  But just now that seems too depressing and repetitive; so I'll save that interesting topic for another week.  Instead, I want to tell a story about one of the best readers and writers I've ever taught.

A few years ago, one of my best students was a a senior I'll call Sarah.  Sarah had never before gone to school; her mother had homeschooled her from the very beginning.  When her mother died of cancer, her father enrolled Sarah and her younger brother in Leafstrewn High.  Sarah was a remarkable student and an excellent writer.  For her senior project, she read Anna Karenina and War and Peace, and she wrote a wonderful paper about Tolstoy's prose style.  For me, Sarah's success called into question the value of much of our English curriculum, and highlighted the significant differences between English and, say, math.

I was interested in homeschooling (my wife and I were eventually to homeschool our son for a year), and I asked Sarah about what her homeschooling had been like.  She said the biggest difference was how amazingly inefficient regular school was.  There was SO much class time, and so little of the class time felt useful to any individual person.  At home, she had been able to go at her own pace, and because she could accomplish in a few hours what took all day at school, there was a lot of time to sit around drinking tea and reading books.

When I asked her more specifically about her "curriculum", I was interested to learn that what she had done in the way of English was mainly just that: sitting around drinking tea and reading books.  There was very little writing of papers, and, as she told it, virtually no "explicit instruction" in reading skills and strategies, in vocabulary, or in paragraphing, structuring an argument, creating a thesis or handling textual evidence.  Her mother would read the books with her, and they would talk about them, and every once in a while her mother would have them write something about the books, but there was, again, little to no formal instruction.

This is interesting to me, seeming to call into question many of my daily practices.  That Sarah could be one of my two best students that year, that she could mark up a text, make intelligent inferences, create a thesis, structure an argument, and use sophisticated vocabulary, all without ever having been explicitly taught these things, makes me wonder whether my own English classes are using their time as effectively as they could, and makes me wonder, in particular, whether explicit instruction in English is valuable at all.  Sometimes I even wonder if, with our higher-skilled students especially, we English teachers are making more withdrawals than deposits from our students' cultural capital.  Most of my honors-level students say they read more over the summer than during the year.

Another thing Sarah's story points up is the difference between English and other disciplines. Sarah's experience in math and science was distinctly different from her experience in English class.  In math and science, she was in the top classes, but she was not one of the best students in the school.  Also, her homeschooling experience in math and science had been different.  It's hard to imagine what  would be analogous, for math, to just, for English, sitting around drinking tea and reading books. She certainly had not just sat around drinking tea and reading math textbooks, or drinking tea and counting things, or drinking tea and playing with a calculator.

Math and Science are distinctly different from English.  I daresay math cannot be learned without explicit instruction, while in English, as Sarah's success showed, explicit instruction can be unnecessary.  This is perhaps why, at Leafstrewn High as at other schools, the English curriculum is far less clearly structured, far less clearly sequential from one year to the next, and in some ways perhaps less necessary.  My own elementary school kids are being taught many of the same skills that I am trying to teach my high school students.  The common core standards in English are often pretty similar from one year to the next.  If a student misses a year of English, she can move right into the next year without much trouble.

What particular elements of our English curriculum, cannot potentially be learned from pleasure reading alone, or from reading, friendly discussion, and a modicum of writing?  What needs to be taught, or at least consciously learned?  I can think of at least four things, none of which make up the bulk of my instructional time:

1. Grammar (Sarah might have had no idea what a preposition was.  On the other hand, as Wittgenstein wrote somewhere: --Do they understand the game?  --Well, they play it.)
2. The historical progression of, say, American Literature
3. Schools of critical thought
4. Literary and poetic terms

But these parts of our curriculum are not what we spend most of our time on.  Instead, we spend time teaching students vocabulary, or teaching them to "weave in" quotations or sandwich them in buns of introduction and explanation.  We teach arguable theses, topic sentences, logical arguments.  And almost all of it is regarding books that we, not the students, have chosen.

Much of what we do is useful, and certainly much better than having the kids watch TV or hang out on the street.  But I wonder whether, as MisterFischer suggested last week, we might get just as much if not more mileage out of just having fun with reading and writing--giving them time to read, letting them read what they want, and having them write what interests them, not us.

Some might say that the picture I've offered of Sarah's homeschooling leaves out certain key elements--most importantly, other people, whether her mother or her fellow homeschoolers, with whom she may have had some interaction.  But my point is that Sarah spent most of her time reading, and the rest of the time discussing (with perhaps a very little bit of writing), and virtually no time on what we all spend explicit instruction on nearly every day.  It wasn't just Sarah; my son was in a homeschooling reading group, and all they did was read the book aloud together--actually, the teacher, a mom, read it to them--and then, for about ten percent of the time, discuss it.  His reading grew more that year than other years, just as it has always developed more over the summers than over the schoolyear.

What do we gain from teaching the way we do?  Would our students develop just as quickly, if not more so, if we just read, discussed, and wrote?  Is explicit instruction valuable?  What do you think?

"This is the work; that was just reading"

I'm a high school English teacher in a town I'll call Leafstrewn.  For a while now I've been considering keeping a blog, as a way to clarify some of my own thinking about reading and school. Today I had an interaction with a student at my school that provided a neat little introduction to what I'm worried about, so I decided to start blogging today, and not next week. Here's the story:

Once a week I help out in our school's "Tutorial" program, which offers in-school academic support for students who need it.  I sat down to help a student with his English homework.  His class was reading a novel; this assignment was to read a chapter and then to write a journal entry about a particular aspect of the chapter.

"So," I said to the kid, "did you actually read the chapter?"

“Well," the kid said, with a wry smile, "that’s a completely different issue." 

"What do you mean?" I said.

"This is the work," he said, pointing to the journal. "That was just reading.”

Struck by his words, I asked if I could write them down.  "This is the work. That was just reading."  To this student, reading is not seen as legitimate homework, not seen as homework that has to be done.  No doubt the teacher doesn't see it this way, but the student is far from alone.  Many, many other students seem to feel the same way.

I've been working in this tutorial, which has ten students, all year; only a few times have I seen a student actually reading, and that was almost always because I, the reading specialist, was in the room.  The students in this tutorial seem to like me, but they have not been eager to read with me, and I think it's because they see the reading as a waste of their time.  They must produce the journal entry, or the answers to the reading questions, because those they have to hand in, but in order to produce those you certainly do not need to read the chapter itself.  Or kids are learning to produce pieces of paper, but I'm not sure they're learning to read better.

This fact that many students are not actually reading the assigned reading, or not doing any reading at all, has come to seem more and more like the most important challenge we English teachers face.  If my students don't do the reading, much of my work is simply farcical.  I'm pretending to teach kids who are pretending to learn, but in fact we only meet on a plane of pretense and illusion.  And even more important, perhaps, than whether our classes are absurdist farces is the fact that if our most needy students are not reading at all--and I think that for ten to twenty percent of our students this is more or less the case--then they are probably not going to get much better at reading or writing.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I know we need to find one.  Increasingly we are asking our students to journal, or answer questions; last year William Broz published an article in English Journal about the problem in which he suggested that journaling was the answer.  I myself, despite my reservations, have been asking my students to comment on a class blog.  The problem is that then the blog comment or the journaling becomes "the work", and the reading is, well, "just reading."

To finish my story: I asked the student to explain, and I reached over to my computer to write down what he said.

“As long as you can find a few words that are related to your assignment," he said, enjoying the attention, "then it’s all good, especially if its interpretive, cause then you can interpret it in any way you want.  You can make it about cheeseburgers, and the teacher can tell you you’re wrong."  It took me another few seconds to finish typing, and when I reached the end he said,  "Now put a smiley face.”  So I did.

:)

My anecdote should really end there, with the cheery emoticon (ironicon?) but I feel I should add that despite the kid's cheeriness about his M.O., I did suggest that the reading was the work, too (feeling, with the "too," like both Gatsby and Daisy at once), and that reading was worth his while. 

I'm not sure I convinced him.