The best book I've read this year

The best two books I've read in the past several months were both historical fiction: first The Radetsky March, Joseph Roth's amazingly astringent 1932 novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, recommended to me by a friend who's spending the year in Vienna; and now The Lions of Little Rock, a 2013 YA novel by Kristin Levine, recommended by my 10-year-old daughter.

My daughter had been trying to get me to read this book for weeks. Yesterday's snow day gave me a chance to start it--and once I started, I couldn't stop. The Lions of Little Rock, about the school integration struggle in Little Rock in the late 1950s, is maybe even better than the Roth. I was floored by its apparently effortless depth and wisdom. It's about a 7th grader, and it's packaged like a book for tweens, but everyone should read it.  It's a more gripping book than Warriors Don't Cry, and it's both better and less morally questionable than To Kill a Mockingbird. If my ninth grade students could get over their reluctance to read books aimed at younger children, I think they'd love it.

Again I am amazed at the quality of the YA books produced in our time. We are living in a golden age of children's literature, and we should thank our lucky stars.

The new Common Sense Media report on reading

(I have been taking a year off from blogging while I think things through on (maybe) a deeper level, but I wanted to record a quick take on a new paper on reading that's been in the news.)

A new report by Common Sense Media reviewing the data on how much kids read has been getting some press recently. In the Times, Frank Bruni used it as the jumping off point for a column celebrating reading. My department chair sent us a link to the report, and asked what we thought. Here are my quick thoughts.

The standard takeaway from the report seems to be that kids are reading less now than they were 20 years ago. My department chair used the phrase "hell in a handbasket," and Bruni calls the change "marked and depressing." I'm not sure it's as bad as all that. But if the data the report discusses is somewhat open to interpretation, it does seem clear that our society can do better at helping our schoolchildren read. Because reading seems clearly to be the most important academic skill, this matters a lot.

The report's first two "key findings" are what have gotten the most attention, and they also seem most important to me. The report's other key findings are either of less general interest (gender gaps, racial/ethnic gaps, impact of e-readers, etc.) or kind of obvious (kids whose parents read aloud to them and have books in the house are better readers). The first two key findings are:

1) all kids, but especially older kids, are reading less for fun than they used to;

2) while reading comprehension scores for elementary-age kids are higher than they used to be, reading comprehension scores for older kids have not improved.

What's interesting about these two findings, if they're accurate, is that there are two apparent contradictions: kids in the younger grades are better at reading than they used to be, but kids in the older grades are not; and the reduction in pleasure reading is not translating to a decrease in reading scores.

Two possible (but I think unlikely) interpretations:

One way to interpret these findings is to think that reading for pleasure doesn't matter much. That's possible, but unlikely, given the high correlation between pleasure reading and reading scores.

Another possibility is that the findings are not accurate, that older kids are reading just about as much as they used to, but that some of their reading is not showing up in the data. As far as I can tell, there is some possibility that some of what teenagers are doing on their screens is not being counted as reading, even though it is practically the same as stuff that in the past, when it wasn't done via a screen, used to be counted as reading. A lot of what my son does on his iPod touch is reading about professional tennis and rock climbing. When I was his age, I spent hours every week reading bicycling magazines. Reading an online article or blog post and reading an article in a print magazine are basically the same activity, but I looked like I was reading, and he looks like he's on facebook.

My take:

While these studies may not be catching all the reading that's really happening, I think they're probably mostly accurate. Older kids probably are reading less. Some of this may be due to the improvement of competing non-reading activities like youtube, instagram and facebook (technologies that can be seen as improved versions of the telephone and the television). But this wouldn't explain why younger kids are getting higher reading scores now, so I think there is something else going on, too.

What I think has happened is that we have put a lot of energy into trying to teach, through direct instruction, the "skills" and "strategies" of reading. There has been a huge push, at all levels, to turn reading instruction into a mechanical process that can be broken down and implemented piece by piece. What there has not been is a huge push to encourage reading as a pleasurable and valuable activity that people might want to engage in on their own, either for entertainment or (like my son's reading about tennis and rock climbing) for information about the world.

The increase in direct instruction in skills and strategies may have boosted reading scores on the NAEP in the elementary school years, but they have not made 17 year olds better readers. We seem to be having short term success, but the short term success is not translating into long term success.  This is a pattern that I noticed last year in data about the reading scores of students in Waldorf schools. Waldorf education doesn't teach reading at all until kids are 7 or 8. As you might expect, Waldorf students score poorly on reading tests in early elementary school. By eighth grade, however, they have caught up. By the end of high school, they may be pulling ahead.

It also strikes me that the direct instruction that may produce higher scores in elementary school could be having a counterproductive effect in the long term. It's very possible that the way reading is now taught discourages reading for pleasure.

So if it were up to me, I would try to spend more energy on encouraging pleasure reading, especially at the high school level, when pleasure reading drops off precipitously.

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The report: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/file/csm-childrenteensandreading-2014pdf-0/download

The Times column: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/opinion/bruni-read-kids-read.html

Summer Reading Redux

I've been so busy that I haven't followed up on some stuff I posted about a long time ago and meant to come back to.  Here's a quick follow-up on one thing.

A few months ago I wrote about being on a summer reading committee, and about my cousin's seder-table diatribe against summer reading programs in which everyone reads the same book.  After that post, a few emails, and a discussion in our department meeting, I somehow ended up on a committee of two--me and a wise librarian--charged with creating a summer reading program based on (mirabile dictu) student choice.

So we made up a suggested reading list and wrote up a simple plan for students to recommend books to one other in English class this spring, read books of their own choosing over the summer (they must read at least three books) and then report back on their reading in the fall.  I'm a little worried that some of my colleagues will be pressed for time and won't bother to do the activity; I'm a little concerned that we haven't tried to provide kids with books; and I wish we had had more time to make sure everyone was on board--but at least in principle we now, at least for this year, have a summer reading program that is entirely based on students' choosing their own books.

Hooray!

Getting kids to read complex texts: challenge, not difficulty; engagement before challenge

I've been thinking about complex texts recently, not only because there's been a lot of talk about the Common Core's call for increasing text complexity, but also because my ninth grade classes are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and my Juniors are reading Song of Solomon. Both texts are pretty complex, and too difficult for some of my students (most, in the case of my ninth graders) to read comfortably.  I've been dealing with the problem by doing a lot of reading aloud--which has been great--but I've also been mulling over a kind of reverse Jane Fonda principle: Less pain, more gain.

Engagement, not difficulty
Learning should be challenging and interesting, and our students should be engaged, but we should not be giving them reading that is difficult for them.  Here's a rule of thumb: the more difficult the task, the more engagement is required.  The first thing we teachers should be thinking about, then, is engagement and interest--not difficulty.  The more students are engaged, the more they will be able to tackle difficult tasks.  This principle--of putting engagement before difficulty--is very important when you're thinking about reading.

The heart of the Common Core ELA standards is the requirement that students be able to read complex (i.e. difficult) texts independently.  This is a wonderful goal, but school tends to go about it in the wrong way. If we want kids to read texts of increasing complexity, it is important that they (1) be able to read them, and (2) be interested in what they are reading--and if a text is so difficult that the student finds it painful, it is very important that they not try to persevere with that text.  Too often, students get the worst of both worlds: they are not very interested in what they are told to read, and the reading is too hard.

The first thing we need to do is get kids reading a lot
Less skilled readers do not need "challenging" texts.  Less skilled readers do not need to be pushed, as so much discussion around the Common Core implies, to read more complex and difficult texts.  What they need is what all kids need: to read a lot of books they are interested in, books they can read, over many, many years.

The way readers become able to read complex text is by reading a lot of text that is not difficult for them.  My son is a very good reader, and he reads quite a lot, but he has never forced himself--or been forced by anyone else--to read books that were difficult for him.  He is lucky, but he is like most of our highly skilled readers.  Most highly skilled readers grew up hearing lots of adult talk, were provided with lots of high-interest books from an early age, and were not forced to read books that were too difficult for them.  In school, kids like my son never encounter text that is painfully difficult.  His Science textbook may be kind of boring to him, but for him, unlike many other students in his class, it is not too difficult.  When he gets to ninth grade, he may be somewhat bored when he is asked to reread books he's already read (To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, etc.), but those books will not be for him, as they are for so many others, too difficult for him to read comfortably.  Good readers get better not only because they choose to read more in their spare time, but because the assigned reading they receive is at their level.  Forcing kids to read difficult text will not work.

Books that are hard may be manageable if kids are really interested
Good readers often try books that are diificult for them.  If the books are too hard, they drop them.  That's what I do, that's what you do--and it's what my son does.  My son has, for a long time, been really interested in books about Black athletes; when he was nine or so he started reading the new biography of Willie Mays, a book written for adults.  It was tough, but he kept at it, off and on, for nearly a year, and finally he finished it.  No one forced him, but he did it.

In the same way, one of my ninth-grade students has spent the last month very slowly getting through the first two hundred pages of Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher, a painful memoir about anorexia and bulimia.  My student usually races through books she's interested in, but this one is moving very slowly.  That's okay; she's enjoying it, and she's very proud of being able to read it.

But if the kids want to drop them, or aren't reading them steadily, they should drop them
Again, isn't this what we all do?  Sure, sometimes it's good to push yourself, but you need to want to push yourself.  If you don't want to, you'll do what I did when I was assigned Proust in a college French literature class: you won't read it.  That' wasn't terrible (I read Remembrance of Things Past in English, and I loved it), but I certainly would have gotten better at reading French literature if instead of being assigned Proust, I had been allowed to read easier books.

Over the past several months, my son has tried lots of books that sounded really interesting to him but that ended up being too hard for him to read comfortably.  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Guns Germs and Steel, and David Remnick's book about Muhammad Ali, King of the World, are a few examples. He loves history, and he's been very interested in the lives of Black athletes, but these books were just too hard.  He could read them, but only with difficulty, and he felt he wasn't getting enough out of them to continue, so he dropped them.  That's okay; he'll read them some other time, and, more importantly, dropping Jared Diamond allows him to read Walter Dean Myers.

Challenge, not difficulty
In a sense, difficulty is always bad.  We learn best when we are in the zone, in the flow, whatever you want to call it.  You can't experience flow when something is difficult. Challenging, yes, interesting, yes, complex, sure--but not difficult.

[In my next post I'm going to look at some of the curriculum that's being developed for the Common Core Standards, to see how that curriculum looks in terms of text complexity, likely student engagement, and reading volume.  Stay tuned.]

Jane Austen's theory of education

I've been reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my son, and last night I was happy to find that Austen's theory of education is similar to my own.  In chapter 29 she presents her thinking in the form of a dialogue between Lady Catherine de Bourgh, one of Austen's great monsters, and the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who is always right except about men.

Here is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, prefiguring Dickens's Gradgrind: "Nothing is to be done in education without steady and regular instruction, and nobody but a governess can give it."

And here is Lizzy Bennet defending, in the great tradition of Franklin, Douglass, Malcolm X and Stephen Krashen, her reading-based education: "We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary."

Novelists are biased, no doubt, but it is striking how often they portray education as coming entirely out of independent reading.  The only counterexample I can think of offhand is something John Updike said once--something like, "I read what I was assigned and thought myself the better for it."  But Updike was probably being contrarian.

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Update on Updike: I was wrong; I just looked it up (the internet is amazing), and even in the passage I was thinking of, Updike, too, makes the case for self-selected reading in childhood and adolescence.  Updike was a very erudite guy, and did extremely well academically (top of his class in English at Harvard, for whatever that's worth), but his preparation seems to have been largely pleasure reading:

"I read books of humor by Thurber and Benchley and Wodehouse and Frank Sullivan and E. B. White, and mystery novels by Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh.  This diet pretty well took me up to Harvard, where I read what they told me, and was much the better for it."
     -- John Updike, Self Consiousness, page 109

Summer Reading Blues

A committee of teachers
I'm on a committee charged with rethinking the summer reading program at Leafstrewn.  Over the past several years there has been a whole-school summer reading book.  The title changes very year: Fahrenheit 451; Farewell, My Subaru; First Crossings; etc.  This afternoon our committee talked about changing things around--perhaps by having a book for every grade, so that maybe every year Freshmen would have to read Fahrenheit 451, but maybe Juniors would have to read Dreams From My Father--or whatever; we didn't talk about specific titles.  I advocated, predictably, for a free-choice program that would require reading at least one book but would encourage reading many more, a program in which the choice would be a central part of the conversation--but I didn't think what we ended up with was so terrible.  The department chair sent out notes about the meeting, which included the following bullet point:

•    We agreed that the goals of summer reading are  1) to promote the enjoyment of reading and 2) to give students practice in choosing books they enjoy reading.

Pleased to see these admirable goals, I went happily off to a seder.

A student's perspective
At the seder table, my cousin, a recent graduate of Leafstrewn and now an English major at a fine college, was sitting--or should I say, reclining--next to me. When I mentioned in passing that I'd been at a meeting about summer reading--I didn't say anything about what had been said--my cousin said, Oh, summer reading!  I said, Yeah--what did you think about the summer reading program?  He said, I can describe it in one word: CRUEL.  I said, Really?!  He said, Well, I don't resent it that much anymore, but if you'd asked me six years ago I would have gone on a rant.  I said, I'm surprised; I didn't think it was so terrible.  He said, Being forced to waste your time reading a terrible book OVER THE SUMMER?  The books were awful, we were forced to read them, and then we didn't even do anything intetresting with them in the fall.  It was infuriating.  My friends and I all hated it.




What now?
First, we might consider surveying students to see what they think.  Second, if our goals are really to promote the enjoyment of reading and to give students practice in choosing their own books to read, then having a single assigned book (whether for the whole school or by grade) is almost certainly not the best way to accomplish them, and is possibly even counterproductive.



An admission
Although I have been a compulsive reader since the age of 5, when I was assigned a book to read over the summer before my freshman year of college (it was "The Machine in the Garden," by Leo Marx), I didn't read it.  And I am not alone.  Many people--even many teachers at Leafstrewn--just don't like assigned reading.  Designing a summer reading program that actually encourages reading may require some unnatural teaching.

Thousands of little countries that don't read

There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today about reading in Mexico ("The Country that Stopped Reading").  Its author, David Toscana, an eminent Mexican novelist, argues that his native country, which took next-to-last place in a Unesco survey of reading habits, ought to encourage a love of reading by providing students with enjoyable and compelling texts and giving them time to read in school:

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

...

A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper. 

When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.”

The US is very different from Mexico, but I'm afraid that the Common Core and other Ed Reform efforts are taking us in the wrong direction.  We, too, can learn from Toscana's prescription: give kids enjoyable books and time to read.  Thousands of our children are not getting that, and thousands of our kids are, in themselves, little countries that don't read.

Guys Read--but may not like the books they're assigned in high school!

A "Read In"
Today our school had a "Read In"--a whole day, in between midyear exams and the second semester, in which we shared books, read, and talked about reading. During one of my free blocks I was on a panel of four male teachers; we talked to an audience of about a hundred and fifty students about our own reading, we read to them from a book we liked, and we took their questions.

Even future teachers don't like assigned reading
In the course of the discussion, every single one of us let it slip that he had not liked much of the assigned reading in high school--that we liked reading, but not the books we were given in our English classes.  I remembered that the same thing happened on the panel I was on last year, and I asked a friend who was on another panel today, and he said he and the guys he was up on stage with had said the same thing.

Does high school discourage reading?
At a certain point in the discussion, when we were asked when we had really been turned on to reading, I turned the question back around to the audience and asked them to raise their hands if they read more now than they did in elementary school.  A few brave souls raised their hands.  Then I asked them to raise their hands if they read more in elementary school than they do now.  eighty percent of the audience raised a hand.

We need to change this
One day is a nice start, but we high school teachers really need to think about how we can change the way we encourage-- or discourage--student reading.  What we are doing now is not working very well.  I think the way to go is toward more independent reading and group discussion and analysis focused on shorter passages (and of course a lot of writing); in any case, what we are doing now, and what has been done at most high schools over the past fifty years or more, is not very inspiring.

Do students need to "build reading perseverance"?

I was at a Metco conference all day today, and one of the workshops I attended was on the Common Core.  It was interesting in lots of ways that I'll have to mull over for a while, but one minor thing I was struck by was the way the presenter talked about independent reading.  The presenter, a high-school principal, told the story of a teacher in her school who twice a week puts high-interest YA books on every desk, and for the first 30 minutes of the period has the students just read.  When one of the students was asked why he thought they were spending 30 minutes twice a week in reading, the kid said, clearly repeating a phrase the teacher had instilled in him, "Well, we're going to have to take the SATs, so we have to build up our perseverance."

Later in the workshop, the presenter put up a slide of "tips" for ways ELA teachers can prepare their students for the Common Core and the tests that will stem from it.  One of her slides was titled "FOCUS ON READING", and it had two "tips". One was about reading in the content areas and the other was this:

"Students need to build reading perseverance"

I wasn't sure what I thought about this.  On the one hand, I was happy to see teachers encouraged to have their students do in-class reading of pleasurable texts--particularly in connection with the Common Core, which does not, as far as I can see, pay much explicit attention to reading volume or making sure that students are actually reading.  On the other hand, I was like: What?!  Perseverance?!  That is so depressing!  We "persevere" in things that are difficult, painful, discouraging.  Reading a good book is not supposed to be difficult, painful and discouraging; it's supposed to be entertaining, engrossing, FUN!

Maybe I'm just lucky, but my experience is that for well over 90% of my students (whether in the Metco program or not), they don't have much trouble sitting and reading silently.  This year, I had one girl who complained the most about how much she disliked reading; over the past couple of weeks I have had to tell her more than once, when we were having a discussion or doing a writing activity, to stop reading and put her book away.  Reading is fun--that's what we need to be helping our students to discover.

More on other stuff later; it was an interesting day.

Pleasure Reading, Close Reading, Deep Immersion Reading, and Magnetic Resonance Imaging

I. Pleasure reading makes good readers

Almost all good readers spent a lot of time reading for pleasure as kids.  That time is chipped away at every year; two of my students told me today that after elementary school their pleasure reading time has diminished every year.  They both mentioned AP US History as something that took up a lot of their time this year.  One of them said that he still tried to read for pleasure, but it was like "One page of Henry James, and then one page of AP Achiever."

I have a few reactions to what my students said.  One is to think, again, that if our students' time is like Africa, and we teachers are the European imperial powers, fighting to grab as much as possible for ourselves, then at my school APUSH plays the role of England, and we English teachers end up, ironically, something like Italy.  Of course, that analogy would imply that it might have been better to let the kids alone to go off and read Henry James, just as it would have been better for the world if Europe hadn't gone on its colonizing binge...

Another reaction is to think that the English department should have an AP course, so that we can colonize more of our students' time--and give Henry James a province of his own.  But I don't love segregation by ability...

Another reaction is to think that this kid's advanced reading ability (James is difficult for most high school students) is due hardly at all to his in-school literacy activities, and almost entirely to his literate family and his endless hours of pleasure reading in elementary school.  This thought makes me feel good about spending a lot of energy and class time encouraging pleasure reading, especially in my non-Honors level classes.

As I've said before, you can become an excellent reader and thinker without ever getting explicit instruction in English class, solely by "sitting around reading books and drinking tea."  So why not include more of that, of sitting around reading books and drinking tea, in our high school English classes?

II. But New Research seems to show that pleasure reading doesn't get your brain going...

Reason to eschew pleasure reading in favor of close analysis of short texts is offered by new research that has been getting a fair amount of media attention.  The research, conducted by a Michigan State English professor, apparently shows that when readers switch from skimming a text, "as they might do in a bookstore," to reading it closely and analytically, they start using much more of their brain, including areas of the brain that aren't usually associated with reading or analysis, but instead are associated with movement or thought.  This study, while still only "preliminary," is being hailed as a justification for literary analysis, and, interestingly, a reason to privilege thinking "about" a book rather than just reading it for pleasure.  Unfortunately, the study hasn't been published yet, so all we have are confusing stories about it in the popular press, and it's not clear what the larger implications are.

The MRI study apparently showed a "global increase in blood flow" to the brain during close reading.  During "pleasure" reading, the blood flow increased  as well, but in different areas.  If the study's results hold, Natalie Philips, the literature professor who is the lead investigator, has said, then "it's not only what we read – but thinking rigorously about it that's of value."

If Philips is right, then those parts of my classes that involves basically sitting around reading and drinking tea may be less helpful than the parts of my classes that have my students doing close reading, analysis and metacognition.  But based on (a close reading of) the articles about her research, I'm not so sure.

III. Is "pleasure reading" or "skimming" the same as deep immersion reading?

There are a few problems with Philips's conclusion that "thinking rigorously about" what you read is more important than just reading it for pleasure.  The most important problem is that it's not clear what is meant by "pleasure" reading.  Philips uses the phrases "pleasure reading" and close reading" to distinguish the two kinds of reading that her subjects were switching between while in the MRI machine, but the subjects are also described as being instructed to "leisurely skim a passage as they would in a bookstore."  Now, this does not sound like "pleasure reading" to me.  When I "skim" something, I don't do it in a "leisurely" way, and I don't find reading in bookstores particularly pleasurable.  When I read for pleasure, I am much, much more deeply involved.  I enter what Nancie Atwell calls the "reading zone".  This deep immersion reading is very far from skimming in a bookstore.

Oddly, Natalie Philips, the professor running the study, also describes this deep immersion reading.  She says, "I am someone who can actually become so absorbed in a novel that I really think the house could possibly burn down around me and I wouldn't notice."  Unfortunately, it's not at all clear whether this kind of deep immersion reading was occurring in her study.  Skimming or browsing in a bookstore is clearly not deep immersion reading--and neither, it would seem, is reading a text closely "as a scholar might read a text while conducting a literary analysis."

So... I think we need more data.  I would love to see the same study done with a more rigorous attempt to define different types of reading.  I suspect that you would see dramatically different patterns of brain activity--and I wouldn't be surprised if "pleasure reading" of the deep immersion kind provoked just as much activity, across just as wide a range of brain areas, as close reading of the scholarly kind.