My department is about to spend a lot of money on three new projector carts. I like projectors, but I wonder if it might be better to spend the money on building up some classroom libraries. As a recent study reminds us, computerized gadgets may be neat, but are not necessarily educational -- unlike books.
The study is from the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it finds that giving poor kids computers doesn't help them do better in school. Free computers increase computer use, but do not lead to improvements in grades, test scores, attendance, or disciplinary actions.
This is another reminder that books are a more important educational technology than computers. Giving books away in doctors offices works. Having book-filled libraries is very important. So maybe the NBER should do a study in which they tried giving some kids a thousand dollars worth of free books?
Showing posts with label Providing Kids with Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Providing Kids with Books. Show all posts
Friday, May 24, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
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?”
...
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.
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.
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.
Friday, August 3, 2012
A tale of two summers
One more post before my August vacation: two stories and a
conclusion. Regular readers of this blog will know where I'm going; as
ever, I think our thinking about school should be informed by
extracurricular learning, which varies much more than school, and I
think we should be spending a lot of our energy on helping kids find
texts and creating time and space for them to read.
Summer #1: From non-reader to reader
A good friend of mine, a fellow teacher, was concerned that her son wasn't reading enough. Maybe she had been reading a blog post that cited data linking school achievement with time spent reading outside of school, or maybe she was just, like many other parents, aware that reading is the most important academic skill, and that no one becomes really good at anything without spending large amounts of time doing it (K. Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hour rule may be a cliche and may be nitpicked in various ways, but it's basically right that almost all expert musicians, athletes and readers spent many thousands of hours as children practicing their skills). In any case, her son was not reading at home very much, and hadn't been reading in school, either (his reportedly excellent second grade teacher had allowed him to spent most of his literacy and reader's workshop time writing a very long story and drawing pictures of hockey players). Her son needed to read more.
So my friend took action. She told her son that he would have to read for twenty minutes every night. Following good SSR protocol, she would read her own book alongside him. They went together to the library and spent the better part of an hour searching out books he might be interested in. They took out a bunch of Matt Christopher sports novels, and a book by Avi.
That first week, the reading did not go so well. He asked every minute or two how much time was left, and he never picked up a book when it wasn't his appointed time, preferring instead to go outside or to pick up the family iPad and check the sports scores.
That was in June and early July. Then, two weeks ago, the boy visited his grandmother for a weekend, and his grandmother took him to her local library and asked her local librarian for help. The librarian spent a half an hour or so with him, reading and talking, and set him up with a number of volumes from the "Weird School" series that were much easier to read than the Matt Christopher or the Avi . When he came back from his grandmother's, he not only had easier books to read, he also had fewer distractions: his parents had put away the iPad.
I saw my friend and her son last week, when they were staying with the rest of their family at a cabin in the woods. More than once I saw the boy take out, unprompted, one of his "Weird School" books and read it to himself. His mother reports that he has been voluntarily reading more than the required thirty minutes a day, and she has not had to sit with him and read. Within a month, he had moved from reluctant reader to reader.
Summer #2: From reader to non-reader
My own son is in sixth grade. Since the second grade, he has always read a lot. His favorite books have been biographies of athletes (he's read the new Willie Mays biography a few years ago, and last summer he raced through Andre Agassi's Open), but he has also enjoyed graphic novels (Tintin, Bone, Persepolis) and action books (Alex Rider books, the Hunger Game series). He probably reads, over the school year alone, rather more than a book a week, and over the past few summers he has read at an even faster pace.
This summer is half over, and in its six or so weeks he has not yet read a single book.
I ascribe this to three factors: 1) competing activities; (2) electronic distractions; (3) more limited availability of books.
First, he has been pretty busy, going to a few different camps, going on two different camping trips, and playing a lot of sports when he's not at camp.
Second, he has spent an hour of every day at home on the computer, and he just got an iTouch. He is allotted an hour of computer time a day, and he rarely spends even a minute less. Most of that time is following the professional tennis tour, and he is frighteningly well-informed about who is ranked what and why and so on. His iTouch, which is somewhat under our control, hasn't increased his screen time by much, but somehow his relationship to books seems different.
Finally, and this may be the most important, he hasn't been to the library yet this summer. He himself blames his non-reading on this: "I don't have anything to read!" Despite our shelves of books, nothing has jumped out at him, and I haven't thrust a We Die Alone into his hands this time around.
Conclusions: Providing appropriate books and a distraction-free environment matter a lot
These two stories are mirror images of each other. In both cases, reading was difficult for kids who (a) were distracted by electronic devices and (b) didn't have interesting, appropriately leveled books easily to hand. When appropriate books and a distraction-free environment were provided, both kids read a lot. These conditions may seem obvious, and they don't seem terribly difficult, but still, most children don't have either one, and most children don't read as much as they should (45 minutes a day at a minimum).
Because in fact these two conditions are not easy to provide. I am extremely interested in my children's reading, and yet my son has read next to nothing in the past six weeks. My friend is also very interested in her kid's reading, and yet he read very little over his whole second grade schoolyear. And no wonder: providing the appropriate books and the time was in fact not so easy.
Providing books for my friend's son (the "Weird School" series; I love that title) took two trips to the library and a few hours of adult time, and in the end it took a trained professional--the children's librarian in the grandmother's town. It also took a well-stocked library--the boy's grandmother lives in a town that's probably as wealthy as Leafstrewn. (If we want to get kids reading, we should not be cutting library budgets, and we should be taking the 20 billion or more dollars we spend on standardized testing and spending that money on books and librarians.)
Providing distraction-free time is also not easy. We're all busy, and we all have lots of things that need to get done now. In English class we feel we need to get through the whole-class novel, we need to do the prewriting work for the essay, we need to teach the vocabulary lists. At home, there's television, music, texting, sports, iPads. But it's important to provide the time, both in and out of school.
Post-script: a trip to the library
After I wrote the post above, we took my son went to the library, and he came home with a stack of books two feet high. That night he read a graphic novel and started a mystery story about a brother and sister whose mom disappears in the Grand Canyon. And now we're going on vacation, so he'll have a lot of time!
As for this blog, I'm going to take a month-long break. I'm going to do some pleasure reading, and I'll also think about how to take the message I've been hammering away at here to a broader audience..
Summer #1: From non-reader to reader
A good friend of mine, a fellow teacher, was concerned that her son wasn't reading enough. Maybe she had been reading a blog post that cited data linking school achievement with time spent reading outside of school, or maybe she was just, like many other parents, aware that reading is the most important academic skill, and that no one becomes really good at anything without spending large amounts of time doing it (K. Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hour rule may be a cliche and may be nitpicked in various ways, but it's basically right that almost all expert musicians, athletes and readers spent many thousands of hours as children practicing their skills). In any case, her son was not reading at home very much, and hadn't been reading in school, either (his reportedly excellent second grade teacher had allowed him to spent most of his literacy and reader's workshop time writing a very long story and drawing pictures of hockey players). Her son needed to read more.
So my friend took action. She told her son that he would have to read for twenty minutes every night. Following good SSR protocol, she would read her own book alongside him. They went together to the library and spent the better part of an hour searching out books he might be interested in. They took out a bunch of Matt Christopher sports novels, and a book by Avi.
That first week, the reading did not go so well. He asked every minute or two how much time was left, and he never picked up a book when it wasn't his appointed time, preferring instead to go outside or to pick up the family iPad and check the sports scores.
That was in June and early July. Then, two weeks ago, the boy visited his grandmother for a weekend, and his grandmother took him to her local library and asked her local librarian for help. The librarian spent a half an hour or so with him, reading and talking, and set him up with a number of volumes from the "Weird School" series that were much easier to read than the Matt Christopher or the Avi . When he came back from his grandmother's, he not only had easier books to read, he also had fewer distractions: his parents had put away the iPad.
I saw my friend and her son last week, when they were staying with the rest of their family at a cabin in the woods. More than once I saw the boy take out, unprompted, one of his "Weird School" books and read it to himself. His mother reports that he has been voluntarily reading more than the required thirty minutes a day, and she has not had to sit with him and read. Within a month, he had moved from reluctant reader to reader.
Summer #2: From reader to non-reader
My own son is in sixth grade. Since the second grade, he has always read a lot. His favorite books have been biographies of athletes (he's read the new Willie Mays biography a few years ago, and last summer he raced through Andre Agassi's Open), but he has also enjoyed graphic novels (Tintin, Bone, Persepolis) and action books (Alex Rider books, the Hunger Game series). He probably reads, over the school year alone, rather more than a book a week, and over the past few summers he has read at an even faster pace.
This summer is half over, and in its six or so weeks he has not yet read a single book.
I ascribe this to three factors: 1) competing activities; (2) electronic distractions; (3) more limited availability of books.
First, he has been pretty busy, going to a few different camps, going on two different camping trips, and playing a lot of sports when he's not at camp.
Second, he has spent an hour of every day at home on the computer, and he just got an iTouch. He is allotted an hour of computer time a day, and he rarely spends even a minute less. Most of that time is following the professional tennis tour, and he is frighteningly well-informed about who is ranked what and why and so on. His iTouch, which is somewhat under our control, hasn't increased his screen time by much, but somehow his relationship to books seems different.
Finally, and this may be the most important, he hasn't been to the library yet this summer. He himself blames his non-reading on this: "I don't have anything to read!" Despite our shelves of books, nothing has jumped out at him, and I haven't thrust a We Die Alone into his hands this time around.
Conclusions: Providing appropriate books and a distraction-free environment matter a lot
These two stories are mirror images of each other. In both cases, reading was difficult for kids who (a) were distracted by electronic devices and (b) didn't have interesting, appropriately leveled books easily to hand. When appropriate books and a distraction-free environment were provided, both kids read a lot. These conditions may seem obvious, and they don't seem terribly difficult, but still, most children don't have either one, and most children don't read as much as they should (45 minutes a day at a minimum).
Because in fact these two conditions are not easy to provide. I am extremely interested in my children's reading, and yet my son has read next to nothing in the past six weeks. My friend is also very interested in her kid's reading, and yet he read very little over his whole second grade schoolyear. And no wonder: providing the appropriate books and the time was in fact not so easy.
Providing books for my friend's son (the "Weird School" series; I love that title) took two trips to the library and a few hours of adult time, and in the end it took a trained professional--the children's librarian in the grandmother's town. It also took a well-stocked library--the boy's grandmother lives in a town that's probably as wealthy as Leafstrewn. (If we want to get kids reading, we should not be cutting library budgets, and we should be taking the 20 billion or more dollars we spend on standardized testing and spending that money on books and librarians.)
Providing distraction-free time is also not easy. We're all busy, and we all have lots of things that need to get done now. In English class we feel we need to get through the whole-class novel, we need to do the prewriting work for the essay, we need to teach the vocabulary lists. At home, there's television, music, texting, sports, iPads. But it's important to provide the time, both in and out of school.
Post-script: a trip to the library
After I wrote the post above, we took my son went to the library, and he came home with a stack of books two feet high. That night he read a graphic novel and started a mystery story about a brother and sister whose mom disappears in the Grand Canyon. And now we're going on vacation, so he'll have a lot of time!
As for this blog, I'm going to take a month-long break. I'm going to do some pleasure reading, and I'll also think about how to take the message I've been hammering away at here to a broader audience..
Friday, June 22, 2012
How many books did our students read this year?
I'm going away for a few days on a camping trip, but I'm going to try to schedule this to be posted on Friday. Miraculous technology! (I feel like Willy Loman's boss, Howard, who tells Willy about his amazing new tape recorder, which allows him to listen to Jack Benny at any hour he wishes, as long as the maid remembers to record the show for him when it's aired. I suppose if this doesn't work I could always have my maid do it--if I had a maid...)
"How many books did our students read this year?" is a question that we should all be asking. A couple of weeks ago I asked it of the students in the "Tutorial" class I work in once a week. Not how many books they were supposed to read, but how many they actually read. The answers I got were interesting. The students read, on average, about six books each over the course of the year.
These are kids who are in a very well-run academic support program. More than half of them are in honors English classes. They have been in school for eight and a half months.
If we assume that kids are truthful in their reporting, and even if we pretend that kids are reading every page of the books they claim they are reading, and if we assume that a book is, on average, 300 pages long, that would mean that each kid is reading fewer than ten pages a day. And if you look only at the lower half of the distribution (mostly kids who are not in "Honors" classes), each kid is reading only 150 pages a month, which works out to 5 pages a day. For the kids in the lower quarter of the distribution, each kid is reporting reading reading 2 to 3 pages a day.
I think it's safe to say that this is not enough. Children should be reading closer to two books a month, at the least.
What were the averages for kids in my own standard-level classes? 8.5 books per kid. Better--but again, not nearly enough.
There are a number of reasons it's hard for schools to get kids to read more:
So how can we make kids read more? The answer is simple: provide them with a large number of good books at their independent reading level to choose from; and make them read; and watch them do it. Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day. There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day. Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized.
"How many books did our students read this year?" is a question that we should all be asking. A couple of weeks ago I asked it of the students in the "Tutorial" class I work in once a week. Not how many books they were supposed to read, but how many they actually read. The answers I got were interesting. The students read, on average, about six books each over the course of the year.
These are kids who are in a very well-run academic support program. More than half of them are in honors English classes. They have been in school for eight and a half months.
If we assume that kids are truthful in their reporting, and even if we pretend that kids are reading every page of the books they claim they are reading, and if we assume that a book is, on average, 300 pages long, that would mean that each kid is reading fewer than ten pages a day. And if you look only at the lower half of the distribution (mostly kids who are not in "Honors" classes), each kid is reading only 150 pages a month, which works out to 5 pages a day. For the kids in the lower quarter of the distribution, each kid is reporting reading reading 2 to 3 pages a day.
I think it's safe to say that this is not enough. Children should be reading closer to two books a month, at the least.
What were the averages for kids in my own standard-level classes? 8.5 books per kid. Better--but again, not nearly enough.
There are a number of reasons it's hard for schools to get kids to read more:
- If we ask kids to read at home, it is very hard to make sure they really do it, and the weakest readers will tend to read least
- If we have kids read in English class, the teacher then feels that she herself isn’t doing enough.
- If we have an academic support program, that program will support the work that is being directly checked and graded that day or week, and that usually means producing or processing a piece of paper (because that's checkable), not reading a book.
- If we have a remediation program, we tend to want to remediate the particular areas in which we see the kids are weak (fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, etc,) so we tend to teach “strategies” or vocabulary aimed at these specific areas.
- Remediation teachers have the same desire to feel personally useful, and just having the kids read doesn’t seem like “teaching”
- Also, remediation programs have very little time (typically an hour a week), and we know the kids need more reading than that, so spending the time having them read seems inadequate.
So how can we make kids read more? The answer is simple: provide them with a large number of good books at their independent reading level to choose from; and make them read; and watch them do it. Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day. There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day. Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized.
Friday, June 1, 2012
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:
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!
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!
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