It works to make kids do their homework in school
Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind. The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake. Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.
The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students. It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school. As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.
This is a simple but extremely important practice. It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework. Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year. (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday. It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.
A student who doesn't read
I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program. I'll call him "Billy." Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly. When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family. Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school. Billy passed my class, barely. He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts. He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level). Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.
Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework." I said, "Do you do the reading?" He said, "No. Never." I said, "But you read in my class. I remember you reading Alex Rider." He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home. I never read at home in your class either." I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.
Reading is the most important academic skill. As I wrote last year, "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." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "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?”"
If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school. We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.
Homework in School and Social Justice
The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum. If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.
Showing posts with label Success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Success. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Thursday, December 27, 2012
US schools perform extremely well on international tests
US students do well; Massachusetts students far outperform Finns
This is worth noting, as a counter to the usual scare stories about the failure of American schools and teachers: US students did really, really well on the recent TIMSS (math) and PIRLS (reading) tests. Many individual states did even better. In our state, Massachusetts, the average score on the 8th grade math test was far better than that of Finland, a country with a comparable population. In fact, despite a continuing gap between the scores of white students and black students, the average math score for African-American 8th graders in Massachusetts was better than that of the average for all 8th graders in Finland. It's very likely that if reading scores were available for Massachusetts, our students would have done better overall than Finnish students (a state-level reading score was only available for Florida, and Floridians scored as well as the Finns).
Hooray!
Junkets to Leafstrewn?
Perhaps the most important thing about this news is the way it has been reported in the mainstream press (1). As usual, it is very important to read press reports about education, and everything else, with a skeptical eye. Some papers, like the DEtroit Free Press that I linked to before, covered the story reasonably well. Others, like the Times and the Post, stuck largely to the "School Failure" storyline. Here's the headline in the Washington Post, for instance: "U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science." A better headline might be: "U.S. students perform extremely well on international tests".
You might think that the press might switch the narrative from "Our schools are failing, so we need reform" to "Look, reform is working"--but a meme as well-established as the "failure" of US schools has so much momentum that it is, like the Titanic, almost impossible to turn. If enough icebergs like these results come in, maybe the old meme will finally sink, and education experts can take junkets to Leafstrewn instead of junkets to Finland.
Now if we can just eliminate poverty...
On the other hand, these scores also remind us that there are wide gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and the best thing we could do to improve our students' academic achievement is reduce inequality. If the US had the poverty levels of Finland, just think how well we'd do then!
***************************************************************************
Footnotes:
1. Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has done an excellent job of deconstructing the press coverage of these recent scores.
This is worth noting, as a counter to the usual scare stories about the failure of American schools and teachers: US students did really, really well on the recent TIMSS (math) and PIRLS (reading) tests. Many individual states did even better. In our state, Massachusetts, the average score on the 8th grade math test was far better than that of Finland, a country with a comparable population. In fact, despite a continuing gap between the scores of white students and black students, the average math score for African-American 8th graders in Massachusetts was better than that of the average for all 8th graders in Finland. It's very likely that if reading scores were available for Massachusetts, our students would have done better overall than Finnish students (a state-level reading score was only available for Florida, and Floridians scored as well as the Finns).
Hooray!
Junkets to Leafstrewn?
Perhaps the most important thing about this news is the way it has been reported in the mainstream press (1). As usual, it is very important to read press reports about education, and everything else, with a skeptical eye. Some papers, like the DEtroit Free Press that I linked to before, covered the story reasonably well. Others, like the Times and the Post, stuck largely to the "School Failure" storyline. Here's the headline in the Washington Post, for instance: "U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science." A better headline might be: "U.S. students perform extremely well on international tests".
You might think that the press might switch the narrative from "Our schools are failing, so we need reform" to "Look, reform is working"--but a meme as well-established as the "failure" of US schools has so much momentum that it is, like the Titanic, almost impossible to turn. If enough icebergs like these results come in, maybe the old meme will finally sink, and education experts can take junkets to Leafstrewn instead of junkets to Finland.
Now if we can just eliminate poverty...
On the other hand, these scores also remind us that there are wide gaps between rich kids and poor kids, and the best thing we could do to improve our students' academic achievement is reduce inequality. If the US had the poverty levels of Finland, just think how well we'd do then!
***************************************************************************
Footnotes:
1. Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has done an excellent job of deconstructing the press coverage of these recent scores.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
More on the non-golden age of the 50s...
This is not directly literacy-related, but it supports and confirms what I was talking about in my last post, so I'll just mention it quickly. Richard Rothstein, who has for years and years been doing a great job of patiently and repeatedly dismantling the idea that schools and teachers are the best way to overcome poverty, has a wonderful, entertaining and painful article in The American Prospect. I'll give the basic story here, but it's worth reading the whole thing.
I. Joel Klein's non-evidence-based BS
Joel Klein--who represents better perhaps than anyone else (see footnote) the idea that if only we put billionaires in charge of our schools and gave them a free hand to hire, fire and generally wreak havoc, then public education will be able to cure all of our country's social ills (which are now largely the result of incompetent, undisciplined teachers who have read too much Paulo Freire)--Joel Klein is always citing his own life story to show that all you need are good teachers to lift you out of inner-city poverty and public housing. According to Klein, he himself grew up poor and in public housing, in a family that offered him no support for reading or other cultural activities, but his public school teachers held him to high standards, and he went to Columbia and on to a successful career, so therefore poverty is not an insurmountable impediment, and his story shows that "you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education."
The most obvious problem with this story is that one anecdote does not prove much of anything. A larger problem is that the nation's schools were not, by any objective measure, any better overall in the 50s or 60s than they are now. But the biggest problem with the story is one you wouldn't know unless you did what Richard Rothstein did and actually looked into it: Klein's account of his own childhood is essentially untrue in every particular.
Klein was not in fact poor: his postal-worker father and bookkeeper mother probably made significantly more than the national median household income.
Klein's family did offer him culture and literacy. In fact, Klein was inspired to become a lawyer because his father would take him to the federal courthouse in Manhattan to watch cases, and if his family was like many other middle-class Jewish New York families of his era, education was probably valued as much as life itself.
Klein did grow up in public housing, but it was in no way like public housing as we have become accustomed to think of it. The words "public housing" for most evoke notions of crime-ridden wastelands, subsidized permanently by the government, inhabited by single parents and terrified children who are mostly people of color. The public housing Klein grew up in, by contrast, was not rent-subsidized, and in fact could be seen as a bastion of white middle-class privilege: the application process excluded single-parents, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with an out-of-wedlock birth, anyone with a history of drug addiction or mental illness, and most people of color (there was essentially a quota system intended to keep the neighborhood balance the same as it was before). In other words, the social problems, as Rothstein puts it, were "weeded out by the Housing Authority." This is not what most people think of when they hear "public housing."
So Joel Klein's biography does not actually provide any evidence that a poor kid growing up in a dangerous and unhealthy neighborhood with little family support can be saved by a good teacher. Instead, it reinforces the obvious truth that a middle-class kid growing up in a safe and healthy neighborhood with significant family support will do well in school and will appreciate a good teacher when he gets one--as Klein appreciated his high school physics teacher.
II. Parallel Childhoods
One of the strengths of Richard Rothstein's article exposing Klein's BS is that Rothstein and Klein turn out to have had parallel childhoods. Like Klein, Rothstein grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York with a postal worker father and a bookkeeper mother, went to public school and went on to an Ivy League college. The two men even had the same physics teacher. But while Klein complains about not having a Mitt-Romney-like childhood and pretends that schools in the fifties were so great as to make up for his deprivation, Rothstein is aware that it was his family support that made the difference. Rothstein even tells us that when he wanted to apply to Harvard, his high school refused to process the application (because "boys from here don't go to Harvard") until Rothstein's father took the day off from work to come in and talk to the Principal. So much, as Rothstein says, for the golden age of the 50s.
For most people, as for Rothstein and probably Klein, education in the 1950s was no better than it is now. Then, as now, there are lots of kids from middle-class homes and parents without college degrees who are pushed and supported by their families and go on to great academic success. My father and stepfather are both examples of this: both grew up in stable middle-class homes, with parents who hadn't been to college; both were pushed and supported by their parents. My father, who went to a small rural high school in the midwest, was one of two kids in his high school class to go to college, but he ended up at MIT. My stepfather grew up in a Mitchell-Lama building in Washington Heights, with parents who hadn't gone to college, and he went on to be valedictorian at Bronx Science; he also went on to MIT.
Neither my father nor my stepfather would ever say that their 50s and 60s public schools were responsible for their success. Their schools were OK, but most students in those schools did not achieve such dramatic success. Instead, what allowed my father and stepfather to excel so remarkably was the support and encouragement of their middle-class parents, the fact that they were not surrounded by miserable poverty, and probably the fact that they themselves were pretty gifted.
III. Rothstein's concluding peroration
Again, it's worth reading the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of it:
"It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
"A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging."
IV. My own conclusion: the subtext of Klein's and others' master narrative
(I don't have time to write this in an articulate way, since I have to enter interim progress reports, but I'll take ten minutes and make an attempt.)
Klein's story is obscene, but its obscenity is not unique to Joel Klein; in fact, it is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the anxious attempts by our ruling classes to assert that they deserve their own extraordinary privileges, and I think we need to understand the current emphasis, by these ruling classes, on education and education reform as a part of this larger cultural phenomenon.
This need to deny one's own cultural advantages can be seen not only in Klein's absurd story, but in the absurd assertions by successful aristocrats like Mitt Romney that they are self-made men ("I inherited nothing"). Our society is in many ways less a meritocracy than it was 50 years ago, but the ruling classes want to pretend that it is. (This is, I believe, the thesis of a book I haven't read, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by the estimable Christopher Hayes.) The ruling elites know they are smart and have worked hard, and they want, perhaps understandably, to pretend that their success is due to their own efforts. The elites' emphasis on education has to be seen in the light of this pretense.
Every time a politician pays lip service, as Obama did in his disastrous debate, to the idea that education is the best way to rebuild our economy and create jobs, we should remember that this is a self-serving argument, and one that implicitly blames the poor for their own condition. When we see articles that say that even high-priced colleges are a great investment, we should consider that college, for many students in a country whose top college major is "Business", may be as much a matter of what I think Jane Jacobs calls "credentialing" and what I always think of as analogous to a guild system; that is, a college degree functions as a class marker, and the four years of hard work or debauchery at an expensive campus is less about education than about your parents trying to ensure that you remain in the upper middle class.
What we are living in is less meritocracy than plutocracy, and saying that our educational system is failing is a way of displacing blame for the increasing inequality whose effects are all around us, if we only have eyes to see. (This is not to say that education doesn't matter, nor to say that individual teachers can make a difference--and in fact I am trying my best, but we teachers can't do it all by ourselves.)
********************************************************
Footnote: Joel Klein's career
Hired in 1998 by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein was for years the Chancellor of the largest public school system in the country despite having no prior experience in education (he was counsel for a huge corporation); after resigning in 2010, Klein now works for two other billionaires Rupert Murdoch (Klein is trying to sell media to public schools) and for Eli Broad (Klein is in charge of Broad's massive effort to put "reform"-minded (anti-union, pro-privatization) superintendents in place across the country).
I. Joel Klein's non-evidence-based BS
Joel Klein--who represents better perhaps than anyone else (see footnote) the idea that if only we put billionaires in charge of our schools and gave them a free hand to hire, fire and generally wreak havoc, then public education will be able to cure all of our country's social ills (which are now largely the result of incompetent, undisciplined teachers who have read too much Paulo Freire)--Joel Klein is always citing his own life story to show that all you need are good teachers to lift you out of inner-city poverty and public housing. According to Klein, he himself grew up poor and in public housing, in a family that offered him no support for reading or other cultural activities, but his public school teachers held him to high standards, and he went to Columbia and on to a successful career, so therefore poverty is not an insurmountable impediment, and his story shows that "you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education."
The most obvious problem with this story is that one anecdote does not prove much of anything. A larger problem is that the nation's schools were not, by any objective measure, any better overall in the 50s or 60s than they are now. But the biggest problem with the story is one you wouldn't know unless you did what Richard Rothstein did and actually looked into it: Klein's account of his own childhood is essentially untrue in every particular.
Klein was not in fact poor: his postal-worker father and bookkeeper mother probably made significantly more than the national median household income.
Klein's family did offer him culture and literacy. In fact, Klein was inspired to become a lawyer because his father would take him to the federal courthouse in Manhattan to watch cases, and if his family was like many other middle-class Jewish New York families of his era, education was probably valued as much as life itself.
Klein did grow up in public housing, but it was in no way like public housing as we have become accustomed to think of it. The words "public housing" for most evoke notions of crime-ridden wastelands, subsidized permanently by the government, inhabited by single parents and terrified children who are mostly people of color. The public housing Klein grew up in, by contrast, was not rent-subsidized, and in fact could be seen as a bastion of white middle-class privilege: the application process excluded single-parents, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with an out-of-wedlock birth, anyone with a history of drug addiction or mental illness, and most people of color (there was essentially a quota system intended to keep the neighborhood balance the same as it was before). In other words, the social problems, as Rothstein puts it, were "weeded out by the Housing Authority." This is not what most people think of when they hear "public housing."
So Joel Klein's biography does not actually provide any evidence that a poor kid growing up in a dangerous and unhealthy neighborhood with little family support can be saved by a good teacher. Instead, it reinforces the obvious truth that a middle-class kid growing up in a safe and healthy neighborhood with significant family support will do well in school and will appreciate a good teacher when he gets one--as Klein appreciated his high school physics teacher.
II. Parallel Childhoods
One of the strengths of Richard Rothstein's article exposing Klein's BS is that Rothstein and Klein turn out to have had parallel childhoods. Like Klein, Rothstein grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York with a postal worker father and a bookkeeper mother, went to public school and went on to an Ivy League college. The two men even had the same physics teacher. But while Klein complains about not having a Mitt-Romney-like childhood and pretends that schools in the fifties were so great as to make up for his deprivation, Rothstein is aware that it was his family support that made the difference. Rothstein even tells us that when he wanted to apply to Harvard, his high school refused to process the application (because "boys from here don't go to Harvard") until Rothstein's father took the day off from work to come in and talk to the Principal. So much, as Rothstein says, for the golden age of the 50s.
For most people, as for Rothstein and probably Klein, education in the 1950s was no better than it is now. Then, as now, there are lots of kids from middle-class homes and parents without college degrees who are pushed and supported by their families and go on to great academic success. My father and stepfather are both examples of this: both grew up in stable middle-class homes, with parents who hadn't been to college; both were pushed and supported by their parents. My father, who went to a small rural high school in the midwest, was one of two kids in his high school class to go to college, but he ended up at MIT. My stepfather grew up in a Mitchell-Lama building in Washington Heights, with parents who hadn't gone to college, and he went on to be valedictorian at Bronx Science; he also went on to MIT.
Neither my father nor my stepfather would ever say that their 50s and 60s public schools were responsible for their success. Their schools were OK, but most students in those schools did not achieve such dramatic success. Instead, what allowed my father and stepfather to excel so remarkably was the support and encouragement of their middle-class parents, the fact that they were not surrounded by miserable poverty, and probably the fact that they themselves were pretty gifted.
III. Rothstein's concluding peroration
Again, it's worth reading the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of it:
"It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
"A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging."
IV. My own conclusion: the subtext of Klein's and others' master narrative
(I don't have time to write this in an articulate way, since I have to enter interim progress reports, but I'll take ten minutes and make an attempt.)
Klein's story is obscene, but its obscenity is not unique to Joel Klein; in fact, it is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the anxious attempts by our ruling classes to assert that they deserve their own extraordinary privileges, and I think we need to understand the current emphasis, by these ruling classes, on education and education reform as a part of this larger cultural phenomenon.
This need to deny one's own cultural advantages can be seen not only in Klein's absurd story, but in the absurd assertions by successful aristocrats like Mitt Romney that they are self-made men ("I inherited nothing"). Our society is in many ways less a meritocracy than it was 50 years ago, but the ruling classes want to pretend that it is. (This is, I believe, the thesis of a book I haven't read, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by the estimable Christopher Hayes.) The ruling elites know they are smart and have worked hard, and they want, perhaps understandably, to pretend that their success is due to their own efforts. The elites' emphasis on education has to be seen in the light of this pretense.
Every time a politician pays lip service, as Obama did in his disastrous debate, to the idea that education is the best way to rebuild our economy and create jobs, we should remember that this is a self-serving argument, and one that implicitly blames the poor for their own condition. When we see articles that say that even high-priced colleges are a great investment, we should consider that college, for many students in a country whose top college major is "Business", may be as much a matter of what I think Jane Jacobs calls "credentialing" and what I always think of as analogous to a guild system; that is, a college degree functions as a class marker, and the four years of hard work or debauchery at an expensive campus is less about education than about your parents trying to ensure that you remain in the upper middle class.
What we are living in is less meritocracy than plutocracy, and saying that our educational system is failing is a way of displacing blame for the increasing inequality whose effects are all around us, if we only have eyes to see. (This is not to say that education doesn't matter, nor to say that individual teachers can make a difference--and in fact I am trying my best, but we teachers can't do it all by ourselves.)
********************************************************
Footnote: Joel Klein's career
Hired in 1998 by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein was for years the Chancellor of the largest public school system in the country despite having no prior experience in education (he was counsel for a huge corporation); after resigning in 2010, Klein now works for two other billionaires Rupert Murdoch (Klein is trying to sell media to public schools) and for Eli Broad (Klein is in charge of Broad's massive effort to put "reform"-minded (anti-union, pro-privatization) superintendents in place across the country).
Friday, June 15, 2012
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.
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.
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