Informing parents about missing student work raises GPA and raises test scores for Math--but not for English

I read an interesting study yesterday. Here's my take:

The Study
A New York Times article yesterday referred to an interesting study suggesting that getting more information to parents about their kids' education is low-hanging educational fruit.

According to the study's author, Peter Bergman,  a professor at Columbia, there are three basic problems in this area:

1) parents don't have high-quality information about their kids' grades and work completion

2) parental bias means that parents think their kids are doing more homework than they really are

3) the short-term bias of children (Bergman says they have "higher discount rates") leads them to conceal poor performance and poor homework completion from their parents

The literature about parental involvement has been ambiguous, according to Bergman, because it has been difficult to distinguish between cause and effect. Studies have even found negative correlations between parental monitoring/involvement and student achievement. This could either be because parental nagging is counterproductive or because parents tend to monitor and nag kids who are underperforming. Bergman thinks it's the latter.

Bergman models the situation using some fancy-looking game theory, but his experimental design is simple: the treatment group, at a California school serving mostly poor kids, got messages about missing assignments, including specific information like the date and the page number of the textbook. The control group got the default amount of information that school and teacher provided parents: report cards four times a semester and teacher contact as the teacher chose (usually very little).

Positive Results: GPA goes up; math test scores go up
The results were positive: in the treatment group, both overall GPA and math test scores increased by about .2 standard deviations. That's a pretty big increase.

This is not surprising, but it does point to an obvious lesson: schools and teachers should move to as transparent a grading system as possible. Parents should have continuous access to their children's assignments and grades. As a teacher, this will push me to be more timely and thorough about updating my gradebook, but that's a good thing. Or--it would be a good thing if I were a math teacher.

Unfortunately--as usual--English test scores don't change
Another interesting result of the study--for me, more interesting than its headline finding--was that the English test scores of the treatment group did not go up. (Well, they went up .04 standard deviations, but that's not much).

As Bergman notes, this disparity is typical--many studies find it easier to raise math scores than English scores (2). But it is nevertheless a real puzzle, one that calls into question the effectiveness of English class.

Informing parents about missing work seems to have had some direct effects. Parents who were informed about missing assignments were in better touch with the school, and more of them attended parent-teacher conferences. Parents in the treatment group took away twice as many privileges from their children (mainly access to screens and friends). Students in the treatment group skipped class less, completed more of their assignments, and attended after-school tutoring more often.

Therefore, this experiment found that a group of students who had more engaged parents, who went to class more often, who did more of their schoolwork, and who went for help after school, nevertheless did not make any more improvement on their English test scores.

This is a striking result.  Going to math class and doing your math homework really matters. Going to English class and doing your assigned English work seems to matter much less.

Results like this should make English teachers very uncomfortable.

How might English teachers respond?
An English teacher at this school could interpret these results in three ways:

1) the purpose of English class is not really to improve reading ability, so this result is irrelevant, and I am going to keep doing what I'm doing.

2) the purpose of English class is to improve reading, but coming to class and doing the assigned work does not seem to serve that purpose, so I am going to change my practice.

3) the purpose of English class is to improve reading, and although coming to class and doing the assigned work does not seem to serve that purpose very well, changing my practice would be inconvenient, difficult, and unnatural, so I am going to keep doing what I'm doing.

I think most English teachers respond, if unconsciously, in the third way. Here's why:

Education is conceptualized in a way that fits math, not English
English teachers work within a system that is set up for teaching subjects, not for getting kids to read a lot. The other academic subjects, including math, are about teaching discrete concepts and techniques, while English is about continual gradual improvement in the exact same activity students have been practicing since they were in first grade. In English there is no proper "content," and the usual ways of thinking about education are inappropriate and inadequate for thinking about reading.

The usual way of thinking about education is that the teacher teaches a skill or concept, and then students practice or conceptualize on their own and get feedback from the teacher about their performance. For me, this model was most vividly represented by the Australian researcher John Hattie, who in his book Visible Learning says that the "heart of the model of successful teaching and learning" is like rappelling in that "the goals are challenging, specific and visible," the skill being taught does not come naturally, the experience of learning is "exhilarating," and "it is abundantly clear what the success criteria are". This may be a good model for learning a single skill like rappelling off the top of a building, and it may work to some extent for subjects like math, science, history or foreign languages, in which there is "material" to be learned or "skills" to be mastered, but it is not a good model for improving your performance in an activity, like reading, that you have been doing over and over for many years.

The best way for students to get better at reading is probably to spend a lot of time reading interesting material, and to spend some time discussing the meaning of interesting or difficult texts. Unfortunately, neither the reading or the discussing fits easily into education's standard conceptual framework. So instead English teachers often assign work and plan classroom activities that are neither actual reading of texts nor discussion of texts, and it doesn't really matter if our students do the work or take part in the activities.

Bergman's study shows that we should be more transparent about missing student work, but it also shows that we English teachers should be rethinking our practice.

(1)
"Parent-Child Information Frictions and Human Capital Investment:
Evidence from a Field Experiment" by Peter Bergman

(2) This phenomenon is discussed somewhat in Bergman's paper, and in more detail in a 2010 paper by Eric Bettinger. It's also touched on in a 1996 meta-analysis of summer learning loss by Cooper et al. The paper about summer learning loss is interesting, since it finds that although on average the summer learning loss is greater in math, for poor kids it is greater in reading. Food for thought.

Kids talking about not reading

Below is a video made by the estimable Penny Kittle, whose brand new title, Book Love, ably makes the case for an English curriculum of 50% free-choice reading.  The video's a bit self-serving, but that seems to be the nature of a lot of the discourse in the education world. In any case, she's doing the right thing, and I imagine her students are reading almost as much in her class as they say they are.  Here's hoping that this title, coming not so long after the similar but less amiably titled Readicide (though many years after the wonderful Mary Leonhardt books--and perhaps other books I don't know about yet), heralds a new age in adolescent literacy.

Here's the video:

Election Special: Presidential Prep Schools (Part II: English Department Goals)

I have suggested that what comes naturally to us as teachers may not always be the best practice, and I often think that teachers can learn a lot from looking beyond our own classrooms: from looking at the way our literature portrays reading; from looking at homeschooling; from looking at good educational research; and from looking at medicine and doctors (and the health care field more generally).

Another place we should look is at schools that might be different from our own.  Leafstrewn High is a public school--a relatively privileged one (our community has, I think, the most graduate degrees per person of any in the United States), but still a public school.  Anybody who can get an apartment in the town, we enroll.  In this we are distinctly different from private schools, which can select, filter, exclude, hand-pick, etc.  So I thought I'd see if private school English departments speak about their practices in the same way we do--or the same way public schools that serve less privileged students do.  Because it's election season, and because our two candidates both went, as do their children and most of the other super-elite in this country, to private school, I looked up the English department web pages for the two presidential prep schools, the Punahou Academy and the Cranbrook School. 

Interestingly, what I found was in many ways similar to what Leafstrewn's English Department says and does.  The mission statements at these elite private schools, however, go far beyond the skills and standards-based philosophy that is in effect at many schools serving less privileged student populations (1). Whereas schools for the less privileged often describe a narrow view of reading, describing skill development and little else, schools to which the elite send their children seem to consider reading quite broadly, mentioning skill development but quickly moving on to morals, imagination, ethics, spirituality and passion.

The mission statement of our English Department
Several years ago, the Leafstrewn English department took a month or so and wrote a mission statement.  Here it is:

We teach all students to think critically and creatively, to read carefully, and to write well.  In our classes we foster relationships, engagement, independence and confidence.

That's a pretty good statement.  I like the attention to things that are not English-specific: thinking, relationships, engagement, independent, confidence.  I could wish that the reading and writing were more clearly tied to these aims, but as a short statement, it's good enough for me.  The Presidential prep school English Departments have websites with much longer statements, statements that draw out the connections more clearly.

Cranbrook: Reading as a "lifelong habit" that "transforms the individual"
The Cranbrook School, Mitt Romney's alma mater, seems to be fairly traditional.  Though it has progressed beyond the days in which gay students were baited and bullied and given impromptu tonsures, it still, even in its English Department, "remains committed to gender segregation."  Like Leafstrewn, it has core texts and doesn't offer elective English courses until Senior year.  It also, however, unlike many public schools, is willing to openly state goals that go beyond mere academic skills.

Cranbrook does talk about explicit instruction in vocabulary, grammar, and reading "rigorous training" in written expression, but it also talks about how its faculty will share their "passion" for literature. Cranbrook's English faculty "believe that the study of literature is a life-long habit"; they also believe that "reading transforms individuals beyond the development of academic competency," helping them "gain the capacity to take reasoned positions on complex questions and develop an appreciation of other cultures" and thus become "better citizens."

Punahou: Reading as a spiritual and ethical pursuit
The Punahou Academy as a whole is interested in more than just academics (and does not see that interest as limiting student freedom); the Punahou English department seems to be at the center of this endeavor.  As the course catalog explains: "In order to educate the heart as well as the mind, Punahou students are asked to explore their spirituality, examine their ethical systems, and develop their roles in communities." To fulfill this requirement students must take a course in which these issues are directly addressed; among the regular offerings with a Spiritual, Ethical and Community Responsibility (SECR) credit are only two Social Studies courses, but nine English courses.

The Punahou English Department's statement of its own goals (1) is also remarkable, saying nothing about reading fluently, or with comprehension, or with proficiency.  No, Punahou has something much more ambitious in mind: "The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature."  To read compassionately!  And then to act!  Despite a faint tinge of noblesse oblige (remember "compassionate conservatism"?), these are admirable aims. I am troubled by the fact that both candidates, like so many others in the ruling class, went to fancy private schools that are cut off, even more than places like Leafstrewn, from the masses. Nevertheless, if I had to vote for a candidate based solely on his prep school's English department mission statement, I would have to vote for Obama (despite his continuing war-making, extra-judicial executions and willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare).

What do these goals imply?
I'm interested in these goals in and of themselves--good reading may make us more compassionate, though I wonder if other things are more important!--but I'm also curious about whether having a focus that goes beyond skills (what someone a colleague of mine was reading called "authentic" reading and writing) might actually improve skills more than a set of aims that remained focused primarily on skills.  Some research suggests that this is so, and it would make sense.  That also seems to be our thinking at Leafstrewn; I hope we keep it that way.

*******************************************************

Footnotes:

(1)

I looked at the websites of twenty or so high schools across the country that serve less privileged students.  At most of these high schools the websites were terrible, and even at those that did have a substantial web presence, there was often no information about academics at all.  Some promised information and then didn’t give it; the high school my mom and several of my grandparents attended, in Southern Ohio, had a page on its website entitled “Curriculum”, but this “Curriculum” page showed only the Bell Schedule and the grade scale (A: 93-100; B: 86-92; etc.).  At most of the high schools that did describe their curriculum or mission, the English department statements put a great emphasis on skills, saying nothing about passion, imagination, morality, or spirituality.  Here are two representative statements:

KIPP NYC College Prep

The English Department at KIPP NYC College Prep offers a rigorous four-year course of study that fosters critical thinking, reading and analytical skills, technological proficiency and creativity, and sophistication in writing. With the skills gained through this course of study, Students graduating from KIPP NYC College Prep will be prepared for success in the academic and  professional areas  of  their  choice.

Brighton High:

 The Language Arts Department offers a standards-based curriculum which offers a variety of required courses and electives. These courses not only meet the Massachusetts State Frameworks but also prepare students to be successful in English at the college level. The Boston Public Schools curriculum is taught in all grades (9-12). Students in grades 9-12 have over 7 hours of instruction per week in Language Arts.

Students read literature of various genres and are asked to carefully analyze and respond to literature through key questions, as well as developing their fluency through reading independently selected texts. Writing is taught as a process; students are encouraged to revise and rewrite as frequently as necessary, and representative samples of student writing are published on a regular basis. Vocabulary and language skills are integrated throughout the language arts curriculum. 

(2)

From the Punahou course catalog, available here:

The goal of the Academy English Department is to teach students to read compassionately, think exactingly, write clearly and gracefully, and act with the compassion, exactitude, clarity and grace they derive from their engagement with the English language and with literature. We believe that offering students a wide variety of curricular challenges with language and literature will increase their capacity for perception, feeling, reason, and tolerance; nourish their imaginations; and inspire their actions.

"Skills" vs. "Process"

A colleague's post
I don't often think about the fact that I didn't go to Ed. School, but once in a rare while I wonder if I maybe missed something important. Last week, one of my colleagues wrote, on an internal forum, a very interesting post about different approaches to teaching reading; when I got to the part about how she was "haunted" by "the skills versus process debate" from Ed. School, I thought: Huh?  What skills versus process debate?  How did I miss that?  Fortunately, as I read on, I think I got the basic idea.

My colleague wrote that she fears her focus on skills undermines her goals around process.  She believes that many of our students in the "standard" (lower) track need a fair amount of explicit teaching of skills--the "training wheels" of checklists, rubrics, graphic organizers, etc.; and, while she sometimes worries that students can become dependent on these training wheels, she also thinks that, for almost all of our students, taking the training wheels off leads to high anxiety and not particularly interesting or imaginative work.

This tension played out, according to my colleague, around a recent passage paper that every tenth grader at Leafstrewn was assigned.  The tenth grade teachers, she writes, decided to take a less didactic or "skills"-focused approach to the assignment; I think this means the teachers didn't provide a lot of scaffolding--didn't tell students to make double-entry notes, didn't give a graphic organizer outline, didn't provide a list of literary terms and concepts, etc.  The students were simply, as I take it, given the assignment.

The resulting papers, my colleague reports, were "somewhere between terrible and mediocre."  My colleague now wonders whether she should have done more explicit teaching around the assignment.  Such explicit "skills" teaching might, she suggests, have made the assignment more like a "paint by numbers exercise," but she is also believes it would have led to better papers.

In her conclusion, my colleague writes that we need both skills and process.  She discusses an article by Lisa Delpit (here I felt on firmer ground--I haven't been to Ed. School, but I have read Other People's Children!).  As my colleague writes, Delpit's argument was that "the students who are most in need of the cultural power and capital schools provide get shortchanged by the skills vs. process debate," at least as it was playing out in the eighties.  Delpit calls the debate "fallacious; the dichotomy," she says, "is false."

My reaction
This was all very interesting to me--perhaps partly because I missed out on the debate fifteen years ago, but also because I worry about the issue all the time, though I don't use the term "process."  I wondered, as I was reading, if the debate was really so fallacious and the dichotomy so false as Delpit claimed. There is a distinction here, and it is significant in the real world, as my colleague's story about the tenth grade passage paper shows.

The story about the tenth grade passage was really interesting; like my colleague, I'm not sure what to conclude.  I do, however, have some questions.

One question is whether we teachers maybe tend to focus too much on the short term when we are thinking about lesson planning and assessment.  My colleague thinks, rightly, that her students' papers would have been better if she had given them, along with the assignment, specific strategies for how to do it.  I'm sure that's true; on the other hand, she shouldn't hold herself responsible for the performance of students that she had never seen six weeks before.  So part of it is that she was the coach of a team whose players she had never coached before, and if they don't know the fundamentals, like basic literary terms, or how to mark up a text, then (a) that's not her fault, and (b) giving them a quick primer on those fundamentals is probably not going to make a lasting difference.

Another question the story raises for me is what we should think of as the fundamental skills we are responsible for helping our students acquire.  Is writing a passage paper a fundamental skill?  Is doing double-entry notes?  Is knowing literary terms?  Maybe they are--although I realize that I myself didn't know what "double-entry notes" were until a couple of weeks ago, and I have certainly never made them myself.  But if passage papers, double-entry notes and literary terms are fundamental skills, akin, say, to the two-on-one in hockey, then our tenth graders probably should have been practicing them in earlier grades. 

But maybe the fundamental skills are deeper--even more "fundamental".  That is, maybe they are the more or less unconscious skills of reading, thinking and writing, and the skill of being able to quickly adapt those skills to a new assignment.  Maybe writing a passage paper is like running a particular play on a two-on-one, or like playing a box-like zone defense when one of your five skaters is in the penalty box.  Running a particular play, or killing a penalty with the box defense, is something that a young hockey player might not be too familiar with, so it might need to be taught, and if it weren't taught, you might expect the results to be "somewhere between terrible and mediocre."

So these are the questions my colleague's story raises for me.  My gut instinct--but I'm not sure I'm right--is always to think that we should focus less on teaching particularized skills than on trying to make sure that our students are doing a lot of reading, a lot of talking about what they read, and a lot of revising of their own writing. My gut instinct is perhaps partly supported by what's been happening in youth hockey in recent years.  According to my friend John, the President of the youth hockey program my kids play in, there has been a realization, in recent years, that a lot of hockey practices have been too focused on explicit instruction, that kids were not getting enough time actually playing the game.  John told me that in the past, coaches used to be able to assume that their players were coming to them with thousands of hours of pond hockey and/or street hockey experience under their belts. That experience gave them a feel for the puck on the stick, a sense of how to shoot, how to pass, how, on defense, to challenge the guy with the puck.  These thousands of hours cannot, John said, be made up for with explicit instruction. 

If the analogy with English class holds (my grandmother tells me that these analogies are suspect--that she mistrusts analogous thinking so much that her memoir, soon to be published, contains only one metaphor!), then I'm still not sure what the lesson is.  What I fall back on is my feeling that if the task is meaningful, and if we can get the students to engage with it, then they will need some explicit instruction and lots of practice.  We shouldn't be too worried about teaching a skill right at the same time we're assessing it.  If the tenth grade common assignment was an initial or formative assessment, then teaching them about double-entry notes probably isn't appropriate.  If it was summative, then it should have come later in the year.  But above all, it is not our job to make the student's product excellent now, while we are teaching them, but to help the students become capable of making their own products excellent in the future.

Trying to think this through leaves me wondering what "process" is, and whether, if I would tend to downplay lots of explicit skill instruction (as opposed to practice and fine-tuning), that means I am more a "process" kind of person.  Maybe, but I don't love that term.  ("Process," to me, sounds like architecture-school claptrap--the kind of hooey untethered to the real world that gets you the kinds of buildings featured on a website I make sure to check at least twelve times a year: the eyesore of the month.)  The process that matters is the process of the students themselves being focused on the product--which I guess is the idea, but using the term "process" implies that the product is not important.  It is--and so the key next step would be to have the tenth graders look back at their own papers and try to make them better--which would require understanding why they were terrible or mediocre in the first place.

One third of my ninth grade class reports never finishing a book in middle school

I do not want to be one of those teachers who says, "My students never read a book until I inspired them, and now they love reading!"  I don't think I'm particularly inspiring, and I know that many of my students are never going to LOVE reading.  Nevertheless, I am going to report a conversation my students and I had in one of my ninth grade classes yesterday.

After my ninth graders read their free-choice books for 30 minutes (yesterday was a 70-minute block), I asked them to discuss with a neighbor how the reading in class was going, how it compared with reading at home, and when they had first started to enjoy reading.  After a couple of minutes I let them share out if they wanted to. The sharing led to a pretty interesting ten-minute discussion of reading in general, and for the first time in this class a number of kids talked openly about how little they had read for much of their lives.

First it came out that about half of the students much preferred reading in school to reading at home, because in school there weren't nearly as many distractions.  Of course, the other half of the students preferred reading at home for exactly the same reason!

Then about six kids talked about how and why they had first started to read.  Every story had the same structure: "Until I was in __th grade, I hated reading.  It was hard for me, I was bad at it, and I hated it.  Then in ___the grade I read _________, and that book made me like reading.  Now I still don't like reading just anything, but if I get a book I like, I'll read right through it."  The grade at which these epiphanies occurred varied, but for every one of the six kids who talked, the epiphany had happened in fifth grade or later.  Three of the kids said they had never enjoyed reading at all until this year--one of them after taking a summer literacy class that did a lot of in-class independent reading and two of them after finding books they liked in the first month of school in my class..

One of those kids, who said he had never really enjoyed a book until he read John Green's Paper Towns (he's now in the middle of The Fault in Our Stars  and liking it less), said that in fact he had, during the two years he spent in middle school (he went to BB&N), never finished a whole book.  I was surprised, and someone else said, "Me too."  I pressed them, but they asserted that this was true.  I heard other rumblings, so I said, Okay, raise your hand if you didn't finish a single whole book in middle school.  A third of the class raised their hands.

Could they possibly be telling the truth?  I told this story to a few of my colleagues, and one of them couldn't believe it.  I myself think it's plausible.  They didn't say they hadn't ever read a book, only that over those two years they had never finished a book.  If the class is structured in a traditional way, with a lot of emphasis on whole-class texts, and if teachers don't pay close attention to what kids are reading independently, with a significant amount done in class, then it is pretty easy for students to get away without reading much.

Again, I am not telling this story because I think that trying to create a culture of reading is going to make these kids love reading.  Many of them will probably still not like it very much.  But I do think there is a lot of room for improvement if a third of the students in that class can have gotten through the last two years without finishing a single book.  To change that all you have to do is give them quiet time and books to read.

Beyond the issue of whether students are reading or not, there lies another, deeper issue: sometimes I'm not even sure that having kids read more is going to help them that much.  That's why the question that a colleague of mine recently asked--How do we measure the effects of what we're doing?--is so haunting.  Even if our students read five times as much this year as last year, and even if it makes a real difference to them, how will we know?

I'll try to hold off on worrying that until another time.  For now, I'm just going to be happy that most of my students seem to be enjoying the reading they're doing in class.

Studying English is a chronic condition; we must do "the same old things in the same way"; that's okay!

I. English class is repetitive

At our department meeting this week, one of my colleagues said that she feels discouraged when she looks at what her daughter is doing in English class in sixth grade, because it looks so similar to what we are doing in our high school classes at Leafstrewn.    My colleague said that on the first day of school, when she tells her students about the cool things on her syllabus, her students look like they've heard it all before.  "Oh great, we're going to write another profile," she imagined her students thinking. "Let's see, we did one of those in fourth grade--and sixth grade--and seventh grade--and..."

We laughed about it, but the story points up a distinctive aspect of English class that I've written about before: English, unlike math, science, French, or most other subjects, does not have a well-defined body of knowledge that it is our job to transmit.  In this English is much more similar to a sport--soccer, for instance, or running.  It does not seem totally unreasonable to write up year-by-year curriculum standards for math.  My daughter, in second grade, is just beginning to think about multiplication.  My son, in seventh grade, is beginning to think algebraically.  While it's true that different students may move through these topics at dramatically different rates (my son had a homeschooled friend who was learning integral calculus in second grade), the topics seem distinctly different.  In English, the tasks are largely the same year after year.

My daughter last year, in first grade, wrote an argumentative essay (like many of her classmates, she suggested that we should not despoil the planet).  The length and sophistication of her argument was not quite up to what my ninth graders do, but the task itself was basically the same, and even much of the vocabulary was the same.  Her teacher taught that one needed evidence to support one's main idea, that one's evidence should be relevant, that one should consider one's audience, and so on--concepts that sound very much like one of the state's Writing Standards for both grades 9-10 and grades 11-12: "Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence."  This is, again, like sports (my 12-year-old son's hockey team practices skating, passing, shooting, exactly the same fundamental skills practiced by six-year olds, and by the Bruins), and this is why the Massachusetts State Curriculum Frameworks are so hard for me to take seriously.  Their aim to provide what I think is called "scope and sequence" results in the absurdity of  seeming to suggest that only in grade four do students need to begin to "Choose words and phrases to convey ideas precisely" (L.4.3a.)

II. Studying English is a chronic condition

This summer, I read a book by Arthur Kleinman about doctoring and chronic illness that argues against strictly uniform, standardized systems of care, suggesting that they represented and produced a "dangerous hubris."    "Uncertainty," Kleinman suggests, "must be as central to the experience of the practitioner as it is to the patient."  Much of what his book says seems applicable to education in general, and English class in particular.  Rigid curricula, scripted lessons, the kind of backwards planning that assumes a pre-ordained destination: we can all come up with educational parallels to Kleinman's "complete...systems of care that claim to answer wholesale each and every one of the dilemmas faced by patients, families, and clinicians (and in a standardized manner, yet!)."

Kleinman's book is talking specifically about the chronically ill, and he often distinguishes what he says about chronic illness from the different truths that may be seen in cases of acute illness.  He says, for instance, that the doctor who cares for the chonically ill has more time to get things right, to build a relationship with his patient, to consider more fully his patient's social position and larger life situation, than an acute-care doctor, who is seriously constrained by the urgent necessity to act as quickly as possible.  Considering this distinction, it struck me that teachers, who deal with their students over the course of a whole year on an almost daily basis, are much more in the position of doctors for the chronically ill than in the position of doctors dealing with acute illness.  An ER doctor wants uniformity and certainty--a script, a checklist, an algorithm--while we teachers have the luxury of knowing that if we take the time to get to know our students' individual needs they will not die before we act.

The experience of the ER doctor may in some ways, however, parallel the experience of teachers in disciplines like math, science, or History.  If by the end of the week everyone in the class needs to learn the quadratic formula, or what the cell wall is and does, then perhaps a script or a checklist might make sense.  But in English especially, we are working on the same skills and tasks over and over, and every kid's needs are different, and the learning goals we have are not, and cannot be, acute.  Our student's do not have to learn the basic facts about Shay's Rebellion by next week.  Instead, they need to learn to read more nimbly, to think more deeply, to write more clearly, profoundly and coherently--or, as the state standards put it, to "Choose words and phrases to convey ideas precisely."

In this sense, being an English student in particular is a chronic condition.  Just as the essence of having a chronic condition is that you can never be cured, that you are always working on the same underlying issues, the essence of being an English student is that you can never be fully educated, that you are always improving the same basic skills. A math problem can be solved; no piece of writing is ever perfect.  If we see education in this way, Kleinman's discussion of chronic illness is interesting.  "We must begin," Kleinman says, "with the premise that chronic disease by definition cannot be cured, that indeed the quest for cure is a dangerous myth that serves both patient and practitioner poorly."

Is it possible, then, that the quest for mastery is a "dangerous myth" that serves both teacher and student poorly?  Perhaps! (1)

III. So is being repetitive a cause for despair?

No. The fact that we are working on the same tasks over and over is no reason for despair, any more than Claude Julien should despair when he has his players practice their passing for the umpteenth time.  We should think of ourselves as coaches as much as possible.  A good coach doesn't do much teaching; instead, she "runs a good practice."  In a good soccer practice, there shouldn't be much standing around, and there should probably be more than one ball on the field. In a good practice, the coach will often be helping one kid while other kids do drills or practice skills on another part of the field.  A good practice will include activities that will be useful for every single kid on the team, from the most skilled to the least skilled.

Yes, we are doing the same things over and over, but what we are doing is not only of immense practical importance, it also provides an opportunity, as one of my favorite poems says, "for love to continue and be gradually different."

IV. A poem!

Lack of novelty is a favorite theme of postmodern poetry (as Robert Hass wittily puts it: "All the new thinking is about loss./ In this it resembles the old thinking...").  One of my favorite poems, "Late Echo," by John Ashbery, is about this issue, and I kept thinking about it this week as I pondered our chronic condition.

Ashbery begins by feeling that "there really is nothing left to write about."  This is analogous to feeling like there is nothing left to teach (As Mallarme put it, "The flesh is sad, alas, and I have taught all the reading strategies"). But although Ashbery begins by saying that there really is nothing left to write about, he does not then, as Mallarme does, fantasize about sailing away to a tropical isle. Instead, the rest of Ashbery's poem is a revision of and counter to the ennui and discouragement of repetition; instead, his poem is a paean to repetition and dailiness, a pep talk to himself.

For immediately after saying there is nothing left to write about, Ashbery revises:

   Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

   In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

   For love to continue and be gradually different.

Poetry is always about seeing the same things differently; so is English class!  We. too, need to repeat the same things over and over, to write about things in the same way, to read books in the same way, to discuss texts in the same way, to love words in the same way, so that love may continue and, as Ashbery puts it in another of the poem's wonderful, unpredictable shifts of meaning, "be gradually different."

The rest of the poem is a beautiful elaboration of this idea, of the idea that being merely a "talking engine," and one moreover who suffers, as our adolescent students do, from "chronic inattention," can, over time, with continual, loving repetition, reveal an "unprepared knowledge," which the poem doesn't have to say is a lot deeper and more satisfying than the "prepared knowledge" of scripted lesson plans.

Now off to dinner and a birthday party!

Appendix: The full poem...

LATE ECHO (by John Ashbery)

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.


Footnote:
(1) Kleinman goes on to say that the real goal is not a cure, but the "reduction of disablement," that is to say, "reducing the frequency and severity of exacerbations." This last goal is not easy to map onto education.  Kleinman is essentially saying that the doctor of a chronically ill patient should try mainly to help the patient not get worse.  This would be an odd, if not quite perverse goal for a teacher to adopt, but it is a goal that strikes a certain chord in me. When I first started teaching high school full time, I adopted as my explicit goal and first principle--and I told my students this straight out--one of the first principles of the Hippocratic oath, to "do no harm."  Back then I was haunted by the possibility that school is doing as much harm as good, that books like Wounded by School and Readicide; How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It are partly right.  Over ten years of teaching and parenting, my views have changed (largely because I've seen what a humane place school can be, and how supportive and wonderful schools can be to many students, especially those who are wounded outside of school), but I still think it's important to try not to do harm!

Two curricula: one for the elite, another for the masses

     The elite are "nurtured"and "inspired" toward a "love" for reading

Like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Bill Gates did not go to a public high school.  Instead, Gates, a scion of an elite Seattle family, went to a fancy prep school called Lakeside.  Lakeside's English curriculum is quite different from the Common Core Standards that Gates paid millions to have created and is spending millions now to promote, and that Obama and Duncan are pushing as well, through their "Race to the Top" (sic) program.  The Common Core standards suggest long and detailed classroom analyses of extremely difficult texts, and offer absolutely nothing in the way of requiring extensive reading or encouraging a love of reading.  This curriculum is dramatically different from the ones offered at Lakeside, where Bill Gates's kids now go, but I wouldn't expect Lakeside to change its ways anytime soon.

Here are the mission statements for Lakeside's English programs at the middle school and high school levels:

    "The Middle School English Department is dedicated to nurturing a lifelong love of reading
    and writing. We strive to create a community of readers and writers that inspires students to
    experiment with a variety of written forms."

    "Lakeside’s [High School] English Department’s highest goals are to inspire in students a 
     love of literature and to help students become great writers."

Both the middle school and high school statements use the word "love" and emphasize writing in an "authentic voice" and "artistically."  The curriculum is notably literary and cultural, and not narrowly designed to ready students for the business or political world.

It's also notable that these English departments aren't afraid to talk about encouraging a love of reading.  Encouraging a love for reading might seem like an obvious goal of English class, but in the Orwellian world of the Education-Industrial-Complex that goal is controversial.

     The masses are given "instruction" aimed at "proficiency"

This Orwellian madness surfaced in 2006, when the new President of the International Reading Association came out against encouraging a love for reading.  Professor Tim Shanahan, one of the biggest names int he reading world, had already made clear that he was against natural reading: he was a prominent member of the "National Reading Panel" (2000) that after a cockeyed look at the evidence, argued at length for explicit instruction and dishonestly claimed that there was no evidence that independent silent reading was effective.  In 2006, he became President of the International Reading Association, which has as one of its three stated purposes, in addition to improving reading instruction and promote reading proficiency, to "encourage reading and an interest in reading" (Reading Today, June 2006). Shanahan's first move as President of the Association was to say that while he could support improved instruction and promoting proficiency, he was not in favor of "encouraging reading and an interest in reading."  Although Shanahan can be eloquent and passionate about why reading is important, he apparently thinks it's inappropriate and dangerous to encourage interest in it.

For this, Shanahan was not laughed out of the profession; he remains one of the big shots of the reading world. This past week, the thoughtful, intelligent instructor of my PD workshop referred to Shanahan in glowing terms and gave us a couple of his articles.  How could this be?  How could the President of the International Reading Association argue against teachers' trying to encourage "an interest in reading"?!  Bill Gates's kids have teachers that nurture a lifelong love of reading, but the rest of us can't even encourage an interest in reading?  Are there different rules for private and public schools?  Well, yes--according to Shanahan.

     Interest in reading and "freedom of choice"

For, although his central (if insane) argument is that encouraging an interest in reading is somehow inimical to effective teaching, and that we should be "jealous of instructional time" which would apparently be wasted by encouraging student interest in our subject, Shanahan also argues at length that it is beyond a public school teacher's mandate to encourage interest in his subject.  In order to make this argument, Shanahan shifts the terms of the debate from the words "interest" to "pleasure" and then to "desire" and then to "love", and argues suggests that as "institutional beings," teachers have no right to try to instill love or desire in anyone.  A teacher's "public responsibility," according to Shanahan, does not include "encouraging reading," which is, he says, a "personal goal" that might carry "danger."  What danger?  Apparently encouraging reading would limit "freedom of choice."

That encouraging an interest in reading could be considered as limiting to freedom of choice is obviously Orwellian.  As Bill Gates found when he went from public school to private school, and as Shanahan should know, given his explanation of why he is passionate about teaching reading, encouraging an interest in reading actually promotes freedom of choice, while merely teaching it dispassionately as a useful skill is usually a good way to limit freedom. For Shanahan public schools, although obligated to impose explicit instruction of the kind Bill Gates found so tedious when he went to public elementary school, are not allowed to offer students encouragement and nurturing of the very practices that will allow freedom.

     Conclusion: We need to create a culture of reading, even in public schools


Why is Shanahan so uncomfortable with the notion of encouraging interest in reading, even though he acknowledges that reading is important?  Why does Gates spend his billions to promote increased class size and increased testing, even though he sends his kids to a school that brags about its average class size of 16 and that manages to have 40% of its Seniors be National Merit Scholarship Finalists without having done any of the kind of high stakes testing Gates is working to impose on the rest of us?  The obvious answer for Shanahan is that he has spent his career promoting explicit skill instruction, and for Shanahan to admit that it's important to teach reading as an organic, pleasurable experience, or to admit that reading is largely a socially mediated activity, might seem to him to call into question his life's work.

As for Gates, perhaps he doesn't know how to address the social and cultural aspects of learning, or perhaps he thinks the changes he's pushing will lead indirectly to an improved cultural and social environment in the classroom.  My guess is that Gates sees public school as properly different from what he offers his own children. When Gates himself switched from public school to private school, he noticed a dramatic cultural shift.  As he recalls, "it was a change at first.  And the idea of just being kind of a goof-off wasn't the sort of high reward position like it had been in public schools." It seems possible that, partly based on this experience, Gates doesn't think it possible to change that culture.

But he should think so, for in the same interview I quoted before, he offers an excellent example of a public institution that encourages reading. Gates remembers that when he was a kid, the library would give you a gold star if you read ten books over the summer, and two stars if you read twenty.  According to Gates, he and "five or six girls" would compete to see who could read the most books.  For reading is a solitary activity, but reading is also a social activity, and it can be encouraged.

The first job of every high school English class should be creating a culture of reading.  This is difficult to do when many of our expert authorities don't believe that interest matters, and think that human beings are mechanisms that have only to be properly programmed for "proficiency." The best way make sure that our public schools are not like the one Bill Gates went to, where "being a goof-off was more socially rewarding," is to replace the interest in goofing off with an interest in reading and thinking, and that can only happen if we encourage that interest.  We must make sure that our public schools do "encourage reading"--even inspire a love for it.  If reading is, and has always been, strongly linked to social class, we don't have to accept the social class divisions that we are given.

To Kill a Mockingbird and Literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can we get kids to read more?

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

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

Reading Volume of Fifth Grade Students at Different Levels of Achievement

Achievement                         Minutes of                                       Words per

Percentile                            Reading per day                                     year

90th                                           40.4                                             2, 357, 000

50th                                           12.9                                                601, 000

10th                                             1.6                                                  51, 000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He read it in a day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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