Results of a survey on independent reading

I asked one of my ninth grade classes to write my a quick note about how independent reading went for them this year. I asked specifically about how they felt about independent reading, how it had changed, if at all, over the course of the year, and what they foresaw for the future. A few kids were absent; I got thirteen responses.  Two were weakly positive; two were strongly negative, and nine were strongly positive.

I expected to get more responses like the two that were weakly positive, saying that reading "wasn't bad" but not granting that it was actually good.  Instead, most students seemed pretty enthusiastic.  Maybe they were just saying what I was obviously hoping they would say, but I like to think they were really pretty happy to get an English class that gave them a lot of time and encouragement to read what they were interested in.  The strongly negative responses were perhaps the most interesting.  One of the kids read quite a bit (a couple dozen books), and the other read very little (four or five books).  But both predict they will never read voluntarily.  This is probably true.  The tone of these comments is a bit defiant ("Reading didn't actually change my year in any way whatsoever"; "independent reading this year sucked.  I hated it."), but I think they were pleased to get a chance to vent their feelings about having to do something every day that they feel they're really bad at.

In the end, I think the independent reading was a good idea.  I have some ideas about how to change it in the future, but I still think this is a direction we should all be taking.

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Here are the responses, unedited except for redacting the name of one elementary school.

Weakly positive:

• It wasn't bad.  I liked it better than class work.  If the book was good, I liked it.  It got better over the year.  I'll probably read more.
• I think that the independent reading this year wasn't that bad.  It helped me read a lot, which increased my vocabulary.  I have read more this year than last year.

Strongly negative:

• My independent reading has greatly increased.  I still don't like reading, but if I have to then I will.  Reading didn't actually change my year in any way whatsoever.  I most likely will never read again unless I have to.
• I thought the independent reading this year sucked.  I hated it.  I never liked to read, and I never will.  the only time I would like to read is if I find a book that I actually like that doesn't happen often.  I Hate independent reading and I think you shouldn't do it next year.

Strongly positive:

• My independent reading got a lot better for me this year as far as how much reading i did.  Because of the amount of reading we did this year i will continue to read a lot and enjoy reading.
• I really started to like reading again.  This really going to help me in the future because I want to actually pick up a book and read compared to last year when I would spark note everything.
• By reading a lot this year, it made me read more books that I really liked.  I also read a lot at home.  I definatly became a better reader and really enjoyed the unit. I think that I will read a lot this summer and next year.  I haven't read more in my life than I did this year.
• Independent reading this year was at least for me an improvement over the past couple of years. At __________ our teachers never forced us to read that much because we would always be reading a book as a class.  The only problem was I didn't read that much compared to the others in our class.  I would like to keep improving on the amount that I read because my family do so much of it.  This was still a very good year for me even if it may not look like much it's probably the most that I've ever read in my entire life.
• I liked independent reading a lot more than assigned reading. It gave me an option to find a book I liked rather than a boring book. I didn't read many books over the course of the year, But I read more than I did last year. I would like to read more in the future.
• I thought that the independent reading this year was a great idea.  I hate reading as a class because I read slower so I have trouble staying up to date.  It has made me more enthusiastic about reading.  I think I will definately do more independent reading this summer.  At first I wasn't thrilled with the idea of reading on my own but as the year progressed I began to enjoy it.  Thank you for encouraging me to read more and thus making me enjoy it more. Definately do this next year.
• Independent reading this year has helped me advance to a faster reader.  I've read 3 books the whole way through this year, and I haven't done that before.  I've challenged myself with more challenging books this year and I've also figured out what genre I'm most interested in.
• Independent reading really opened my eyes to reading more.  Some books I really liked and some books I hated.  Independent reading in class really improved my reading skills.  I think you should continue to allow your students to do independent reading.
• I thought independent reading was great for me.  Whenever I have to read, I really feel like I am reading for myself.  Reading did change for me.  I have developed my interest and skills in reading. In the future, reading will be closer to my fashion.

Waldorf Schools are an interesting natural experiment showing that explicit reading instruction in the very early grades may be unnecessary

We have some family friends whose kids used to go to a (private) Waldorf school nearby.  The kids were wonderful, but I didn't know much about the school or its methods.  A few days ago, when I was saying something about whether children needed to read "informational text" in the very early grades, my wife said, "That's silly. Waldorf schools don't teach ANY reading until second grade, and those kids end up just fine."

I looked this up, and, as usual, my wife was right: Waldorf schools generally don't teach reading until second grade, use a whole language approach and avoid much explicit strategy instruction when they do teach it, and their students apparently end up reading just fine.  This is an important result, because it would seem to show that explicit reading instruction in Kindergarten and first grade may not be necessary, and that students certainly don't need to read much informational text to themselves in kindergarten and first grade in order to learn to read well later on.

Recent Studies
Until recently, most Waldorf schools were private, so skeptics could argue that if Waldorf students ended up being good readers, the students and families at those schools were distinctly different from the norm, so no comparison was possible.  Over the past couple of decades, however, a number of public Waldorf schools have opened, most of them in California, and two recent studies in the U.S.(Oberman 2007(pdf); Larrison et al. 2012) compare the results at these schools with those at traditional schools with comparable student demographics. The two studies find the same result: when it comes to reading on their own, students in the early grades in Waldorf schools are dramatically worse than their peers in regular schools, but by the later grades, the Waldorf students have caught up or surpassed the regular-school students.

The graphic below shows some of the results obtained in the 2012 study. The scores of the Waldorf students start well below average, then catch up by fourth grade, then seem to pull ahead.

These results are striking. When the same researchers looked only at the California Waldorf schools, so as to avoid issues with cross-state comparisons, the same pattern was seen, though with less dramatic divergence in the upper grades. When Oberman did a similar comparison on a more limited scale and with data from two years earlier, she found a somewhat similar pattern--Waldorf students starting out behind and catching up, if not pulling ahead.  A New Zealand study comes to the same conclusion: Waldorf students do badly on reading tests when they are 6 and 7, but by the time they are entering adolescence, they have caught up or even pulled ahead.

Conclusions
Now, of course the students and families at these schools are self-selecting, and of course there may be other ways to explain away these results, and of course this is not a very large body of scholarly literature.  Nevertheless, I can't find any studies that contradict these three, and these results are consistent with thinking that what is important is not explicit instruction in discrete reading skills, and not reading a minimum proportion of informational text--but, instead, developing students minds by engaging their imaginations, creating a culture of engaged intellectual inquiry, doing lots of reading stories aloud and having them sing songs and repeat poems.

So these studies aren't definitive, but they are enough to call into further doubt the blithe assurances of people like Tim Shanahan and David Coleman that their preferred approach is consistent with the available empirical evidence.

The most exciting literacy scholarship being written today

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

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

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:

A kid who "hates" reading

I. "I hate reading!"

At the beginning of one of my classes last Thursday, I asked the kids to get out their books and start reading.  We frequently spend the first ten to fifteen minutes of class reading silently, and some students had already started; others were opening backpacks and digging out their independent reading books.  Then one girl--I'll call her "Karenna"--slammed her copy of The Lovely Bones on her desk and said, loudly: "Why do we have to read?  I hate reading.  We spend forty-five minutes a day reading.  Can't we do something else?"

This got everyone's attention, and we hadn't talked about this issue recently, so I decided to speak to the whole class.  I suggested that in fact we averaged about ten minutes a day of reading, and that we had only once or twice all year spent more than half an hour reading in class, and I said, as I often do, that reading was important, it was what we were there in English class to get better at, there was no way to get better than to actually do it, and most people would prefer to read a book of their own choosing.  Then I asked the class how many of them would prefer to do something else.  One other girl, a friend of the first one, raised her hand.

In any case, Karenna, I went on, I don't believe that you just never enjoy reading.  You are smart and interesting, and there are lots of different books in the world.  Maybe The Lovely Bones just isn't the right book for you.  What's a book you've enjoyed?

She admitted to having liked an Ellen Hopkins book she read earlier in the year.  Well, I said, even though you've tried other Ellen Hopkins books and haven't liked them, we know you CAN like to read.  You just need to find a new book.  Then I turned to her friend.

Her friend, who happened to be reading another Alice Sebold book, Lucky, cannily said, "Well, I like my book.  But I don't like reading.  I just don't enjoy the activity."

I thought about this for a second.  Clearly with these two kids I hadn't succeeded in "teaching a love of reading."  What to do?

II. Inappropro... what kids like?

I ended up sending Karenna down to the library to find another book.  I sent another student (not her friend) along with her, to help out.  The girl I sent didn't want to go--maybe she wanted to read?--but I told her that since she had already read dozens of books this year, missing twenty minutes of reading wouldn't hurt her--and besides, as an avid reader, she'd be able to help Karenna find a book.  But, the girl said, I don't like the library; I haven't been to the library all year. Okay, I replied, it will be good for you, too, then--you should get to know the library!

After they left, the rest of the class got down to business.  It wasn't long before Karenna's friend, the one who had backed her up and said that she, too, hated reading, called me over to tell me about what had happened in her book. Last week, this girl had been amazed that Alice Sebold's memoir had moved so abruptly away from the verdict in the trial of her rapist, without going into how it had affected her.  Now she wanted to let me know that Sebold had started discussing the longer term effects of her trauma.  "She's got PTSD," the girl informed me.   I said something appreciative, and moved on.  A few minutes later, the same girl called me back over and informed me, in a loud voice, that Sebold was doing crack and heroin.  A few minutes later she had to tell me that Sebold had gone to Germany and let a bunch of guys have sex with her all in a row.  I was duly horrified, and I think the girl appreciated my horror.

A few minutes later, as we were finishing up our twenty minutes of reading, the two other two girls returned from the library, the one who hated reading holding a copy of Lauren Myracle's l8r, g8r. Some adults don't like that book, focusing on the inappropriate sex--but maybe that's what some (all?) kids want to read about...

III.  What next?
I don't know yet how Karenna is liking l8r, g8r (and I wonder why she didn't start with the first book in the series!), but the day overall left me thinking about how I could have done a better job of encouraging these girls to find books they actually like. Karenna has been resistant since the beginning--I remember she told me on day one that she only liked Ellen Hopkins, and I had a talk with her very thoughtful mom on parents' night about how difficult it always was to get Karenna to read--but I think if I had been able to put in her hands a much wider variety of books, especially books that were easier than The Lovely Bones, then maybe by now she would have developed more "reading perseverance," as some people put it.

The best way to do this would be to have lots and lots of books in the classroom, since going to the library doesn't come easily to some kids (like the avid reader who hadn't yet been to the library), but I should have been taking the class to the library regularly, having kids booktalk more often, and talking often about how we find books.  (I also could have instituted a rule about how quickly you have to move through your book before you have to switch.  Karenna has been moving very slowly through The Lovely Bones for about a month now, and I should have forced her to switch.)

In any case, while independent reading has been working well for most of my students, there are some for whom it's not working.  I've often said that we need to be better at providing kids books to read and time to read them.  I've gotten much better at providing time; now I need to get better at providing books.

Classroom environments in elementary school and high school

Why is it that K-8 classrooms often seem better than high school classrooms? 
Like Nancie Atwell, I think we secondary English teachers can learn a lot from our elementary school colleagues. I remember thinking, when my son was in third grade, that the ELA curriculum he was getting (reader's and writer's workshop, basically) was in many ways better than what I was doing with my students, and much of the work I've done over the past few years has been trying, with mixed results, to replicate that feel in my own classes. It seems that every exciting curriculum idea I have, it turns out that elementary school teachers have been doing the same thing for years. I recently read a good book about reading conferences written by a third grade teacher (Conferring, by Patrick Allen); the book made a coherent, mature presentation of what my colleagues and I have been only beginning to investigate. It sometimes seems as if as if small bands of us high school teachers are hacking through the jungle in search of a lost garden that K-8 teachers rediscovered long ago.

What does the lost garden look like? 

In our department meeting last week, we were asked to list some things we would see if we spent ten minutes in an excellent English class.  Some of us came up with things like having a lesson plan on the board that students seemed to understand; others were more focused on whether there seemed to be evidence of engaged reading. When I got home, I asked the same question of my children, and my eight-year-old daughter said, "That's easy: no desks! Instead, you should have tables."  She did go on to list two other important things ("A nice teacher, and books--good books!"), but then she came back to the physical environment: "You should at least have a little cozy corner." My son, who's twelve, started by focusing on student independence ("kids should be working on their own projects 50% of the time"), but then he said, "oh, and there should be bean bag chairs and clipboards!"

My kids' focus on the physical space of the classroom, and in particular their insistence that an excellent English class would not have school desks, is well aligned with the practice of K-8 teachers. In the book I read about reading conferences, Patrick Allen has a section on the layout of the classroom.  He says that it is really important what the classroom looks and feels like, and he cites Debbie Miller and her book, Reading with Meaning, as inspiration. "Debbie taught me that beauty and organization are essential," Allen writes. "We have to be purposeful about how we set up our environment." This purposefulness is evident in the hours and hours that K-8 teachers spend in setting up their rooms.  We at the secondary level don't do the same, but maybe we should.

At Leafstrewn, we share classrooms, so it's not as easy to make your room your own--and even those teachers who do personalize their rooms end up with what could be seen as basically high-quality window-dressing.  My colleagues Rich, Steve and Mark all have wonderful, very distinctive rooms whose walls are covered with fascinating art, maps and memorabilia, whose corners are stuffed with interesting artifacts (bicycles, stuffed ravens, etc.). But even these classrooms conform to the same basic formula:  the teacher's desk and a chalkboard at the front, and student desks arranged in a semicircle or double-horseshoe around the rest of the room.  The bric-a-brac, maps and artwork personalize the rooms, but while students certainly seem to appreciate these distinctive rooms, just as they appreciate these distinctive teachers, the rooms still put the focus on the teacher, not on the students. It could be argued that these are still more rooms for teachers to teach in, than rooms for students to work and learn in.

Nevertheless, I haven't even done what Rich, Steve and Mark have done.  I have always assumed, I guess, that the environment didn't matter, that reading and writing were so inherently interesting that they could be done just about anywhere. But I'm starting to think the second-grade teachers might be right, and I want to start planning how I will move my own classroom more in their direction.  Can we move away from the teacher-focused semicircle of desks?

Is a different kind of classroom possible in a conventional high school?

When I taught second and third grade, we had tables and a cozy corner, but every high school English classroom I've ever been in has had desks with attached chairs, even though no one really likes those things (there's even a Facebook page about hating them).  Obviously there are lots of reasons to use these desks (flexibility being the main one, since the desks are so easy to move around within and among classrooms to suit different purposes), but I am curious: what would a different model of a high school classroom look like?

I could envision a classroom that would feel more like the room that houses Leafstrewn's program for kids making the transition back to school after being hospitalized or out for serious emotional or mental disorders.  That room has both tables and easy chairs, it has potted plants, it has a few computers, and it has a little library of books and magazines.  Whenever I go in there I always think: why would anyone want to go from this wonderful, comfortable environment back to a regular classroom?  If only my own classroom could be as welcoming, attractive and richly furnished!  A few easy chairs, tables instead of desks, a wall of bookcases...

Nevertheless, putting this scheme into practice would not be easy.  There are, first of all, real space constraints. The transitional program usually seems to have only about seven students in the room. High school kids are larger than 2^nd graders, and if we were to have tables instead of desks, it would be difficult to fit 26 students.  Another limitation is that tables are good for discussion, but they are also good for socializing.  I met with a librarian to talk about summer reading last week, and every few minutes she had to deal with trying to quiet kids down at the table they were sitting and supposedly working at (another issue at our school is that there are few attractive places besides the library for kids to hang out in, so the library is used as much for socializing, or for surfing the web, as for studying, and it’s rare that I see anybody sitting in the library and actually reading.  We need a literacy lounge!) Another problem is that we already have the desks...

What could be done within the constraints of our current rooms and desks?

1) I could get a few comfortable chairs.  Sitting in them could be a privilege…

2) I could have a tea corner.  Tea is calming, and students appreciate the vibe.  I think tea, in connection with a very serious attitude about reading, could make for a wonderful combination of treating the kids like students and treating them like human beings.

3) Classroom libraries!  This is really, really important.

4) In-class reading journals, for daily writing.  These could lead to a longer writing assignment that could be done at home—but in that case the notes in the journals would have to be transferred to computers during class time.

5) Space on the walls: for awesome student work, for students to put up raves about books they recommend to others, and for the teacher (me) to put up: things to remember; cool words of the week; the book(s) I’m reading now, and a list of all the books I have read over the course of the year.  Maybe students could put up the same things…

And what else?  What have I forgotten?  Is this impossible?  Is this important?  If the classroom changed, would the teaching practice have to change?  What do you think?

The best book I've read so far about teaching high school English

A lot of the good books about teaching reading are by and for K-8 ELA teachers.  I like Nancie Atwell's The Reading Zone, and I just read a good one by Patrick Allen about reading conferences, which said everything I have been groping toward over the past month or two.  I haven't read many books aimed at high school English teachers, but of the ones I have looked at, this one is the best:

The author, Mary Leonhardt, who taught for 37 years and ended her career at Concord-Carlisle, published a bunch of well-received books about reading aimed at parents, but this one is for teachers.  Leonhardt writes in a clear, common-sense style, and she is very wise.  Basically, she advocates a lot of self-selected reading and daily in-class reading.  No wonder I like it!

Summer Reading Blues

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

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

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

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




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



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

Who knew: Singapore is a den of Dewey-eyed hippies!

On this snow day, I'm about to get down to the business of reading what my students have written about the books they're reading, but I just spent about ten minutes psyching myself up by reading a bit of Pasi Sahlberg's book about Finland.  I haven't looked much into Finland, because it seemed to me that a lot of people who hold it up as a model are ignoring the huge differences between Finland's relatively equal society and our relatively cutthroat one, but Sahlberg's book is interesting.  One thing I learned from it has nothing to do with Finland at all, but with a country I think of as dramatically different: Singapore.

I always thought Singapore was a super-conservative city state that kept its culture business-friendly by such illiberal practices as cracking down on freedom of speech, executing a lot of people, and caning schoolchildren.  It may be that way, but this morning I learned (maybe everyone else already knows this?) that its Ministry of Education has been, over the past fifteen years, promoting a vision of education that even A. S. Neill might have admired.  Singapore's initiative is called:

TEACH LESS, LEARN MORE

That is a beautiful slogan, and it's elaborated with a full-on liberalizing zeal that must be partly necessitated by Singapore's history of cane-wielding Gradgrindian severity but was still inspiring even to me.  We in Leafstrewn are, I think, with them in theory, but not always in practice.  So during this week in which Mother Nature seems to be offering her own critique of high-stakes testing, here are some Singaporean lessons (from the Ministry of Education's website):

Remember Why We Teach -

More… Less… For the Learner   To Rush through the Syllabus  To Excite Passion  Out of Fear of Failure  For Understanding  To Dispense Information Only  For the Test of Life  For a Life of Tests

Reflect on What We Teach - 

More… Less… The Whole Child The Subject Values-centric Grades-centric Process Product Searching Questions Textbook Answers

Reconsider How We Teach - 

More…	Less…
Engaged Learning	Drill and Practice
Differentiated Teaching	‘One-size-fits-all’ Instruction
Guiding, Facilitating, Modelling	Telling
Formative and Qualitative Assessing	Summative and Quantitative Testing
Spirit of innovation and enterprise	Set Formulae, Standard Answers

How many books have our students read this year so far?

My assumption has long been that our students are not reading enough, and that the most important thing we could do to help them improve in this essential area would be to help them read more.  I just did a quick check of their reading logs and my own records, and we put up some stickers on our chart--so I'm going to spend a quick post on how it's going.


Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:

Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)

Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)

Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal.  (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two.  My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)

This year: slight improvement

I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more.  We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts.  I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading.  This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:

Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)

(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)

This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great.  Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year.  (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)

Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more.  What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading.  My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.

Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school.  One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year.  He tells me he didn't finish any last year.  Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class.  In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work.  He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him!  Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it.  I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.

I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.

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

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

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

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

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

Do students need to "build reading perseverance"?

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

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

"Students need to build reading perseverance"

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

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

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

Literacy by any means necessary: the Malcolm X method of learning vocabulary

As an American literature teacher, I'm used to thinking of classic American literature as a treasure trove of extremely thoughtful meditations about almost everything, so I'm very interested in what the American canon has to say about education in general, and about reading in particular.  I've written about To Kill a Mockingbird's caustic portrayal of school and its loving celebration of a Frank Smith-like culture of reading, and about the great scene in which Huck Finn's father castigates his son for learning to read.  American autobiographies are full of wonderful descriptions of coming into literacy (in Smith's words, of joining the literacy club)--sometimes by reading books on your own (Ben Franklin), by reading aloud as a family (Henry James), by using the library (Richard Wright).

These American autobiographies are especially good on reading as a form of self-definition and self-discovery.  Most of the richest and most poignant examples of this that I can think of happen to be from autobiographies of Black Americans--from Frederick Douglass to Richard Wright to Barack Obama. I love Frederick Douglass's story of deliberately making friends with poor white boys and bribing them with bread so that they would teach him to read--but Malcolm X's story is the one I'm going to focus on today.  I'll talk about Malcolm's efforts in more detail, but I want to note first that for all of these extraordinarily gifted and amazingly determined men, the journey to literacy was, in Douglass's words, "a long, tedious effort for years."  We should not kid ourselves; even as we try to help make the process as easy and painless as possible, we need to remember that learning to read and write well is not always easy, especially for those suffering from their place in an oppressive social system.

The Malcolm X method of vocabulary instruction
If we want our kids to learn vocabulary, maybe we should think about people who have actually done it.  We've probably all read the part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in which Malcolm describes teaching himself to read, but I hadn't reread it for years, and it's worth looking at again.  In prison, Malcolm (I call him by his first name with all respect) had started corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, and he became frustrated with his inability to express himself clearly.  He also found that when he tried to read, he didn't know many of the words.  He ordered a dictionary from the prison library and looked at it.  Not knowing what to do--since there were so many words he needed to learn, he just started writing, and he copied the down the first page of the dictionary: definitions, punctuation and all.

It took him all day to copy out that first page.  Then he re-read what he had written down.  He was fascinated.  He liked the word "aardvark."  So he copied down the next page.  And he filled tablet after tablet of paper, and in the end he COPIED OUT THE ENTIRE DICTIONARY!

According to Malcolm X, copying out the dictionary was a great way to learn words, and as he learned more words, he was able to understand the books he tried to read, and as he could understand the books better, he came so to love reading that he read non-stop, and you couldn't have gotten him "out of books with a wedge." And the famous clincher: reading was liberating. Although he was in prison, he had "never been so truly free."  For Malcolm, every page of his books was what Richard Wright called it: a "ticket to freedom."

When the work becomes their own
Copying out the entire dictionary worked very well for Malcolm X.  Should we have our students do it?  Maybe. But I think, looking at this story, the main lesson I take away is that of motivation.  Malcolm was obviously gifted--but he had always been gifted.  He had a lot of time--but so did every other prisoner.  The determination to improve his vocabulary came only when he was (a) highly motivated and (b) face to face with his own poor ability (1).  He was very interested in writing to Elijah Muhammad, and he realized that he could not, in his letters, say what he wanted to say.  When motivated to read and write, and aware that he needed to improve, he figured out a method that worked for him.

Is it possible to create, for our students, conditions similar to those that led Malcolm X to copy out the dictionary?  (Our students are certainly not imprisoned, but they are under the supervision of the state for several hours a day, for many years.)  How can we ask them to do writing that they actually care about doing?  The student newspaper is an excellent way--for the kids who work on it. What can we do in our classes? Creative writing?  Sure--for some.  Have them write letters?  Have them write opinion pieces?  We do that stuff...  How can we have them do more writing that they actually really want to do?  The second condition--that they be confronted with their own poor ability--we arguably already try to do, in our grades and comments.

So one thing we could try is giving the students more freedom in what they write and harsher grades on their writing.  Another thing we could try is giving significantly less feedback on their writing and how to improve it.  This would feel extremely unnatural to us, and would probably be really difficult, and our students might hate us for it--but it might work.  (Is that crazy?  Maybe.  It's been a long week...)  I remember my father's telling me he only learned to write when he was a freshman in college and had a choice: learn to write better, or fail out.  My wife, too, only really learned to write when she was a freshman in college and had to work really hard on revising her own papers.  The burden needs to be on the students, not on us.  How do we put it there?

I don't know how to do it, but I have seen the results. Tonight I watched the Shakespeare play at my school. It was wonderful.  The students did amazing work, and they took full responsibility for it.  In fact, they took so much responsibility that in the talk-back after the play, the teacher who directed the play was not even mentioned--not even once.  Now that is a triumph of teaching! The play couldn't have happened without her, but for the students the work became their own.



********************************************************
Footnote:

(1)
These two factors are exactly parallel with the ones that spurred Ben Franklin to extraordinary efforts at self-improvement.  Franklin was having a debate in letters with a friend of his on various hot topics of the day--like whether it was worth educating women (Ben said yes)--and his father happened to see a few of the letters.  His father told Ben that while Ben often had stronger arguments, the friend was a better writer.  This criticism so wounded Ben's vanity that he went to extraordinary lengths to try to improve his writing: first he took articles from his favorite magazine, the Spectator, made notes on their content, and then tried to reconstruct the article from his outline; second, he took Spectator articles and tried to turn them into rhyming verse; third, he took the rhyming verse versions of the articles and put them back into plain prose.  This is not even to go into the lengths he went to obtain books (after he "borrowed" one in the evening he would stay up all night to read it by candlelight so as to be able to return the book before it would be missed in the morning, and he became a vegetarian and subsisted on a "bisket" or "a handful of raisins" in order to save money to buy books).  Ben Franklin, like Malcolm X, had a powerful practical reason to want to be good at writing (to best his friend Collins) and was confronted with his own poor ability (when his father said Collins wrote better than he did).

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.

The Writing Counterrevolution

I. "The Writing Revolution"
There's an interesting but insidious article about writing instruction, "The Writing Revolution," in this month's Atlantic.  The article tells the story of a high school on Staten Island that changed the way it taught writing and saw its test scores and graduation rates improve significantly.

The changes in the writing instruction don't seem unreasonable--an increased focus on argument and grammar, along with a heavy use of sentence stubs and frameworks (e.g. "I agree/disgagree that_____, because _____")--and it seems possible that instituting a coherent writing and thinking curriculum as a big part of a schoolwide overhaul could be a big improvement in a bad school. Why, then, does the article so raise my hackles?

I think it's mainly because the article takes this one curricular shift and weaves it, with a lot of dangerously simplistic received ideas, into a standard narrative of recovering a lost golden age--in this case, the golden age of the 1950s. According to the article, the school's shift to "formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure and essay-writing" was a return to the ways that "would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950." This counterrevolution (the article's headline is misleading) was necessary, according to the article's narrative, because misguided educational movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s had led schools away from teaching "the fundamentals" and toward a weak, pointless curriculum of "creative-writing" in a "fun, social context."

This long-term narrative is annoyingly untethered to any hard data.  Were students better writers in the 1950s?  I doubt it very much.  The best data we have on long-term trends comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which shows little change from 1971 to 2008, but if anything shows a gradual upward trend.  If the story this Atlantic article is telling has much truth to it--if there was a shift in the 70s and 80s to a more fun and creative writing curriculum that ruined academic achievement across the country--then we should see NAEP scores going down.  But they don't go down, they go (slightly) up! Here are the National NAEP reading scores for 13 year olds:

1971       255
1975       256
1980       258
1984       257
1988       257
1990       257
1992       260
1996       258
1999       259
2004       259
2008       260

The reading scores for 9 year olds, who wouldn't have had as much schooling, and 17-year olds, who had more, tell basically the same story.  Students in 1971 had not had much time to be ruined, as the article implies they were, by teachers teaching Paulo Freire in Ed school, and yet they seem to have been no more literate than students in the nineties, or in 2008.

The particular story the Atlantic article tells, about one high school that changed (among other things) its writing instruction, is an interesting anecdote, one whose facts could be probed further (what else was changed at the school?) and whose meaning can be debated (even if the shift in writing curriculum was responsible for a dramatic improvement in academic achievement, is it possible that any coherent writing curriculum, even one that focused on personal or creative writing, could have had the same effect?).  The interesting anecdote, however, is put in the context of a larger narrative that seems to be clearly and demonstrably wrong.  It is simply not true that because misguided 60s and 70s pinkos, in the name of freedom, stopped teaching anything, student achievement plummeted.  Whatever teachers were doing in the 70s, 80s and 90s, student achievement did not plummet.

II. "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students"
The main Atlantic article is accompanied by a shorter piece by a former "teacher" (the guy seems to have used a brief stint in the New York public schools as a stepping stone from a career in magazine publishing to a career in the Ed Reform industry), entitled "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students." This bizarre article likens the "Reader's and Writer's Workshop" approach (one that this guy used in his classroom) to a "cargo cult."  In other words, the reading and writing his students did was, as he sees it, as totally pointless as the building of runways by primitive peoples who hoped that by imitating the form of an airfield they could bring back the airdrops of supplies and food that had come during the war.  This comparison is so insane on so many levels that I am not going to take the time to analyze it.

Later in his article, apparently realizing that he has gone off the deep end, the author tries to reel himself back, writing, "Let me hasten to add that there should be no war between expressive writing and explicit teaching of grammar and mechanics," but he goes on to argue that "at present, we expend too much effort trying to get children to 'live the writerly life' and 'develop a lifelong love of reading.'" And he concludes by implying that it is ten times more important to teach grammar and mechanics than to try to get kids to love reading and writing by having them actually do it.

These people are all about data, but where is the data that shows that grammar and mechanics "instruction" works better than just reading a lot? It sounds like the author of the Atlantic article had his students spend way too much time on the writing process and not nearly enough time reading, but just because he was bad at it does not mean that getting kids to develop a lifelong love of reading won't help them read and write better.  It almost certainly will.  Grammar and mechanics instruction, on the other hand, should be a small part of the curriculum.


III. What, then, to think? (Besides that the Atlantic is owned by right-wing crazies...)
I'm not sure what my own overarching narrative is (maybe that we're in the middle of a decades-long counterrevolution in which we are making the poor poorer, blaming them for the results of their poverty, and then telling them they ought to act more like they did in the 50s, when people respected their betters?), but I am pretty sure that these people in the Atlantic don't have the right one.

A tale of two summers

One more post before my August vacation: two stories and a conclusion.  Regular readers of this blog will know where I'm going; as ever, I think our thinking about school should be informed by extracurricular learning, which varies much more than school, and I think we should be spending a lot of our energy on helping kids find texts and creating time and space for them to read. 

Summer #1: From non-reader to reader

A good friend of mine, a fellow teacher, was concerned that her son wasn't reading enough.  Maybe she had been reading a blog post that cited data linking school achievement with time spent reading outside of school, or maybe she was just, like many other parents, aware that reading is the most important academic skill, and that no one becomes really good at anything without spending large amounts of time doing it (K. Anders Ericsson's 10,000 hour rule may be a cliche and may be nitpicked in various ways, but it's basically right that almost all expert musicians, athletes and readers spent many thousands of hours as children practicing their skills).  In any case, her son was not reading at home very much, and hadn't been reading in school, either (his reportedly excellent second grade teacher had allowed him to spent most of his literacy and reader's workshop time writing a very long story and drawing pictures of hockey players).  Her son needed to read more.

So my friend took action.  She told her son that he would have to read for twenty minutes every night.  Following good SSR protocol, she would read her own book alongside him.  They went together to the library and spent the better part of an hour searching out books he might be interested in.  They took out a bunch of Matt Christopher sports novels, and a book by Avi.

That first week, the reading did not go so well.  He asked every minute or two how much time was left, and he never picked up a book when it wasn't his appointed time, preferring instead to go outside or to pick up the family iPad and check the sports scores.

That was in June and early July.  Then, two weeks ago, the boy visited his grandmother for a weekend, and his grandmother took him to her local library and asked her local librarian for help.  The librarian spent a half an hour or so with him, reading and talking, and set him up with a number of volumes from the "Weird School" series that were much easier to read than the Matt Christopher or the Avi .  When he came back from his grandmother's, he not only had easier books to read, he also had fewer distractions: his parents had put away the iPad.

I saw my friend and her son last week, when they were staying with the rest of their family at a cabin in the woods.  More than once I saw the boy take out, unprompted, one of his "Weird School" books and read it to himself.  His mother reports that he has been voluntarily reading more than the required thirty minutes a day, and she has not had to sit with him and read.  Within a month, he had moved from reluctant reader to reader. 

Summer #2: From reader to non-reader

My own son is in sixth grade.  Since the second grade, he has always read a lot.  His favorite books have been biographies of athletes (he's read the new Willie Mays biography a few years ago, and last summer he raced through Andre Agassi's Open), but he has also enjoyed graphic novels (Tintin, Bone, Persepolis) and action books (Alex Rider books, the Hunger Game series).  He probably reads, over the school year alone, rather more than a book a week, and over the past few summers he has read at an even faster pace.

This summer is half over, and in its six or so weeks he has not yet read a single book.

I ascribe this to three factors:  1) competing activities; (2) electronic distractions; (3) more limited availability of books.

First, he has been pretty busy, going to a few different camps, going on two different camping trips, and playing a lot of sports when he's not at camp.

Second, he has spent an hour of every day at home on the computer, and he just got an iTouch.  He is allotted an hour of computer time a day, and he rarely spends even a minute less.  Most of that time is following the professional tennis tour, and he is frighteningly well-informed about who is ranked what and why and so on.  His iTouch, which is somewhat under our control, hasn't increased his screen time by much, but somehow his relationship to books seems different.

Finally, and this may be the most important, he hasn't been to the library yet this summer.  He himself blames his non-reading on this: "I don't have anything to read!"  Despite our shelves of books, nothing has jumped out at him, and I haven't thrust a We Die Alone into his hands this time around. 

Conclusions: Providing appropriate books and a distraction-free environment matter a lot

These two stories are mirror images of each other.  In both cases, reading was difficult for kids who (a) were distracted by electronic devices and (b) didn't have interesting, appropriately leveled books easily to hand.  When appropriate books and a distraction-free environment were provided, both kids read a lot.  These conditions may seem obvious, and they don't seem terribly difficult, but still, most children don't have either one, and most children don't read as much as they should (45 minutes a day at a minimum).

Because in fact these two conditions are not easy to provide.  I am extremely interested in my children's reading, and yet my son has read next to nothing in the past six weeks.  My friend is also very interested in her kid's reading, and yet he read very little over his whole second grade schoolyear.  And no wonder: providing the appropriate books and the time was in fact not so easy.

Providing books for my friend's son (the "Weird School" series; I love that title) took two trips to the library and a few hours of adult time, and in the end it took a trained professional--the children's librarian in the grandmother's town.  It also took a well-stocked library--the boy's grandmother lives in a town that's probably as wealthy as Leafstrewn.  (If we want to get kids reading, we should not be cutting library budgets, and we should be taking the 20 billion or more dollars we spend on standardized testing and spending that money on books and librarians.)

Providing distraction-free time is also not easy.  We're all busy, and we all have lots of things that need to get done now.  In English class we feel we need to get through the whole-class novel, we need to do the prewriting work for the essay, we need to teach the vocabulary lists.  At home, there's television, music, texting, sports, iPads.  But it's important to provide the time, both in and out of school. 

Post-script: a trip to the library

After I wrote the post above, we took my son went to the library, and he came home with a stack of books two feet high.  That night he read a graphic novel and started a mystery story about a brother and sister whose mom disappears in the Grand Canyon.  And now we're going on vacation, so he'll have a lot of time!

As for this blog, I'm going to take a month-long break.  I'm going to do some pleasure reading, and I'll also think about how to take the message I've been hammering away at here to a broader audience..

Emails from a student

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.