Why is To Kill a Mockingbird so difficult?

Kids don't read it because it's difficult--but why is it difficult?
To Kill a Mockingbird is the very text that William Broz used as his prime example in his article, "Not Reading: The 800-pound Mockingbird in the classroom."  Broz argues that most students who are assigned the book don't actually read it.  Broz doesn't mention the text's difficulty in his article, but I wonder if his students--and many others--aren't reading it not only for the obvious reasons (have other priorities; think they can get away with not reading; don't like reading, period; want to read other stuff; etc.), but also because the book is so difficult. I certainly find that the book is too hard for at least half of my ninth graders. But why?  The difficulty is not captured in the book's lexile score, which is about the same as The Fault in Our Stars, but students don't seem to have trouble reading the John Green book.  On the contrary, they gobble it up at astonishing rates.  What, then, makes Mockingbird so difficult?

It's not the vocabulary, sentence structure, or background knowledge
Mockingbird's difficulty is not because of its vocabulary, though that is not easy.  (Any book that uses "seldom", "assuaged"," apothecary", "Methodist", "strictures", "chattels", "piety", "stinginess", "Cornwall", "sustain", "impotent", "apparel", "dictum", "persecution", "Battle of Hastings", "read law" and "taciturn" in the first two pages is pretty difficult, but The Fault in Our Stars manages to use sophisticated vocabulary and still be accessible.)

It's not the sentence structure or the background knowledge that's required, although again, many young readers will be put off by a book whose second page contains the sentence "Mindful of John Wesley's strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel."  

Instead, what makes Mockingbird so difficult is the jumps in time, continuity and logic. Nearly every paragraph requires the reader to make an inference or catch a subtle subtext--and to make these inferences not only so as to appreciate shadings of meaning, but just to follow the basic events of the story.

A sample chapter (seven types of ambiguity!) Chapter 25, which I read out loud to my classes last Friday, is a case in point.  The chapter has a series of very confusing time-shifts, and neglects to mention some key information.  I go through the confusing sequence below, but the specifics aren't so important--what matters is that there are at least seven separate times in the first half of the chapter in which the main plot information is unspoken and needs to be inferred.

1. The chapter starts in medias res, with Jem telling Scout to put "him" out on the back steps.  We don't know what or who is to be put out. A few lines later we learn that it's a "small creature," and that Scout does put him out, scooping him up, putting him on the bottom step, and going back to her cot.

2. Then, after a bit of scene-setting (it's September, they're still sleeping on the porch, etc.), we hear that a "roly-poly" is in the house.  It might occur to us to wonder if this is the creature Scout put out on the back steps, but we wonder, if so, what the thing is doing back inside.  

3. Putting down her book, Scout watches the roly-poly for a while, and then, feeling sleepy, she "decided to end things."  (Not all of my students realized that she was going to kill the bug.)  

4. Scout says, "My hand was going down on him when Jem spoke."  The next paragraph begins, "Jem was scowling.  It was part of the stage he was going through"...  Again we are thrown off balance: Jem "spoke," but what did he say?  We aren't told; we are supposed to remember the first line of the chapter, which was, "Don't do that, Scout. Set him out on the back steps."  But the narration goes on, not mentioning anything about Scout's scooping him up and putting him on the back steps, so we're not really sure.

5. Over the next few paragraphs Scout lies on her cot thinking about things, and soon, she says, she is "wide awake, remembering what Dill had told me."  What had Dill told her, we wonder; are we supposed to know?  

6. She goes on to describe a time Dill and Jem were walking back from swimming at the local swimming hole and get picked up in the car by Atticus and Calpurnia, who are headed to Tom Robinson's house.  Now, if we remember the previous chapter we may wonder if this is the time, the previous month, when Atticus and Calpurnia go out to tell Tom's wife that he has been shot, but we certainly are never told this straight out, and at least half of my students had no idea that this was the particular day that Scout is remembering.

7. Those students would have been confused, then, when Helen Robinson ("Who's Helen?" one of my students called out as I was reading) suddenly collapses just before she reaches Atticus.  Not only has Atticus not told Helen that her husband is dead, Harper Lee hasn't told us that Helen is collapsing because she sees the truth in Atticus's face--nor even that Atticus is there to deliver the news.

Conclusion: maybe we shouldn't assign it so widely?
To Kill a Mockingbird is a wonderful, intricately constructed novel, but it is often needlessly obscure, and I sympathize with those of my students who say they would never want to read it to themselves.  My 13-year old son was given the book a few years ago by his grandparents, and it has sat unread on his shelf to this day. In short, I think we should reconsider assigning it as widely as we do.

Small Victories with To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird is a required text for ninth grade at my school, but I have never had much success with it.  My students like the movie, but the text is much more subtle and sophisticated than its lexile score would indicate (more on that later).  Despite all my assignments, my lessons, our class discussions, our maps of Maycomb, too many of my students weren't really reading the book--a famous problem.  So this year I have ended up reading nearly the whole thing to them--out loud, in class, a chapter or two a day.  They have been doing writing and textual analysis at home, we've been talking about it in class--and I have been doing a lot of reading aloud.

I have played around a bit with how to manage the reading. After we'd done the beginning of the book aloud, the students seemed to be following it pretty well, so I assigned a couple of chapters as homework. When I gave reading quizzes on those chapters, over a third of the students failed, pretty much in line with my experience in past years.

So I went back to doing the reading in class. I did some more aloud, then tried having them read the book to themselves in class.  This, too, was a struggle.  A few students read it easily and quickly; many struggled to understand it.  I tried having students read it to each other.  This worked okay, but it was slow-going, the kids complained, and their comprehension wasn't great. Another thing I tried was allowing students who had done well on the previous reading quizzes to read the book on their own in the hallway while I read it aloud.  This worked fairly well, although there were a few students who used the time not to read, but to go get a drink or chat with their friends. These kids then failed the quick quiz I gave, and weren't allowed to read in the hallway the next time.

I wouldn't say that the book has been a great success this year, and some of the reading-aloud time has been plagued by students commenting loudly and distractingly on the book (A typical comment is the ever-popular "THAT'S SO RACIST!"), or whispering to each other about other things, or whatever.  Nevertheless, there have been some small victories.

1. I have a student in one of my classes who asks me nearly every day if we can "just do something chill today."  I always say, "I'm reading aloud to you.  We're having storytime; it doesn't get any more chill than that!"  She says, No, I mean play a game or something.  I say, Reading is fun!  This has happened three times; finally today some other students in the class backed me up and said they were enjoying listening to the book.
2. In that same class I have a student with some unique learning difficulties who finds it very difficult to understand the novel.  She is the only student in either class who has found it difficult to understand when I read it aloud. I let her read in the hallway, which sometimes allowed her to (barely) pass the reading quizzes, but when we got to the trial section of the novel I asked her to stay in the room and listen to it.  She was so anxious about failing the quizzes (until I knew this girl, I thought beating your breast in anguish was just an expression) that I let her skip the quizzes for a few days.  Then yesterday I handed her a quiz and she took it, saying "I think I understood it today!" As it turned out, she barely passed the quiz, but at least she passed, and at least--for the first time--she felt like she'd understood it. I was worried that the reading aloud was going to be a a terrible experience overall for her, but it doesn't seem to be so bad.  Maybe she's even learning!
3. Today a student in my other 9th grade class, a girl who has proclaimed many times that she hates reading but whom I have sometimes caught reading her independent reading book when she was supposed to be doing something else, announced, unprovoked, at the end of class: "I hate to admit it, but I think this book is really good!" When I said I thought so too, even if I had some misgivings, she said, "Well, I think I would hate it if I had to read it myself."  Then three other kids jumped in and said that they too only liked the book when I read it to them--but that they were liking it.

So I'm still not convinced that it's worth spending six weeks on To Kill a Mockingbird, and if I were to do it again, I would do things differently, but I do think what I'm doing this year is better than what I've done in the past.

Reading instruction without reading...

...is like growing up without eating.  Much of the reading instruction discussed in yesterday's New York Times article sounded like what I'm afraid a lot of the English curriculum is like in a lot of schools: classroom activities that mimic a test. Trying to raise scores leads to even more test-mimicking curriculum.  In the Times article, there was only one extended description of a classroom activity.  It went like this:

"...the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text."

This is at what sounds like a successful school, with a thoughtful teacher.  But notice the two important things that are not happening here:

a) The students are not reading very much.  "A few paragraphs" is not much.  Now, of course it's possible that the kids are reading a lot at other times.  But none of the many teachers and experts quoted in the article ever mentions actually reading, so I think it's possible these kids may manage to do what a third of my ninth grade class did in middle school, and get through years without completing a single book.

b)  The students are not themselves describing Terabitihia; they are asked to "select" from two possible descriptions.  In other words, the students are answering multiple choice questions, not open-ended questions.

This is not reading; it is taking a test.  Taking a test can be educational--I always urge my Juniors to take the AP English test, because I think one day focused on a high-quality test can be a learning experience--but this is not what you need day in and day out.  It's as if, trying to get malnourished children to grow taller, we carefully measured their height every day, without ever letting them eat.

The Common Core's Supposed Emphasis on Close Reading is a Joke (not much reading, and not very close)

In the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity.  Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous.

Resources from the Standards' authors' own company
The Common Core standards are supposed to promote increased complexity of text, but they offer very little guidance on how to do it. Since the standards don't say much about what teachers should actually do, I couldn't be sure, but I have long been skeptical that the standards would do much to improve students' ability to read more complex texts, since the most important factor is how much students read, and the standards say very little about reading volume. Nevertheless, ready to be proved wrong, I decided to look at some curriculum that was developed with the Common Core in mind by an organization founded by the some of the authors of the standards.

Both Bill Gates and some corporations (I think GE gave 18 million dollars) have supported an organization called "Student Achievement Partners," which describes itself, awkwardly, as a "nonprofit organization that assembles educators and researchers to design actions based on evidence that substantially improve student achievement." (With tens of millions of dollars, you'd think they could have substantially improved their own writing!)  This organization has established a website called "achievethecore.org," which offers "free, high-quality resources for educators to implement the Common Core Standards."  When I visited the site, I was surprised not only by the paucity of resources, but also by their relatively low intellectual level.

What about "literary texts" in high school? What about independent reading?
From a none too extensive list of lessons on close reading, I clicked on an eighth grade unit on Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken and Jeanne Watasuki Houston's Farewell to Manzanar--partly because I was surprised that Hillenbrand's book would be taught in the eighth grade (a strong student in one of my Honors Junior classes is reading the book and fnding it challenging because of the length, complexity and the unfamiliar historical content), but also because I wanted to look at a lesson plan on a "literary text", not on an "instructional text," and the site offered not a single lesson plan at the high school level for use with a "literary text." This omission, no doubt related to CCSS's infamous call for 80% of kids' reading in high school to be of informational texts, was disappointing enough--but then I dug into the lesson plan.

The lesson plan only focuses on a few passages from each book.   Each day of the five-day lesson plan has the kids reading one passage from each book, then hearing it aloud, then writing about it, then discussing it.   This would not be terrible--if time were built in for extensive reading beyond these few paragraphs--but the writing and discussion prompts strike me as tedious and shallow, and I am very skeptical that a class doing this lesson plan would have kids actually reading more than a page or two a day.

"Close Reading": Boring Writing Prompts and Discussion Questions

The lesson is prefaced by a warning that since this is close reading, the teacher should not offer students any introduction, background or context for the texts.  This strikes me as truly bizarre advice (the weakness of New Criticism with none of its strengths), especially when the texts in question are brief excerpts from much longer works.  The instructions read:

It is critical to cultivating independence and creating a culture of close reading   that students initially grapple with rich texts without the aid of prefatory material, extensive notes, or even teacher explanations.

These instructions are comically ironic, since this entire teacher-selected, teacher-directed, non-open-ended lesson plan seems designed rather to stifle independence.

Here is the first passage, from Unbroken:

“The men had been adrift for twenty-seven days. Borne by an equatorial current, they had floated at least one thousand miles, deep into Japanese-controlled waters. The rafts were beginning to deteriorate into jelly, and gave of a sour, burning odor. The men’s bodies were pocked with salt sores, and their lips were so swollen that they pressed into their nostrils and chins. They spent their days with their eyes fixed on the  sky, singing “White Christmas,” muttering about food. No one was even looking for them any more. They were alone on sixty-four million square miles of ocean. A month earlier, twenty-six-year-old [Louie] Zamperini had been one of the greatest runners in the world, expected by many to   be the first to break the four-minute mile, one of the most celebrated barriers in sport. Now his Olympian’s body had wasted to less than one hundred pounds and his famous legs could no longer lift him. Almost everyone outside his family had given him up for dead.”

The writing prompt is:

In one or two sentences, briefly describe the condition of Louie Zamperini and the other men who were "adrift" in Japanese-controlled waters.

Then there are three discussion questions, one about how the author establishes "time and geographic location," one about the mental and physical condition of the men on the boat, and one about why the author writes about Louie Zamperini's past life and experiences.

For a good reader, these are boring questions.  They are neither very difficult--it is pretty obvious that the men are in poor shape--nor, just as important, are they open-ended.  These are not questions that could have more than one answer (in case the teacher is not himself a good reader, the lesson plan helpfully gives the answer; for example: "Hillenbrand describes Louie Zamperini's former condition as an Olympic athlete to show how, within a very short period of time, a popular star-athlete could quickly find himself weak, emaciated, and near death while floating aimlessly on a rescue raft in the South Pacific. This portion of text helps students establish a sense of how far Louie was from his former life before the war.")

It's hard to imagine a good discussion coming out of questions like the ones in this unit. There are things in the passage that seem interesting to me, either because I wasn't familiar with the phenomena (rafts turning to jelly, salt sores, etc.) or because I was curious about why (the looking at the sky, the singing of "White Christmas," etc.), or because the logical continuity of the writing seemed tenuous (in the last two sentences, there seems to be an implied connection between Louie's famous legs wasting away and his being given up for dead by folks back home, even mthough you wouldn't know his legs were wasting away unless you were on the raft).  But the questions in the unit just don't get at these strange and interesting elements of the passage, and if I were a student in the class I would feel like I was mostly wasting my time.

It seems to me that it would be much more worthwhile to have students mark up and make comments directly on the passage and then have a more open-ended discussion, beginning perhaps with a pretty broad question like "What didn't you understand in the passage?" or "What do you think the author is doing in this passage?" Open-ended questions will lead to real discussion, and real discussion will help students get better at answering even the boring questions like these.  But answering boring questions won't help kids learn anything, except to dislike school and reading.

Kids need to read a lot, and this lesson plan doesn't encourage that

If this were run as a five-day unit, the students would read a total of four pages in class, and at most another three pages at home.  An appendix does present the possibility of doing a three-week unit in which students would read one of the texts in full, but this possibility would require, for kids reading Unbroken, an average of over thirty pages per night, a pace which, for this demanding text, would lead nearly all students to cheat on the reading, pushing some into the arms of study guides, others into desperate skimming, and all into frustration and contempt.

Assuming that the unit is done as a one-week unit, students would get well-organized lesson plans on interesting, but very brief texts with boring tasks and very, very little reading.  This is not a good way to learn to be a good reader.  Students need to read a lot, and the discussions they have about what they read need to be based on interesting, open-ended questions to which the teacher or lesson-planner does not already know the right answer.

It might be tempting to think that this lesson plan is just a lemon, but it's not.  The Common Core sets an expectation that students will be "given frequent opportunities to read a high volume of
texts independently and be held accountable for this reading", but nothing in the Standards, or in the materials I've seen developed for them, or in presentations I've watched by David Coleman or others, offers any hint as to how this could be accomplished, especially in the context of all the other stuff students are supposed to be doing.  I know from experience, and from the very, very consistent literature on fostering higher-volume reading (by Mary Leonhardt, Nancie Atwell, Stephen Krashen, Richard Allington, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher, and others) that teachers must make a concerted effort to provide students with high-interest books, and with time to read them.  The Common Core just doesn't do this; therefore, unless we teachers take matters into our own hands, students will not advance on the "staircase of text complexity."

The high school lesson plans are no better

For the high school grades, there are no sample lessons on fiction or literature, only on "informational text," and for grades 11 and 12 there are only two sample lesson plans.  The first is a three-day lesson on a two-paragraph speech by the great jurist Learned Hand about America and freedom; the second unit takes "several days" to read and re-read Andrew Carnegie's four-page article,  "The Gospel of Wealth," about how wonderful inequality is, and how poor people should be grateful for it, since it allows rich people to spend some their wealth on philanthropic endeavors.  

Leaving aside the fact that these texts, especially the Carnegie essay, are of dubious literary quality and are essentially propaganda, there are again two major problems with these lesson plans:  (1) the questions and prompts are not not very interesting, and any good reader would hardly have to do any "close reading" in order to answer them; (2) they are together less than five pages long, and yet would seem, along with the "text-dependent questions" and the culminating essays, to be all that was intended to occupy the students for over a week of class time.  This is not a curriculum that is prioritizing reading.

Conclusion
The Common Core's supposed emphasis on close reading is a joke.  Again: in the curriculum materials developed by the Common Core authors' own company, there is very little time available for high-volume reading, and the close reading questions lack depth or complexity. Poor readers will not read enough to improve; good readers will be bored and very likely contemptuous. Of course, a good teacher could probably make these lesson plans work--but then, a good teacher wouldn't need them in the first place.

Although I am more and more sure that the CCSS effort is basically a stalking horse for standardized tests and for-profit curriculum, and that the authors are mostly clueless about how to help students develop into good readers, I do think it would be possible to develop a CCSS curriculum that would work very well.  That curriculum would involve large amounts of independent reading at the students' own reading level, along with focused close reading and instruction in how to read closely.  You might say, Well, that's just what Student Achievement Partners is trying to do!  Perhaps, but they are ignoring the independent reading side of it and doing the close reading side poorly.

In the future, I'm going to put up some curriculum I think would be better--and I'll also have to write about those lesson plans on how great America and inequality are...

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.

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.

Students who need to read in school

It works to make kids do their homework in school

Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind.  The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake.  Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.

The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students.  It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school.  As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.

This is a simple but extremely important practice.  It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework.  Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year.  (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday.  It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.

A student who doesn't read

I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program.  I'll call him "Billy."  Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly.  When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family.  Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school.  Billy passed my class, barely.  He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts.  He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level).  Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.

Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework."  I said, "Do you do the reading?"  He said, "No.  Never."  I said, "But you read in my class.  I remember you reading Alex Rider."  He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home.  I never read at home in your class either."  I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.

Reading is the most important academic skill.  As I wrote last year, "Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”"

If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school.  We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.

Homework in School and Social Justice

The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum.  If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.