read or die

There has historically been a disconnect between what students want to read and what they are asked to read in school.  School Boards, parents, and community groups have banned books that they considered offensive or indecent, and many English teachers have relegated their classroom libraries to consist of canonical pieces that students can’t relate to, or even understand in many cases.  And yet, these books that have been banned, or considered “junk books” by some, are exactly what kids- especially boys, who lose interest in reading to a greater extent that girls do- want to read.  In her article “To get boys to read, yuk works wonders”, Gina Damron examines what schools can do to encourage interest in reading.

For the kids that struggle with reading, the ones that see “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and give up after page one, “ ’They’re the ones falling through the cracks,’ [Jo Kwasni] said. ‘There’s no bad literature for these kids.’” 

I believe that schools should do like libraries have begun to across the nation: they should start to bring in all kinds of texts, from graphic novels to books like “The Adventures of Captain Underpants” to ensure that the kids who are behind in literature, the ones who are first to stop wanting to read because it’s too hard, get the opportunity to learn the joys of reading while gaining skills they can use later when they decide to move on to different literature styles.

When it comes to reading, even if we can’t all agree that all reading is great, it is certain that any reading is better than no reading at all.  If boys need their books to be full of gore, violence, and blood, or stupid toilet humor and gross depictions of vile things like poop and snot, then that reading should be the kind of reading they’re allowed to do in the years when they make up their minds about whether or not they can get anything out of reading. 

We can always hope that boys will grow out of being fascinated by the grotesque and the obscene, but by forcing them to read things they don’t like, we are not going to get them to be any less interested in gore or obscenity.  If books filled with poo and masturbation are what they want to read, then let them read.  Keeping kids reading is the best way to make them better readers, and if they don’t read about something unpleasent in a book, they’ll find in on TV or on the internet.  Let’s face it, when it comes to grabbing kids’ attention with a book, there’s no such thing as bad reading.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070125/NEWS05/701250387/1007

I have decided to change my topic and address new methods in teaching reading, rather than focusing on the evaluation aspect.  While the conflict between better reading instruction and standard methods of evaluation remains important, it is the better instruction that I want to focus on.

 Though it is hard to believe that it could be considered a revolutionary teaching technique, one 8th grade teacher in Hawaii, Jim Harstad, is spending an hour every day reading to his students as they read along. 

I wish I could find the data to back up the claim I am about to make, but I’m sure I saw somewhere that there is a significant positive correlation between how much a child is or was read to and how well they read and write themselves.   When there is little to no reading going on in the homes of impoverished, middle-class and evn well off students, I am not surprised that someone has finally made the leap and started reading to their students.

“It’s a three-pronged approach that includes five minutes of journal-writing or free-writing at the start of class to improve the ability to express thoughts; a second five-minute segment devoted to analyzing a new sentence each day; and the remainder of class time is for reading aloud together.

“‘Students tend to think books are dead things… I want to bring them to life’ says Harstad”.

Harstad’s reason for approaching reading this way is what I agree with the most.  He says that preparing for a test is a process that runs counter to reading- he doesn’t want students thinking of books as a chore.

If our goal is to get students to become better readers we have to get them more interested in reading so they read on their own for fun, and so they approach reading as a process they can get something worthwhile out of.  That way, when it comes time for them to read and understand required texts, they have a wealth of experience from which they can draw tools that they’ve used in the past to help them understand and enjoy.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070128/NEWS07/701280357/1012/NEWS

My plan, I think, is going to be to focus on the evaluation part of teaching reading.  Considering the challenges that come with evaluating “Aesthetic reading”, and considering the insufficiencies of testing reading skill progress in any sort of homogenized, overarching manner designed to equally evaluate all students, I thought this would be an interesting and important issue with arguments for many approaches to solving this dilema.  Since I expect there to be so many varied and perhaps conflicting proposals for how best to evaluate reading, across grades, across districts, and across the nation, I figured it would be a good topic for a person like myself since I am very opinionated and critical- sometimes more-so than I ought to be I think.  Also, considering the idea behind this part of the class is to engage in discussion, a category such as this would instigate plenty of debate.

 I will be using sources like the BBC World News and the NEA homepage, but one source I have high hopes for is the link to Reading Today Daily, so I’ve included the link here: http://www.google.com/reader/view/  I think this should work.

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