(I wrote this 4 1/2 years ago. It still applies.)
After all the books
and articles I've read about city schools and failure and what are we going to
do about them...
THIS SEEMS LIKE THE
ANSWER
Books you need jump off shelves to you. That’s how I wound up with four books by Mary
Leonhardt. Why I needed them I didn’t know at the time the first one jumped. My
kids were beyond the age where they needed my help in reading, if they ever
did. They were in college or had already graduated. I was no longer a teacher.
But something had me hanging around the education books in a store somewhere,
and there was Parents Who Love
Reading, Kids Who Don’t. It had a boring, all-type cover and I hadn’t heard
of it or Mary. But I bought it, magically, like those things happen … devoured
it, like those books make you … and it became a fast friend to me, a companion
like Walt Whitman’s books had once become a friend to me. In her writing I
found the truth. That’s what we all look for when we cross a bookstore
threshold.
When I was planning this blog, this newsletter,
I took a bus to Massachusetts to meet her. She lives in Concord, retired from
teaching. The first thing she said to me after hello was that she had to read
to me the opening sentences of a paperback book she was reading. She was just
who I hoped she would be.
A week ago she e-mailed me answers to questions
I had sent her.
It appears that all cities have trouble
teaching so many of their kids to read well, even though the 12 years they have them seem way more than
enough time. Do you have any insight into why it's such a difficult thing to
do? Or is it not so difficult and is there just something the public schools
are missing?
This is what most educators don’t understand:
In reading, as in life, practice is everything.
Excellent readers are kids who, somewhere along the line, fell in love with
books and so spend a great deal of time reading. Schools don’t make falling in
love with books a priority. Or even a goal!
Schools think kids become excellent readers by
answering comprehension questions and memorizing vocabulary. Not only are they
wrong about this (just ask an excellent, avid reader if he spends a lot of time
filling out worksheets or memorizing vocabulary), but this belief necessitates
that everyone read the same book—so the teachers can make up questions on it.
The result is that kids hate reading because
they are forced to read stories and books they don’t like and then answer
questions they think are stupid.
Poor kids usually don't have books at home,
maybe weren't read to enough. Can school make up for that? Again, 12 years
seems plenty of time to do that. Why doesn't it get done?
Sure. All educators have to do is flood every
school with interesting reading material (books, comics, magazines, newspapers)
and then let the kids spend at least an hour or two a day just reading. No
worksheets. No memorizing vocabulary. No required reading—just free choice. And
everyone needs to be reading during this time—the principal, teachers,
secretaries, the nurse, coaches—everyone!
If this were done in elementary and junior high,
high school kids could then be assigned more challenging titles and have fun
discussing them. But our high schools are now filled with students who read
poorly and see reading as only a boring chore to avoid at all costs.
If you were chosen the Schools Chancellor,
what would you do the first hour in office to change things?
Oh, what a tempting question! How about this: an
edict mandating that school districts spend as much on librarians and reading
material for the kids as they spend on administrators and their staff.
I see great-looking young adult books in the
bookstores. They look edgy. Do school libraries get those? Do they get them
while they're fresh?
I have really liked almost every school
librarian I’ve ever met. They are often the only adult in the school who really
values reading.
That said, school libraries are very
underfunded, and the money they do get is being directed to computers and other
technology. New young adult fiction is usually at the bottom of the funding
list.
The other point is that often the books that
really turn kids into readers are series, like Goosebumps or Vampire
Academy; or category fiction, like mysteries or science fiction. These are
really low status books, and librarians are often afraid to order them.
The title of one of your books is ‘How to
Teach a Love of Reading Without Getting Fired’. What's the deal? How could
there be resistance to teaching a love of reading? How did you have to be
careful when you weren't being careful?
Would you believe schools are still teaching Ethan Frome? And Great Expectations? From about
sixth grade through high school, teachers are presented with a curriculum that
requires them to teach books that most kids will hate.
I coach teachers on ways to avoid a poisonous,
required curriculum, to get their students reading books they can love, and not
get fired in the process. The critical element is that students need to be
given the ability to choose most or all of their reading.
TVs, computers, cell phones, all that. Good
or bad for reading?
TV: bad. Computers are better; at least they are
reading a bit, and often writing, too. All of the texting that goes on with
cell phones is probably good IF they are also avidly reading, since then they
will acquire good grammatical structures they can use when they want to.
What reluctance did even English teachers
evidence when you'd talk to them about your way of doing things?
English teachers tend to teach the way they were
taught, with a required curriculum that mandates the teaching of certain books.
The difficulty they have getting their whole class to read these books pales
before the difficulty they envision managing a class where students can choose
most of their reading.
And anyway, they have already read the books
they are assigning. They have folders full of discussion questions, and tests,
and vocabulary exercises on these books. Why on earth would they want to open
their curriculum to books that kids choose—that maybe the teacher hasn’t read.
How can she give them a test on it?
The fact that most students read little of these
required books, or any other books with a required book hanging over their heads,
simply doesn’t impact them. I think the reason is because most teachers don’t
understand how important avid reading is for developing reading skills. So it
doesn’t matter too much if students are not reading.
Are schools arranged correctly for reading?
No. Most schools are pretty sterile places. I
would love to see schools with magazines in the cafeteria, comics in the
nurse’s office, overflowing bookshelves lining the halls. I want to see piles
of Soccer World and Sports
Illustrated for Kids in the
gym. I want the school buses to be awash with interesting reading material.
Why aren't kids breezing through books and
reading assignments after 12 years?
This is really the heart of the issue. Kids
don’t breeze through reading assignments because they don’t read well enough to
do so. But since reading is a hidden skill—unlike, say, playing soccer—few
people realize how poorly many children read. And they read poorly because they
read so little.
Follow a child of any age throughout a school
day, and see how much time this child spends in sustained, concentrated
reading. Everything else in a school day is considered more important than just
having a child sit and read for a block of time. Kids listen to lectures,
discuss issues, answer questions, fill out worksheets, write essays . . . but
just sit and read? No time for that. It’s so sad.
