I'm responsible for creating content and discussion starters at our district's web site. Here's this week's blog topic. (this is teacher-centric stuff, if you want to skip it, but I think parents, writers and concerned folks might find something of interest in it).
Part of our work this year in the English department includes a study of Kelly Gallagher's provocative book, Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. His thesis is that "rather than helping students, many of the reading practices found in today's classrooms are actually contributing to the death of reading. In an earnest attempt to instill reading, teachers and administrators push practices that kill many students' last chance to develop into lifelong readers."
He attributes some of the decline in reading for pleasure in our students to a variety of factors, many that are driven by high stakes testing. His thesis, though, isn't particularly new and has been a concern for decades. When I was taking education classes in the 70s, we discussed a bitterly satirical essay by Jerry Farber entitled, "Teaching Johnny to Walk." In it he parodied a popular series of articles in education at the time that broke down any skill into a series of distinct teachable and measurable units ("Teaching Johnny to Read," "Teaching Johnny to Swim," etc.).
In the essay, he shows that if we break walking into distinct units, like contracting a muscle group, leaning forward, lifting a leg, etc., we will give so many instructions that Johnny will not be able to walk at all. There will be too many things to think about when it should all go together seamlessly.
His point was that we can overteach, and in the midst of the overteaching, we will not only fail to reach our goals, but we will also make our students hate the subject.
I think Farber and Gallagher would get along very well. While we are diligently (some might say desperately) trying to break our subjects into measurable, teachable units, we have created the appearance of an unteachable mess. Our Comp-Lit 10 curriculum, for example, contains six standards that are broken down further into sixty smaller parts. Some of those subparts are further broke down. Standard 1.e is "Interpret and critically read a variety of texts," and then it lists six kinds of texts to read and five ways to evaluate them.
If you add up all the standards, substandards and parts to the substandards, you end up with as many standards as we have days to teach.
Clearly, the task is impossible when it is described this way. Fortunately, good teachers know that no skill is really taught in isolation, and teaching almost anything involves (more or less) everything else, so the very detailed curriculum guide is not a description of what goes on in the classroom, exactly.
Reading is not only a skill, it is also a recreation. The real goal is not necessarily to do well on a standardized test, but to create lifelong readers. Gallagher reminds us that although we want to improve our students' ability to gain knowledge through reading, we don't want to kill our students' love of it along the way. Our students should learn how to become better readers, but they shouldn't grow to hate the activity. Good teachers remember that our students don't know about all the curriculum standards (nor do they care), but they will learn, particularly if the teacher remembers that they need to be engaged, and (dare I say it?) they can also enjoy it.
We certainly do not want to kill reading in the attempt to raise a score.
chipper
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jimvanpelt
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Meanwhile -- I made it a rule not to read books I actually liked for book reports. And found that English teachers could put a bad taste in my mouth about books that I had already read and therefore knew I liked, which would take years to wear off.
So damage can be done to those of us who did turn out avid readers.
I know there are several books I loathed for years because of what happened in the classroom, but school didn't hurt my outside reading.