The Fate of Reading

Yesterday on Twitter I followed a link to Musing of a Book Addict’s post Venting About The Fate of Reading and Reading Teachers.  As I read her post, I felt myself growing more and more frustrated.  Sandra laid out her own anger with the canned and scripted reading program she is expected to use with her 7th and 8th graders this year.  While I despise scripted programs this part angered me the most:

If they finish a lesson early they may read one of the following books from the program’s library: The Tiger Rising, Johny Hangtime, Bird, The Boy Who Saved Baseball, Night of the Twisters, Every Living Thing, Locomotion, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup.
Only these 8 books – OR –They may read either the Kids Discover Magazine, Cobblestone Muse, Faces or Odyssey Magazine or Footsteps. Of course they (the program) have picked the approved topic such as Bridges, climate, fairy tales, Chemistry of chocolate, or Folk Art.

On day 5 and 10 if they finish their computerized lesson they are to go to the online book cart (part of the program) and pick one of their selections and read it and test on it and then go to their online books (part of the program) and read a passage and test on it.

If at anytime they finish all of the above the only other approved book is their required novel from their Language Arts class. 

WHAT?!  First of all, there is nothing wrong with The Tiger Rising, Johny Hangtime, Bird, The Boy Who Saved Baseball, Night of the Twisters, Every Living Thing, Locomotion, Granny Torrelli Makes Soup.  However, there is no way on earth those eight books will connect with all of the program’s students.  They are great books but students should be able to choose from the thousands and thousands of middle grade and YA books out there to read.  Who chose those 8 books?  Which students are they meant to speak to?  What about the students who won’t connect with those books?  

And then if they happen to finish all those books they can then read their novel for language arts and only that class novel.

Personal choice means nothing? 

Students can’t be trusted to choose their own books?

I spend the beginning of each year teaching my sixth graders how to choose books.  For a small handful of students the process can take almost the whole year.  However, they are capable of choosing appropriate books that they will enjoy once they are taught how to choose those books.  How do we expect students to grow into lifelong readers if we teach them that they can’t handle the responsibility of finding their niche in the world of reading?

The program Sandra’s district has implemented actually states that all pleasure reading is to be done at home.  What a laugh!  It’s the rare student who will take time out of their night to read a book for pleasure if their teachers don’t model the importance of pleasure reading in school.  If we don’t show that reading deserves to be done and is important in our daily life then students won’t make that judgement on their own.  My students read independently every.single.day. I make sure to carve the time out of our school day and they then carve out time at home.  It’s a reciprocal relationship.  If it is important to me it becomes important to them.

But what upset me even more in Sandra’s post were her anecdotes about the other teachers in her district who are blindly accepting the canned program.  In fact, they are glad to have it.  Upon hearing that Sandra read books for her students over the summer, they actually responded with disbelief and almost-horror.  Why on earth would a teacher do that “crap”, as one of the teachers so eloquently put it?  

You want to know why Johnny and Johnae can’t read? We have too many teachers willing to let administrators spend thousands of dollars for canned programs that list the benchmarks and what to say and even have the lesson plans written up. That way they don’t have to do anything. 

We need to stop this.  There is no better way to get students reading then putting books in their hands.  BOOKS.  Not basal readers, not graphic organizers, not workbooks.  Actual, physical, paper-and-glue books.  Real novels and stories, not those written specifically for test prep and canned programs.  Literature.  For the past three years I have been growing readers in my classroom, as Jen says, and I do it with nothing more than a classroom library and booktalks.  My students still learn and use the comprehension strategies, they write about reading, they hold conversations about their books.  In fact, they go above and beyond what the scripted programs ask for.  I have extremely high expectations for them and they meet those expectations every year.

Does this mean I have to write my own lesson plans, read professional literature, keep up on children’s literature, and do a little more work?  Sure.  But it’s what is best for my students and it’s what has been working for the past three years.  How can you be a reading teacher and hate reading?  How can you think that reading from a script and never deviating from it is what’s best for our students?!  If all we need to teach kids is a script, then hire a robot instead of a teacher.  Or sit kids in front of a computer.  All you will get is a generation of test-takers.  Sure they’ll pass the standardized tests but they won’t be lifelong learners and they certainly won’t be readers or writers.  And where would our world be without readers and writers?

Whether you are dealing with dormant readers, developing readers, or underground readers- literature is the way to go.  In fact, it is the only way to go.  As teachers we need to get the message out to administrators and politicians that we don’t want these programs!  Instead, the millions of dollars spent annually on reading programs should be funneled to school and classroom libraries.  We should be booking author visits, connecting students with real live writers and creators.  We should be buying novels, graphic novels, realistic fiction, non-fiction, every genre of books for our schools.  We should be exposing students to real text with real stories.  Not some 5-paragraph garbage written for a computer reading program with 10 multiple-choice questions that dig no deeper than recall on Bloom’s Taxonomy yet we call it “everyday text”.  Ridiculous.  Everyday text is made up of what we really read everyday- books, brochures, recipes, signs, newspapers, and so much more.

Books are the answer.  Real reading makes readers.  

Not scripts.

Not programs.

Teachers + books + students

=

Lifelong readers.