More reasons to follow TWTM reading lists (NPR story)

[Jane in NC]

I don't know if this NPR story on declining reading levels was discussed on the Chat Board, but if any of you have doubts on the value of TWTM reading lists, take heart!

 

You can listen to the story here.

 

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you'll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren't assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.

 

At Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., the 11th-grade honors English students are reading The Kite Runner. And students like Megan Bell are reading some heavy-duty books in their spare time. "I like a lot of like old-fashioned historical dramas," Bell says. "Like I just read Anna Karenina ... I plowed through it, and it was a really good book."

 

But most teens are not forging their way through Russian literature, says Walter Dean Myers, who is currently serving as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. A popular author of young-adult novels that are often set in the inner city, Myers wants his readers to see themselves in his books. But sometimes, he's surprised by his own fan mail.

 

"I'm glad they wrote," he says, "but it is not very heartening to see what they are reading as juniors and seniors." Asked what exactly is discouraging, Myers says that these juniors and seniors are reading books that he wrote with fifth- and sixth-graders in mind.

 

And a lot of the kids who like to read in their spare time are more likely to be reading the latest vampire novel than the classics, says Anita Silvey, author of 500 Great Books for Teens. Silvey teaches graduate students in a children's literature program, and at the beginning of the class, she asked her students — who grew up in the age of Harry Potter — about the books they like.

 

"Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' "

 

Those anecdotal observations are reflected in a study of kids' reading habits by Renaissance Learning. For the fifth year in a row, the educational company used its Accelerated Reader program to track what kids are reading in grades one through 12.

 

"Last year, we had more than 8.6 million students from across the country who read a total of 283 million books," says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning. Students participate in the Accelerated Reader program through their schools. When they read a book, they take a brief comprehension quiz, and the book is then recorded in the system. The books are assigned a grade level based on vocabulary and sentence complexity.

 

And Stickney says that after the late part of middle school, students generally don't continue to increase the difficulty levels of the books they read.

 

Last year, almost all of the top 40 books read in grades nine through 12 were well below grade level. The most popular books, the three books in The Hunger Games series, were assessed to be at the fifth-grade level.

Last year, for the first time, Renaissance did a separate study to find out what books were being assigned to high school students. "The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read," Stickney says, "has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level."

Most of the assigned books are novels, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men or Animal Farm. Students even read recent works like The Help and The Notebook. But in 1989, high school students were being assigned works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Emily Bronte and Edith Wharton.

Now, with the exception of Shakespeare, most classics have dropped off the list.

 

Back at Woodrow Wilson High School, at a 10th-grade English class — regular, not honors — students say they don't read much outside of school. But Tyler Jefferson and Adriel Miller are eager to talk. Adriel likes books about sports; Tyler likes history. Both say their teachers have assigned books they would not have chosen on their own. "I read The Odyssey, Tyler says. "I read Romeo and Juliet. I didn't read Hamlet. Asked what he thought of the books, Tyler acknowledges some challenges. "It was very different, because how the language was back then, the dialogue that they had.

 

Adriel agrees that books like that are tougher to read. "That's why we have great teachers that actually make us understand," he says. "It's a harder challenge of our brain, you know; it's a challenge."

 

But a challenge with its rewards, as Tyler says. "It gives us a new view on things."

 

Sandra Stotsky would be heartened to hear that. Professor emerita of education at the University of Arkansas, Stotsky firmly believes that high school students should be reading challenging fiction to get ready for the reading they'll do in college. "You wouldn't find words like 'malevolent,' 'malicious' or 'incorrigible' in science or history materials," she says, stressing the importance of literature. Stotsky says in the '60s and '70s, schools began introducing more accessible books in order to motivate kids to read. That trend has continued, and the result is that kids get stuck at a low level of reading.

 

"Kids were never pulled out of that particular mode in order to realize that in order to read more difficult works, you really have to work at it a little bit more," she says. "You've got to broaden your vocabulary. You may have to use a dictionary occasionally. You've got to do a lot more reading altogether."

 

"There's something wonderful about the language, the thinking, the intelligence of the classics," says Anita Silvey. She acknowledges that schools and parents may need to work a little harder to get kids to read the classics these days, but that doesn't mean kids shouldn't continue to read the popular contemporary novels they love. Both have value: "There's an emotional, psychological attraction to books for readers. And I think some of, particularly, these dark, dystopic novels that predict a future where in fact the teenager is going to have to find the answers, I think these are very compelling reads for these young people right now."

 

Reading leads to reading, says Silvey. It's when kids stop reading, or never get started in the first place, that there's no chance of ever getting them hooked on more complex books.

 

[Maureen]

Thanks for posting this. I made my 2 8th grade dd and my 6th grade dd read Great Expectations this past spring to illustrate how reading skills are a muscle that needs to be used to be strengthened. It was a tough read for them (and they read an assigned novel almost every week). We are now reading Jane Eyre. I love the classics and am enjoying sharing them with my girls. They do plenty of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Hunger Games on their own. I think all of these books can have merit if you discuss them with your kids. Quality of writing, social context of the stories, author's motivation and purpose for writing, etc. All can be discussed. It is interesting to read a pop fiction book and a classic one after the other and then compare how the stories affect you and how the themes can stick with you (or not!) for a long time after you close the book.

[unsinkable]

Thanks for posting this. I made my 2 8th grade dd and my 6th grade dd read Great Expectations this past spring to illustrate how reading skills are a muscle that needs to be used to be strengthened. It was a tough read for them (and they read an assigned novel almost every week). We are now reading Jane Eyre. I love the classics and am enjoying sharing them with my girls. They do plenty of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Hunger Games on their own. I think all of these books can have merit if you discuss them with your kids. Quality of writing, social context of the stories, author's motivation and purpose for writing, etc. All can be discussed. It is interesting to read a pop fiction book and a classic one after the other and then compare how the stories affect you and how the themes can stick with you (or not!) for a long time after you close the book.

 

Maureen,

 

I love your name!

 

It is so beautiful!

 

It used to be very popular but I don't meet many Maureens any more.

[swimmermom3]

Jane, a year ago I was on this board asking questions about TWTM reading list and its viability for ninth grade. It's not that I doubted reading the classics, I just wasn't sure about the difficulty for that level.

 

Silly me. About a month after ds returned home from the ps for English and history, he was laying on the couch one night talking to me about the Iliad when he suddenly paused for a moment and then said, "This is what I missed at school - reading great books and talking about them." This is my most cynical child who never gives his teacher an inch. When our discussion was over, I went into my bedroom and cried as I think that was the best homeschooling moment ever with him. For us, the great books are a way to build a stronger academic foundation for many disciplines, not just literature.

[Jane in NC]

Jane, a year ago I was on this board asking questions about TWTM reading list and its viability for ninth grade. It's not that I doubted reading the classics, I just wasn't sure about the difficulty for that level.

 

Silly me. About a month after ds returned home from the ps for English and history, he was laying on the couch one night talking to me about the Iliad when he suddenly paused for a moment and then said, "This is what I missed at school - reading great books and talking about them." This is my most cynical child who never gives his teacher an inch. When our discussion was over, I went into my bedroom and cried as I think that was the best homeschooling moment ever with him. For us, the great books are a way to build a stronger academic foundation for many disciplines, not just literature.

What a lovely post, Lisa! It reminded me of a conversation that I had with a parent of a then high school student when my son was in perhaps 5th grade. At this point I was weighing the homeschooling option with much trepidation. I had asked this acquaintance about her daughter's reading. Was there a list of books available for me to scan? "List?"

 

I have friends who are public school teachers in another state. One told me that her district has a master list of suggested books for each grade or class in high school. Teachers are allowed some flexibility to choose among them so that they don't have to teach Romeo and Juliet every single year. Apparently our school district had nothing like this--or at least this parent did not know about it.

 

Back to my story: "What is your daughter reading?" "John Grisham." "No, I mean for school." "Students choose their own books to read. She is reading John Grisham."

 

Alrighty then. Homeschooling became even more attractive.

[8filltheheart]

Thanks for linking, Jane. I just listened to it.

 

What I find interesting is the perspective of my own kids. My 3 teenagers (at the time 13, 16, and 18) finally read the Hunger Game series last summer just so they could have common ground for talking with some of the other kids they were around. My 2 daughters (13 and 18) both made the exact same comment. They said the books were hard for them to get through b/c the writing level annoyed them so much. They basically said they enjoyed the storyline, but they felt that they were reading elementary level books. Both of them love reading...one is more into Jane Austen and the other more into poetry. But, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure are part of the appeal and definitely something they pay attention to.

 

FWIW, I think it is possible for younger kids to read books with challenging vocabulary w/o necessarily going forward to adult classics. I read aloud to my littler ones quite a bit from the Collier Jr. Classic series. The selections it contains has elevated vocabulary. It is wonderful, though, to hear a 3 and 7 yr old try to figure out what a word means before asking. :) I think if you start when they are little, they are simply used to it.

[SarahW]

"Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.' "

 

 

From a purely sociological perspective, this is fascinating in and of itself.

 

That being said, there are classics that fit in those genres. Those could be good ways for students to cut their teeth on advanced vocabulary and plot.

[swimmermom3]

Thanks for linking, Jane. I just listened to it.

 

What I find interesting is the perspective of my own kids. My 3 teenagers (at the time 13, 16, and 18) finally read the Hunger Game series last summer just so they could have common ground for talking with some of the other kids they were around. My 2 daughters (13 and 18) both made the exact same comment. They said the books were hard for them to get through b/c the writing level annoyed them so much. They basically said they enjoyed the storyline, but they felt that they were reading elementary level books. Both of them love reading...one is more into Jane Austen and the other more into poetry. But, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure are part of the appeal and definitely something they pay attention to.

 

FWIW, I think it is possible for younger kids to read books with challenging vocabulary w/o necessarily going forward to adult classics. I read aloud to my littler ones quite a bit from the Collier Jr. Classic series. The selections it contains has elevated vocabulary. It is wonderful, though, to hear a 3 and 7 yr old try to figure out what a word means before asking. :) I think if you start when they are little, they are simply used to it.

 

 

Your teens' observations caught my attention and made me think of my youngest's experience with The Hunger Games. As you know, he seldom willingly reads a book on his own, but the night before 8th grade started, his sister gave him the book and he stayed up all night to read it. That was a springboard to an amazing year in literature. When he talked about the book with my older kids, they told him about dystopian literature and suggested he read Fahrenheit 451 and from there he went to Animal Farm, 1984, and The Inferno to name a few.

 

While my son said that he liked The Hunger Games, he never picked up the other books in the series to read even when given them as a gift.

 

I think what that book did was give him an opening into working with 'big ideas." What followed was probably prompted by the discussion of dytopian literature and not so much The Hunger Games itself. I don't know if I can explain this well, but I think that year was a watershed. He went from thinking of literature in the terms of "interesting story with well-constructed metaphors" to considering it as commentary on what it means to be human and to interacting with those ideas.

 

Does that make any sense?

[regentrude]

I am all for classics, and I definitely think students are not adequately challenged in public school, but this comparison bothered me:

 

"The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read," Stickney says, "has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level."

 

This statement does not take into account that the percentage of students who attended high school one hundred years ago was much smaller than the practically 100% today, when compulsory education forces kids into school until 12th grade.

Reading up on the history of public education in the US

http://0-nces.ed.gov...ubs93/93442.pdf

you come across numbers like the following:

 

1940, more than half of the U.S.population had completed no more than an eighth-grade education. Only 6 percent of males and 4 percent of females had completed 4 years of college. The median years of school attained by the adult population, 25 years old and over, had registered only a scant rise from 8.1 to 8.6 years over a 30-year period from 1910 to 1940

 

or here http://www.historyliteracy.org/download/Sears2.pdf a source is cited that

For example, in 1910, only 35% of 17-year-olds were in high school

 

It seems safe to assume that the students who did attend school beyond 8th grade were the more academically inclined ones, and IMO it makes no sense comparing what the top students one hundred years ago read with what the average student reads today - the majority of the kids in those classes would not even have attended school.

 

The problem is the one-size-fits-all school where, for the sake of political correctness, all students are taught to the lowest common denominator and the strong students are not adequately challenged. But I consider the quoted comparison apples to oranges.

[8filltheheart]

This statement does not take into account that the percentage of students who attended high school one hundred years ago was much smaller than the practically 100% today, when compulsory education forces kids into school until 12th grade.

 

It seems safe to assume that the students who did attend school beyond 8th grade were the more academically inclined ones, and IMO it makes no sense comparing what the top students one hundred years ago read with what the average student reads today - the majority of the kids in those classes would not even have attended school.

 

The problem is the one-size-fits-all school where, for the sake of political correctness, all students are taught to the lowest common denominator and the strong students are not adequately challenged. But I consider the quoted comparison apples to oranges.

 

 

While statistically you are correct that comparing education in the early 1900s to today does not make sense, the article confirms my experience in the differences in high school education in the US only 30 yrs vs. today. When I was in high school, we read numerous novels every yr. I read everything from Moby Dick to War and Peace. We read a novel approx every 2-3 weeks. We were writing essays or research papers constantly. We were defending our POV on the analysis of the lit. When I look back on my high school experience, I realize just how blessed I was by the diligence and professionalism of my English teachers. Grading the number of papers they did repeatedly must have taken several hours nightly at home. Each and every paper was marked with commentary on areas for improvement in development of argument and a # that corresponded to grammatical/punctuation errors in our English grammar handbook.

 

My sister's mil was a high school English teacher and quit when she could no longer assign novels. She had to use the lit textbook that the school issued b/c they wanted students to have a broad exposure to mutlitpe genres and there wasn't enough time to read a book. I don't blame her for quitting. It would drive me crazy, too.

[regentrude]

When I was in high school, we read numerous novels every yr. I read everything from Moby Dick to War and Peace. We read a novel approx every 2-3 weeks. We were writing essays or research papers constantly. We were defending our POV on the analysis of the lit. When I look back on my high school experience, I realize just how blessed I was by the diligence and professionalism of my English teachers.

 

 

My older colleagues all tell me that they used to have tracking in high school.

Was that the case when you went, or was it one size fits all? I have a hard time believing that, even 30 years ago, every student was able to read War and Peace in 2-3 weeks.

 

I am curious, since I believe lack of differentiation and "everybody is gifted" to be the culprits. Nobody can be left behind if all are marching to the beat of the slowest drummer.

[8filltheheart]

My older colleagues all tell me that they used to have tracking in high school.

Was that the case when you went, or was it one size fits all? I have a hard time believing that, even 30 years ago, every student was able to read War and Peace in 2-3 weeks.

 

I am curious, since I believe lack of differentiation and "everybody is gifted" to be the culprits. Nobody can be left behind if all are marching to the beat of the slowest drummer.

 

 

YOu are correct; we did have tracking (though it wasn't referred to as that.) Basically students could takenhonors, college prep, or general. THe reading lists were different for the different classes.

 

And, yeah, 2-3 weeks was in general, not every work. We were never not reading a novel and it wasn't like 2-3 novels/yr. We read numerous/yr. We actually didn't read the ancient classics, though. Our courses were more along the lines of American, British, World (for 10th-12th). I don't think we did anything specific like that in 9th, but I honestly don't remember much about 9th grade. So....my English teacher then must not have made much of an impression. ;)

[Susie in CA]

 

I am curious, since I believe lack of differentiation and "everybody is gifted" to be the culprits. Nobody can be left behind if all are marching to the beat of the slowest drummer.

 

I so agree with the above statement. It is very sad that every student must do exactly the same at the same speed. This is exactly why we decided to homeschool highschool.

[Butter]

I'll be honest. I don't like a lot of the classics. I read Little Women recently and found it to be rather obnoxious in tone and very preachy. I also don't really see a huge issue with not reading much of the classics. There are lots of good books being written today. It's not all about the language and words used. I like reading books that are all over the place. I love Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars and I also love To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 and then I also love Truman (David McCollough) and historical fiction and non-fiction (favorite is about things in US history). What concerns me about what this article is saying is how narrow the likes of kids are. I'd rather see them read a variety of books than classics (and, honestly, I can see how someclassics could turn kids off from reading all together).

[Butter]

I'll be honest. I don't like a lot of the classics. I read Little Women recently and found it to be rather obnoxious in tone and very preachy. I also don't really see a huge issue with not reading much of the classics. There are lots of good books being written today. It's not all about the language and words used. I like reading books that are all over the place. I love Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars and I also love To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 and then I also love Truman (David McCollough) and historical fiction and non-fiction (favorite is about things in US history). What concerns me about what this article is saying is how narrow the likes of kids are. I'd rather see them read a variety of books than classics (and, honestly, I can see how someclassics could turn kids off from reading all together).

[regentrude]

I'd rather see them read a variety of books than classics

 

I do not understand this dichotomy. Classics are a variety of books, from a variety of authors, periods, genres. Classics are all literature from previous centuries humans today still deems valuable and pertinent. I don't think it can get more varied than that.

 

This said: nobody likes "all" classics. (Only snobs claim they do). It would not make sense to like all classics, because everybody has different tastes. I do not expect my kids to like all classics; I do, however, expect them to have the ability to read them, and to become familiar with a good portion of the canon, so they are educated people who understand references in literature and art.

 

I do not consider today's teens' preference for reading fantasy and sci fi over historical fiction a problem (to be honest, lots of historical fiction is utterly boring, and that does include some WTM recommendations).

To me, the problem is students' inability to read and comprehend classics. And without the ability, they can not even discover whether they might like a book or not.

[Nan in Mass]

...What I find interesting is the perspective of my own kids. My 3 teenagers (at the time 13, 16, and 18) finally read the Hunger Game series last summer just so they could have common ground for talking with some of the other kids they were around. My 2 daughters (13 and 18) both made the exact same comment. They said the books were hard for them to get through b/c the writing level annoyed them so much. They basically said they enjoyed the storyline, but they felt that they were reading elementary level books. Both of them love reading...one is more into Jane Austen and the other more into poetry. But, vocabulary, syntax, and sentence structure are part of the appeal and definitely something they pay attention to....

 

So I guess this probably means that the reason my son enjoyed them is because he was reading them in French and so didn't notice the low reading level problem? LOL In French, it was probably the right level for him as summer reading, even though he was 18.

 

Nan

[Lori D.]

Jane, thanks for linking the NPR piece! I got to hear most of it while driving around yesterday, and was so pleased to hear someone speaking up for classics, and esp. to hear the quotes from the students who said, yes, classics were hard, but they could see the classics were good for them to challenge them and make them think! :)

 

 

the article confirms my experience in the differences in high school education in the US only 30 yrs vs. today.

 

 

Yes, this is how I interpreted the NPR quote, too, based on the in-classroom experiences of a dear friend (DF) who has taught high school English for 35 years. He taught for 33 in a public high school, both regular and honors English courses, and the past 2 years at a quality private Christian high school.

 

DF says that in his years at the public high school, he was seeing a drop in reading levels about every 5 years, to the point where in his last 5 years at the public high school, even his HONORS level high school class had an AVERAGE reading level of 6th grade, and in his last year of teaching there, he had one class with an average reading level of THIRD GRADE. This was the regular English class of 12th grade students! :sad: There was just no way he could even begin to teach them anything -- they couldn't read the works (even when he switched to easier books to read); they couldn't answer basic questions even with the book open to the page where the answer was; and they certainly couldn't remember anything from a previous chapter... Thinking, discussing, and writing were impossible.

 

Even at the quality private Christian school these past 2 years, he is running into problems with students with a lower reading level. These are students who have been in a more rigorous academic setting for much of their schooling, and a large percent of the typical 10th grade class are reading at about a 6th grade level.

 

So, yes, reading levels across the board have dropped dramatically in the past 30 years for the average student, which means what can be taught in the classroom has changed dramatically (downwards) to accommodate the lower reading and comprehension levels. Couple this with Common Core wiping out the classics from the required reading, and I foresee a generation of virtually illiterate and unthinking drones in the making... :(

 

My heart hurts for these children and young people who are being cut off from real education -- and they don't even know it.

[Arcadia]

In French, it was probably the right level for him as summer reading, even though he was 18.

 

Nan

 

Read "Le Petit Prince" http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300771h.html

(Just kidding). It is one of my favourite Literature textbook.

[kerenlynne]

 

 

My older colleagues all tell me that they used to have tracking in high school.

Was that the case when you went, or was it one size fits all? I have a hard time believing that, even 30 years ago, every student was able to read War and Peace in 2-3 weeks.

 

I am curious, since I believe lack of differentiation and "everybody is gifted" to be the culprits. Nobody can be left behind if all are marching to the beat of the slowest drummer.

 

 

We had some "unofficial" tracking back in HS which I am sad to say was probably close to 30 yrs ago:( I think the writing classes were college prep or regular but the Lit Classes were taken by all. We used anthologies and it really depended on the teacher as to the difficulty of the class. My counselor wouldn't let me take a class from a particular teacher b/c he knew the teacher was pretty bad. There was one teacher who was particularly challenging and she has recently said that at the end of her teaching career she couldn't give the same kind of assignments to her students that she had given in the past because they would buy papers off of the internet and other things like that. She didn't address the reading level. Interestingly- My dad who went to HS in the 50s,and I suspect is dyslexic, said his teacher gave him a lot of "Classic Comics" to read instead of the real books.

[FlockOfSillies]

We didn't have official tracking at my high school in the late '80s, but the smart kids were all in honors and AP classes, and the slower/less-motivated kids were in either general or remedial classes.

 

My dad says he took "dummy" math in the '50s; it was plenty enough for him to support a large family as an HVAC technician. That was back when very few people went to college, because you didn't need a college degree to be a secretary.

[Jean in Newcastle]

I enjoyed The Hunger Games books. But they were a fun read that I enjoyed because it made me think through certain themes. It did not stretch my son or me as a reader but it did lead to some great discussions! But we read it on our free time. I: wouldn't have assigned it for school. Reading the classics stretches us both as readers and thinkers. They expose us to not just great themes but the great thinkers of history. We don't enjoy every classic and honestly, not all classics are even what we would consider "well-written" but they are books that have had a great impact and we discuss that.

[JudyJudyJudy]

Regentrude, I agree with everything you posted except the part in burgundy:

 

This statement does not take into account that the percentage of students who attended high school one hundred years ago was much smaller than the practically 100% today, when compulsory education forces kids into school until 12th grade.

 

I can't even begin to tell you how many students in the areas in which I taught never made it past ninth grade. Some disappeared illegally when they weren't old enough to drop out, and nobody ever bothered to look for them. Others just rode it out until they turned 16. Now that the law is in place that prevents teens from having their drivers' licenses if they're not in school, more do stay longer, but many still aren't getting enough credits to get beyond ninth grade.

[8filltheheart]

Your teens' observations caught my attention and made me think of my youngest's experience with The Hunger Games. As you know, he seldom willingly reads a book on his own, but the night before 8th grade started, his sister gave him the book and he stayed up all night to read it. That was a springboard to an amazing year in literature. When he talked about the book with my older kids, they told him about dystopian literature and suggested he read Fahrenheit 451 and from there he went to Animal Farm, 1984, and The Inferno to name a few.

 

While my son said that he liked The Hunger Games, he never picked up the other books in the series to read even when given them as a gift.

 

I think what that book did was give him an opening into working with 'big ideas." What followed was probably prompted by the discussion of dytopian literature and not so much The Hunger Games itself. I don't know if I can explain this well, but I think that year was a watershed. He went from thinking of literature in the terms of "interesting story with well-constructed metaphors" to considering it as commentary on what it means to be human and to interacting with those ideas.

 

Does that make any sense?

 

Lisa, I realized when I re-read this this morning (and Nan's post) that I hadn't posted what ds thought of the books (thought I had).

 

Ds enjoyed the books and disagreed with his sisters. Ds is a reader and does read all the time on his own. However, his reading choices are definitely more along the modern science fiction spectrum.

 

I'm not sure that **I** know the real distinction--I'm sure they do. My guess would be that ds's reading is more getting immersed purely in the story line. My dds probably morph everything together into enjoying the reading experience.

 

I do know that ds's appreciation for writing is changing. He is writing his own novel and is close to 50,000 words. Since he started writing it, he has become more "language aware." (He definitely never used to be a lover of anything associated with language.) He is starting to pay attention to well-crafted sentences and the beauty of assonance, etc. I don't know that he really cared before. He knew what those things were b/c we discuss them, but I don't think he really appreciated the skill of authors who are true language masters.

[Lizzie in Ma]

From a purely sociological perspective, this is fascinating in and of itself.

 

That being said, there are classics that fit in those genres. Those could be good ways for students to cut their teeth on advanced vocabulary and plot.

 

 

There certainly are! My fantasy loving 12 year old is plowing through Jules Verne right now and her new favorite is Alice in Wonderland. Journey to the Center of the Earth has a 1000 Lexile Level, 20,000 Leagues has a 1030, Alice is 980 so they are good reads for her even though her LL from her Stanford 10's is 1215 this year. I have Frankenstein on her to read list which is a 1170. Just examples of good challenges reads for lovers of fantasy, horror and sci fi.

 

If anyone is wondering, here is where I look for LL

http://www.lexile.com/

[8filltheheart]

Jane,

 

This thread is another one that makes me think of John Branyan's Three Little Pigs performance. I posted it a few days ago in a different thread about grammar b/c the conversation about the decline in grammar skills reminded me of the decline in vocabulary. I didn't realize that with this new format that a youtube video fully embeds in the post. Feel kind of weird about that, so I am not going to link it. But if you google John Branyan Three Little Pigs, it is definitely easy to find. :)

 

I think the crux of the article is not ancient classical lit vs. modern lit. In my mind, it boils down to level of language and literary importance in terms of cultural influence. When vocabulary and reading levels are not challenged and instead reading exposure is limited to writing that is on par with everyday spoken language and selected for its entertainment value, educational outcome has to be impacted. If students are only reading works that are assessed at an elementary/middle school level and are graduating high school w/o being able to comprehend high school/college level writing or understand the cultural influences of literature, John Branyan's performance isn't as much funny as confining.

[Nscribe]

We still have tracking at the high school level, it just appears to be a choice of the student/family more so than in the past (AP, IB, Concurrent Enrollment). These programs grew as the movement away from ability grouping gained steam within the systems/ed community. Parents responded at earlier ages by increasingly seeking "gifted" designations in elementary to assure being on track for access to Algebra 1 (and increasingly Geometry) in middle school. Honors levels in high school seems increasingly a destinction without a difference, except to be something that is not AP/IB or Concurrent Enrollment but not remedial.

 

Dd studies/reads the classics and reads from the current teen oriented selections. She likes both, for different reasons. She loves being lost in a language and conversation rarely encountered today, but she also likes that breezy read that keeps her in touch with the contemporary conversation and trends. A good reading of Paradise Lost may take her a few weeks, but she can pick up Orson Scott Card and be done in a day. For many of her friends, the issue is more than not reading. They don't follow any news, understand other cultures, assume black and white films have nothing to offer, can't imagine why one would worry about a painting beyond whether it matches the sofa and can recall the latest hip/hop verbage but have never read a poem outside a classroom.

[Nan in Mass]

I love Le Petit Prince. I assigned it to my son for literature. I think it is a good example of reading level having nothing to do with whether something is or is not a classic. For those who haven't read it: it is written in very, very simple language but it is beautiful, none the less. It can be read at a number of levels and as I grew up, I began seeing the other levels. Or I guess it might be more accurate to say that I was dimly aware of those levels when I read it as a small child (they aren't particularly hidden), but I wasn't interested in them. I think this is part of what makes a classic a classic - something that can be read at different ages and liked for different aspects. If the book is easy enough to read that most educated people can read it, readily available , well known, and popular, and it appeals to people of different times the same way it appeals to people of different ages, then I think it is likely to make the classic list.

 

A few random comments:

 

My high school was tracked at least through the middle 80's. My elementary school (late 60's through middle 70's) was either tracked or individualized. My children's high school is tracked. Their elementary school is not. None of mine were in the middle school so I don't know about that. I don't think there is a lot of controversy about tracking in high school here but I haven't spoken to many people about it. It is more a matter of the lack of discussions about it. Having the elementary school untracked was popular among the parents I knew.

 

I read relatively few adult-level classics growing up (that is relatively - I certainly read some). I read some of them for the first time as an adult, like The Republic, The Iliad, Lives, some Emerson essays, Ben Franklin's autobio, some of the Federalist papers, the rest of Chauser (some I had read), Dickens, more Shakespeare plays, more Greek plays... I was startled to see how easy these ALL were to read. Now it is true that I picked the easier things off TWTM lists, but still... It was obvious to me that part of the reason they were considered popular classics was BECAUSE they were easy to read. My children aren't the best readers in the world and they had no trouble reading them. Did they see all the adult layers? No. They were children. I pointed some of them out. I probably missed some, also, not being all the way grown up yet, either. I am sure we missed many of the references in The Inferno, despite reading the notes as we went, but that didn't mean my children didn't enjoy it or get something out of it. Could they have gotten more out of it? Sure. But with the notes, they certainly got enough out of it to make it worth reading. We probably could have spent years on any of these. People do. (In order to pick up all those references, I think we would need to be a different culture lol. Like that article Hamlet in the Bush.) When my mother, my son, and I all read Gilgamesh together, we each focused on different themes, depending on our age. I'm not even sure I WANT to point out all the levels to my children. It is really fun discovering them for myself as I reread things at an older age. I want my children to have that pleasure, also.

 

Circling back to tracking... I do think that it probably helped that my children read most of TWTM elementary school and middle school lists before they read moved on to the high school lists. We did almost no English grammar and vocabulary, but they did do a Latin program that explained the grammar. They did Writing Strands (which contains rudimentary literature analysis from the "choices you have to make when you write" point of view) and I know that helped. We didn't dwell on history but they had enough history to be able to understand a bit of the historical background of the books they were reading. If they had read almost nothing and then tried to read the classics, they probably would have been less successful. I wonder if eliminating tracking in elementary school is part of the problem? I think it causes more problems than it is worth and doing a certain amount of individualizing would be better than tracking, but still...

 

Last thought - An aquaintance told me that she had seen a drastic drop in students' academic abilities in the last TEN years. When I asked her why, she said personally, she thinks it is because the teachers are much worse. We are now seeing the first students who have been taught by teachers who themselves received one of the new, inferior educations.

 

Nan

[justamouse]

There certainly are! My fantasy loving 12 year old is plowing through Jules Verne right now and her new favorite is Alice in Wonderland. Journey to the Center of the Earth has a 1000 Lexile Level, 20,000 Leagues has a 1030, Alice is 980 so they are good reads for her even though her LL from her Stanford 10's is 1215 this year. I have Frankenstein on her to read list which is a 1170. Just examples of good challenges reads for lovers of fantasy, horror and sci fi.

 

If anyone is wondering, here is where I look for LL

http://www.lexile.com/

 

Thank you!

 

Ds13 just got done with the Jules Verne full collection (picked it up at Costco, along with the complete Sherlock Holmes (which he already finished at 1130)) and he loved it. All of them (except the 7 yo) have read Alice. I've always wondered about the lexile levels of our assignments. Just for fun, I wouldn't assign with the levels as a purpose.

[justamouse]

You know, this Lexile thing is interesting.

 

With a classical education, the kids will have a better vocabulary from the start--I just punched in Tanglewood Tales (Hawthorne) and it's LL is 1260. I mean, that's not far off from LL of the Mohicans, (which Ds 13 is reading now), with a 1350 level. Even the Beatrix Potters are higher than some of the newer retellings of Robin Hood.

 

I live in a bubble, I knew the difficulty of books had decreased, but if this pablum is what teachers are now forced to assign, it's no wonder the reading ability/proficiency of the modern student is nonexistent.

[FaithManor]

My older colleagues all tell me that they used to have tracking in high school.

Was that the case when you went, or was it one size fits all? I have a hard time believing that, even 30 years ago, every student was able to read War and Peace in 2-3 weeks.

 

I am curious, since I believe lack of differentiation and "everybody is gifted" to be the culprits. Nobody can be left behind if all are marching to the beat of the slowest drummer.

 

You are correct!

 

At my parents high school, they had tracking, but it was flexible. So for instance, my mom was in a trades track - fashion design and home economics...four straight years of increasing intensity to the point that by the time my mom was 17 she was creating custom wedding gowns, and catering events with pinache! She struggled in math and was allowed to go no further than algebra 1, taking instead a lot of business accounting which has served her very well over the years, but she was an ace student in English and was in the college prep courses studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, and the like.

 

My dad was in the college prep sciences track. However, the man was pathetic in English, just awful. So, he was taking all of the upper level mathematics and sciences along with Latin, three years of practical drafting - I suppose now if a high school offered it the course would be CAD though I question the use of the software in the first year because doing the work "the old fashioned way" leads to a lot of specialized learning and skill - metalworking, electrical engineering, etc. He was proficient in history but the man, to this very day, cannot probably tell you the difference between the parts of speech and his spelling is atrocious - though he still remembers a lot of Latin :huh: . I think his natural ability to convey thought to paper is about the only thing that saved him (he's an effective communicator)....well, dating my mom who edited his papers and made him revise frequently because of grammatical errors, spelling, and punctuation probably helped him a LOT! He took the easiest English classes offered.

 

So, there was flexibilty. One could actually tailor the plan to meet the goals and the skill level the student arrived at high school with...there was no "one sized fits all" program.

 

Every year, choices become diminished in all but the wealthier schools. On deck to be eliminated in our local school district, all AP's except calculus and physics, all college prep English courses, all but one year of art, one of the band directors which means no symphonic band or jazz band, one more higher paid math teacher which means that 9th grade algebra 1 will average 42 students per class, all three years of German, the 3rd year of French, and the French teacher herself...French students will sit in the school library and do online work individually so NO CONVERSATIONS!!!!, botany, biology II, metalworking, woodworking, and the international cultures course. Gone. However, the sports budget is getting a 10% increase because sales of tickets and concessions is "a money maker". :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

 

At the last school board meeting, the superintendent, ever the wisecracker, said to me, "So, when are you going to enroll your kids in school and become our best parent volunteer?"

 

This is exactly what I said, "When hell freezes over! Even if I'm dead, my kids will not be enrolled in this district. I come here to fight for the community, for the children, for my neighbor's kids. As for my own children, upon my death, dh would move to Ann Arbor or Lansing and use Dual Enrollment at the university to complete their educations or online coursework through MIT. But, he.would.not.put.them.in.this.school."

 

Yah, I know....I am not winning any popularity contests!

 

Faith

[Nan in Mass]

Hugs, Faith. So frustrating.

[Robin in DFW]

You are correct!

 

At my parents high school, they had tracking, but it was flexible. So for instance, my mom was in a trades track - fashion design and home economics...four straight years of increasing intensity to the point that by the time my mom was 17 she was creating custom wedding gowns, and catering events with pinache! She struggled in math and was allowed to go no further than algebra 1, taking instead a lot of business accounting which has served her very well over the years, but she was an ace student in English and was in the college prep courses studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, Homer, and the like.

 

My dad was in the college prep sciences track. However, the man was pathetic in English, just awful. So, he was taking all of the upper level mathematics and sciences along with Latin, three years of practical drafting - I suppose now if a high school offered it the course would be CAD though I question the use of the software in the first year because doing the work "the old fashioned way" leads to a lot of specialized learning and skill - metalworking, electrical engineering, etc. He was proficient in history but the man, to this very day, cannot probably tell you the difference between the parts of speech and his spelling is atrocious - though he still remembers a lot of Latin :huh: . I think his natural ability to convey thought to paper is about the only thing that saved him (he's an effective communicator)....well, dating my mom who edited his papers and made him revise frequently because of grammatical errors, spelling, and punctuation probably helped him a LOT! He took the easiest English classes offered.

 

So, there was flexibilty. One could actually tailor the plan to meet the goals and the skill level the student arrived at high school with...there was no "one sized fits all" program.

 

Every year, choices become diminished in all but the wealthier schools. On deck to be eliminated in our local school district, all AP's except calculus and physics, all college prep English courses, all but one year of art, one of the band directors which means no symphonic band or jazz band, one more higher paid math teacher which means that 9th grade algebra 1 will average 42 students per class, all three years of German, the 3rd year of French, and the French teacher herself...French students will sit in the school library and do online work individually so NO CONVERSATIONS!!!!, botany, biology II, metalworking, woodworking, and the international cultures course. Gone. However, the sports budget is getting a 10% increase because sales of tickets and concessions is "a money maker". :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

 

At the last school board meeting, the superintendent, ever the wisecracker, said to me, "So, when are you going to enroll your kids in school and become our best parent volunteer?"

 

This is exactly what I said, "When hell freezes over! Even if I'm dead, my kids will not be enrolled in this district. I come here to fight for the community, for the children, for my neighbor's kids. As for my own children, upon my death, dh would move to Ann Arbor or Lansing and use Dual Enrollment at the university to complete their educations or online coursework through MIT. But, he.would.not.put.them.in.this.school."

 

Yah, I know....I am not winning any popularity contests!

 

Faith

 

 

Not that Texas has a great track record or anything, but our Governor recently presented a bill that will allow high school students more flexibility in their education. If it passes, students could tailor their coursework more like college, allowing them to pursue their field of interest. Although I think students should have exposure to various topics, this type of specialization just might be the ticket for those that would otherwise lose interest in school altogether.

 

He is also trying to eliminate all but one standardized test in the high school years so there can be more effort put on real learning rather than learning for the test.

[FaithManor]

Oh, and if anyone is wondering about the elimination of college prep English, they are getting away with this by offering dual enrollment for college writing and English through a community college. Unfortunately, the community college chosen for this, has a very, very poor reputation. It is not the good one 1.5 hrs. south of here, but within blocks of the high school campus and their classes are quite dumbed down. So, they've convinced the parents that there will be no loss of educational momentum by stating, "Your child will be taking college courses". However, the actual content, scope and sequence, is far less than what the college prep and AP English teachers were doing in their classes last year.

 

Now, if this school were near Lansing Community College or U of M, MSU, Kalamazoo College, Grand Valley, Hope, or the like and said, "Hey, we are going to use dual enrollment from one of these institutions", then parents should jump on that bandwagon! But, the institution in question is really run like a business and the motto is "the customer is always right" so any complaint to the dean goes against the instructor. I've known students who skipped half the classes, turned in less than half the coursework, bombed the final, and slept when they were there and when given a failing grade, got it raised to a B by complaining to the administration. So, I have NO faith in what will happen to the college bound high schoolers that land in one of those writing classes.

 

Faith

[Erin]

I remember my mandatory college lit. class in the early 90s, reading things like Frankenstein, Oedipus Rex, or The Divine Comedy. Basically a continuation of my senior year English in high school, really...

 

But I had a lot of classmates who were completely overwhelmed because either they'd never gotten out of their anthology (and while some include entire works, most don't) or they read real books like Jacob Have I Loved, or Hoops.

 

So to be sure, this is not a new issue.

[Erin]

He was proficient in history but the man, to this very day, cannot probably tell you the difference between the parts of speech and his spelling is atrocious - though he still remembers a lot of Latin :huh: . I think his natural ability to convey thought to paper is about the only thing that saved him (he's an effective communicator)....well, dating my mom who edited his papers and made him revise frequently because of grammatical errors, spelling, and punctuation probably helped him a LOT!

I just had to laugh at this. :D My dad is the same way.

He can not spell to save his life, though his grammar is functional. He graduated 2nd in his law school class for the sole reason that he was already married to mom. lol

He always said he doesn't need spelling...that's why he chose a profession that comes with a secretary. ;)

[Candid]

I'll be honest. I don't like a lot of the classics. I read Little Women recently and found it to be rather obnoxious in tone and very preachy. I also don't really see a huge issue with not reading much of the classics. There are lots of good books being written today. It's not all about the language and words used. I like reading books that are all over the place. I love Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars and I also love To Kill a Mockingbird and Fahrenheit 451 and then I also love Truman (David McCollough) and historical fiction and non-fiction (favorite is about things in US history). What concerns me about what this article is saying is how narrow the likes of kids are. I'd rather see them read a variety of books than classics (and, honestly, I can see how someclassics could turn kids off from reading all together).

 

Little Women is not a classic; at best it is a children's classic. Part of what you don't like is the preachy tone which was common for early children's literature which Little Women definitely is.

 

So it is possible you like classics (well mostly, because classics are varied like life and nobody likes everything).

[Colleen in NS]

Boy, do I ever miss this crew of posters! Thanks, all, for giving me a boost I needed.