Atlantic article: Elite college students who can't read books

[knitgrl]

2 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Omg! This! 

It's as though the education department thinks kids have never had any real problems so use literature to introduce them, then do absolutely nothing to help them process any of it.

I don't think my kid needed to endure ptsd flashbacks during her year 7 English class. I don't think I needed to write a poem about death in year 8, the year my favourite grandpa died. Or, you know, ever.

Not to defend it, but I think the intent is that literature is seen as a means of helping them to process problems. If by vicariously experiencing horrible things through novels, then they will make good choices in the future. Or so the logic goes...

[bookbard]

5 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

I know my DD struggles with stuff like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. Not because the text is too hard but because the ideas and lifestyle seem so different to here, whereas to me they seemed pretty relatable. 

Yes, my favourite books when I was growing up were those, plus the Billabong books (did you read them?) I managed to get my daughter to watch Anne of Green Gables and read the graphic novel, and she's listened to a version of Little Women on CD. But there's no way she'd read them. They're just so religious, for one thing. And she's not interested in romance at all. 

However, she's read a lot of Shakespeare for pleasure, went online and found Lord of the Flies to read that, and is now reading The Great Gatsby after discovering the musical. And I will say, my siblings never read half the stuff I used to read either, so a lot of it is personality. 

[Rosie_0801]

2 minutes ago, knitgrl said:

Not to defend it, but I think the intent is that literature is seen as a means of helping them to process problems. If by vicariously experiencing horrible things through novels, then they will make good choices in the future. Or so the logic goes...

Except it doesn't if it's not taught that way, and it's not taught that way. From what I've heard from an English teacher mate of mine, it's *not allowed* to be taught that way. 

It is a technique I've made a lot of use of here in my house, though.

[kbutton]

21 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

 

I know my DD struggles with stuff like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. Not because the text is too hard but because the ideas and lifestyle seem so different to here, whereas to me they seemed pretty relatable. 
 

A lot of older books move more slowly and are long on detailed description. We’re used to faster paced stuff. Some types of plot lines that were new when a book was introduced are common now, so adding in a lot of extra scene-setting can seem extraneous.

I loved Silas Marner, but I chose to listen to it while seeing, and so think it helped with the drawn out nature of the beginning.

[kbutton]

2 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Omg! This! 

It's as though the education department thinks kids have never had any real problems so use literature to introduce them, then do absolutely nothing to help them process any of it.

I don't think my kid needed to endure ptsd flashbacks during her year 7 English class. I don't think I needed to write a poem about death in year 8, the year my favourite grandpa died. Or, you know, ever.

I will never forget a class in college on Developmental Reading where the prof read a very well-written story about a car accident. It was vivid, but not graphic. One student started shaking and then violently crying; she finally fled the room, IIRC. Apparently her brother had been killed in a car accident. The professor’s reaction after hearing this was that the student was overly sensitive. 😡

[whitestavern]

8 hours ago, Ailaena said:

michael Clay Thompson!

https://www.rfwp.com/

I can’t even comment on the rest since it seems like a systemic issue that one band-aid can’t fix 😞 

 

 

I taught my kids with MCT and am proud to say they scored perfectly on the associated ACT segments. That curriculum even helped my husband (a copywriter at the time) and myself (currently a copy editor). I feel very fortunate to have met him at a homeschooling forum ☺️

[SanDiegoMom]

My daughter listened to the podcast Sold a Story about the Whole Language and Balanced Literacy teaching methods.  She says she could tell when students (in her AP English class) read aloud who had learned that way.  They would get to an unknown word and kind of guess at what it was and replace it with a word that started the same.  

She could also tell when doing peer edits who had read as a child and who hadn't.  The vocabulary was very simple and the sentence structure was formulaic.  

[Hyacinth]

“The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

“And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

~ Flannery O’Connor

 

[Rosie_0801]

I always figured if literature was being taught well, the kids would learn how to relate to it. If they still don't like it, they will at least have something more to say about not liking it than "this sucks." People often enjoy not liking things, anyway. (I'm reading about tribalism in music atm.)

[Ausmumof3]

43 minutes ago, Rosie_0801 said:

I always figured if literature was being taught well, the kids would learn how to relate to it. If they still don't like it, they will at least have something more to say about not liking it than "this sucks." People often enjoy not liking things, anyway. (I'm reading about tribalism in music atm.)

Yes.  And it’s funny how this standard is only applied to English. We don’t ask the kids what maths they want to learn or like 😃

But I don’t mind that modern English seems to be coming back to a skills focus it’s just maybe too little too late?

[Meriwether]

My non-reader (reads but very slowly) is a freshman this year. She has read two full-length books, not classics but not fluff reading, in the first 7 weeks. She has also read textbooks, shorter non-fiction books, listened to most of an audiobook of The Three Muskateers (should finish this week), listened to several audiobooks for fun, and listened to me read aloud. With some kids you just do the best you can. She would struggle with a book per week, mostly because at as few as 10 pages per hour she just wouldn't have time. My other kids all read a significant amount for me for school, anywhere from 1-3 books per week across subjects. Of course, most of them were read but not discussed. As adults, they read but not much outside of assigned reading for college. It is 100% because of phones. I don't read half what I used to because I am on my phone too much.

Across the entire population, Lucy Calkins shoulders some responsibility for kids graduating without reading skills. I doubt she is highly responsible for the kids at elite colleges not having great reading skills. That is most likely due to low expectations in high school and phone use.

Edited Thursday at 04:03 PM by Meriwether

[luuknam]

My reading speed has dropped over the years, and doing a long, dense work a week would be a major struggle for me. That said, as I've gotten older (and technology has evolved), my reading style has changed. I'm googling more words I don't know (thankfully my vocab is pretty large so usually not too crazy many), doing more fact-checking or looking up background info, etc, all of which takes time. I also have a larger amount of background knowledge in general, so I sometimes end up making comparisons between things or pondering stuff (I did that when I was younger too, but maybe I do it more? not sure). I'm most definitely picking up on more nuances, or rereading things if I don't get it instead of not caring. I've started jotting down some notes while reading about things that are interesting etc, which I never used to do in the past. And yes, I'm distracted more by kids, phone, etc.

Overall, I'm inclined to say I'm studying books more than simply reading them. Which probably wouldn't be a bad thing if I were to take a college Lit class, but it would prevent me from keeping up with the pace some profs seem to think is desired (and yes, I get that being able to adjust your reading speed/type can be a useful skill, but it's just not always that simple to do). The way I currently read would make me a lot more likely to pass my high school Dutch Lit exam than the way I did in high school, when the two teachers administering the oral final accused me of not having read the books at all (I'd read all of them, unlike some of the kids in my class who bragged of having read less than half of them and got what in the US would be like a B as opposed to my very low F - this was after years of struggling to understand what they wanted me to write on book reports and never getting a useful answer out of them). I got an A in English in US community college (which included some literature) without any trouble when I was 23, for comparison - I'd finally figured out what on earth teachers want you to say about books, lol (I'm probably on the spectrum, so that didn't help anything). 

Wrt high school I feel like it's good to have some year(s) reading a bunch of books (my wife had a book a week during sophomore or junior year) and some year(s) doing deeper dives into fewer books - more books isn't necessarily better or fewer worse, but it depends on what you do with them (and not reading any books cover-to-cover at all is just wrong). IIRC in my high school we did about a book a month in Dutch (but also some books for English, German, and French, so that adds a bit to the total, even if it was maybe 5 or so books for English a year and only 2-3/year for German/French). This year my kids are doing a lot of books (6 books in these first 8 weeks so far, though I'll probably give them 4 weeks for Dr. Zhivago once we get to that), but, that means there's only a limited amount of analyzing/discussing we do about them. I outsourced English for my oldest the past couple of years and there he got one novel a year and a bunch of excerpts/short stories, though he read a bunch of books for fun (still does). They're both really fast readers (too fast, really). Definitely feeling less bad about them sometimes not picking up on certain things in books though... because at least they're not going to freak out at the thought of having to *gasp* read an entire book, and between more maturity over time and us working on having them take more note of certain things that's probably easier to remedy than not being readers at all. 

[Heartstrings]

My husband has always been a painfully slow reader, until last year I suggested he try the dyslexia font on my kindle.  He's never been diagnosed as dyslexic but was absolutly amazed at how much faster he could read and how much longer he could read without getting overly sleepy.  

I have heard there is also an ADHD font floating around out there but its only available as a browser extension right now. 

Edited Thursday at 11:26 AM by Heartstrings

[madteaparty]

Ranty TMI

Edited yesterday at 04:03 AM by madteaparty

[Happy2BaMom]

19 hours ago, Heartstrings said:

I see a lot more hand wringing and concern about the screens than I do about the growing number of adults who are functionally illiterate or nearly so, despite most having graduated high school. The population is certainly more concerned about one than the other.  I've seen congress haul Facebook and Tik Tok in, but not Lucy Caulkins or anyone else about the literacy crisis or to figure how this is going to impact the economy or nationl security. 

I don't know what/where you're looking, but I see a ton of public concern about education. There are multiple Congressional committees (permanent ones) on education, there's focused criticism of public education in many corners, and it's a major focus of many political campaigns. Not to mention that just two weeks ago, Congress established a National Literacy Month, literally citing every concern you mention above. If you google something like "congress literacy crisis" or "congress education crisis", there is a lot of focused legislative activity on this topic.

[luuknam]

4 hours ago, Happy2BaMom said:

I don't know what/where you're looking, but I see a ton of public concern about education. There are multiple Congressional committees (permanent ones) on education, there's focused criticism of public education in many corners, and it's a major focus of many political campaigns. Not to mention that just two weeks ago, Congress established a National Literacy Month, literally citing every concern you mention above. If you google something like "congress literacy crisis" or "congress education crisis", there is a lot of focused legislative activity on this topic.

I liked this article in the Atlantic recently, but it's behind a paywall now (I think I read it on Apple News - not sure if it's still free there). It's really quite shocking how bad reading instruction in some schools is, and how it then affects everything down the road if instead of doing science and social science they just do more ineffectual reading instruction (iirc the article talks about high school history teachers not knowing how to teach a full US History credit at high school level if kids come in not knowing super basic things like who George Washington was (and suck at reading too)). It does blame whole language and balanced reading, iirc, and definitely spending too much time teaching "reading strategies", spending ages on explaining what a caption (for an illustration) is for example. 

Though that article talks about how the schools in NYC drawing better SES kids use a different reading curriculum (and have better reading scores), and realistically, as far as public schooled kids go, those are a lot more likely to end up in elite universities than the kids attending the poorest-performing of NYC's public schools. When it comes to honors/AP students (not) reading whole books, I think people are a lot more likely to talk about being distracted by screens or having too heavy of a homework and extracurricular load to have time to read than they are to be complaining about how English is taught in K-12. 

[SKL]

5 minutes ago, luuknam said:

Though that article talks about how the schools in NYC drawing better SES kids use a different reading curriculum (and have better reading scores), and realistically, as far as public schooled kids go, those are a lot more likely to end up in elite universities than the kids attending the poorest-performing of NYC's public schools. When it comes to honors/AP students (not) reading whole books, I think people are a lot more likely to talk about being distracted by screens or having too heavy of a homework and extracurricular load to have time to read than they are to be complaining about how English is taught in K-12. 

Yeah, I think there are two mostly separate issues at play.

Kids who make it to those elite universities will almost never have the impediments that struggling readers in poor districts have.  They are almost guaranteed to have very involved parents who aren't going to just sit around and hope their kids learn to read, especially if they are born with learning differences.

In fact, it's possible that elite families' intention to raise "good readers" may work against their kids' development of a love for reading, at least while they are young.  And so, given choices, maybe an 18yo doesn't prefer to read a classic vs. some screen or social activity.  Though they might later decide to voluntarily read good books.

[lewelma]

I have a funny story.  Starting at the age of 12, my older boy (the very mathy one) simply could not get to sleep before 1am.  This is obviously not a huge problem for a homeschooled kid, except we live in a VERY small apartment and he shared a bedroom with his younger brother (the room was 6.5 by 8 feet with bunk beds).  We tried everything to get him to go to sleep at a normal time, and in the end we simply put him in the lounge starting at 9pm when the rest of us were going  to bed and told him to do as he will. However, all that was in the room was the Economist, National Geographic, Scientific American and a shelf full of classic novels and Mann Booker prize winners.  That plus an electronic piano.  We figured that he would get so bored, that he would go to sleep.  Nope.  For 6 years, he read for 4 hours per night 365 days a year.  He got through a LOT of current events, and a LOT of novels, including works like War and Peace, 100 years of Solitude, and House of Leaves. He also learned to play the piano. lol. This reading time became so important to him. It calmed his mind, taught him about the world, and empowered him to control his own learning. All because we live in a small apartment and he wouldn't go to bed. 🙂

 

Edited Thursday at 06:35 PM by lewelma

[luuknam]

14 minutes ago, SKL said:

Yeah, I think there are two mostly separate issues at play.

Kids who make it to those elite universities will almost never have the impediments that struggling readers in poor districts have.  They are almost guaranteed to have very involved parents who aren't going to just sit around and hope their kids learn to read, especially if they are born with learning differences.

There could be a relationship. If a fair chunk of those kids are still guessing at words based on context (but are just way better at recognizing more common words and better at guessing in general because they've been exposed to larger vocabularies at home and at school), then it could be that that's having some impact on the kind of reading high school English teachers end up assigning. But I don't know how common that kind of word guessing is in honors/AP classes in 'good' schools. 

I do think that excessive pressure to read hard/classic texts could indeed cause some kids to like reading less. Though I don't think that'd have much impact on honors teachers (not) assigning whole books (if anything, you'd think those parents would take pitchforks to school board meetings demanding whole books). 

[kbutton]

10 hours ago, luuknam said:

I'd finally figured out what on earth teachers want you to say about books, lol (I'm probably on the spectrum, so that didn't help anything). 

I’m not on the spectrum, and English classes have, in my experience, been the ones where I have been most likely to be asked to do stuff that I’ve never even seen while not being told how to do those things. IMO, if you want someone to write a literary essay, perhaps you should have your students read a few. Even better, have the student read a couple written by the teacher!!!

[lewelma]

21 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

Omg! This! 

It's as though the education department thinks kids have never had any real problems so use literature to introduce them, then do absolutely nothing to help them process any of it.

I don't think my kid needed to endure ptsd flashbacks during her year 7 English class. I don't think I needed to write a poem about death in year 8, the year my favourite grandpa died. Or, you know, ever.

My younger boy did his NZ national exams through the correspondence school. His senior year English teacher suggested: 1984, Brave New World, Handmaiden's Tale, and Lord of the Flies.  I was like HELL NO. And then I had quite a fight with his teacher.  I finally pulled the Mental Illness card, and only then would she back down. But she challenged me to find any book at a high enough level that that he could have a response to. Her attitude was that books need to be dark to evoke any emotion and therefore a decent English paper in a teen.  My ds choose Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, and Huck Finn. Which made for a wonderful final year for him.

It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

[kbutton]

4 minutes ago, lewelma said:

It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

I really could’ve done without reading Native Son. 

[lewelma]

19 minutes ago, kbutton said:

I really could’ve done without reading Native Son. 

I read 1984 in 1984 when I was 14.  It was horrid. I still get nightmares over the rat in the cage on his face scene.

[luuknam]

28 minutes ago, lewelma said:

My younger boy did his NZ national exams through the correspondence school. His senior year English teacher suggested: 1984, Brave New World, Handmaiden's Tale, and Lord of the Flies.  I was like HELL NO. And then I had quite a fight with his teacher.  I finally pulled the Mental Illness card, and only then would she back down. But she challenged me to find any book at a high enough level that that he could have a response to. Her attitude was that books need to be dark to evoke any emotion and therefore a decent English paper in a teen.  My ds choose Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, and Huck Finn. Which made for a wonderful final year for him.

It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

This has been mentioned in other threads on literary analysis, but some teachers try to turn English Lit into psychology, sociology, social justice, history, or whatever else they feel like. Which can all be valuable, and as a homeschooler I'm happily doing whatever I want and calling it English Lit, but when it comes to the state making you turn it into that kind of thing... no. And I'm saying this as someone with a 'dark' reading list. We're doing (20th Century) Lit as Propaganda this year, so, you can imagine that's not the most happy fluff positive emotions literature out there (though many aren't as bad as you might think either). Since someone will probably ask... so far we've read: 

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan (btw, the Hitchcock movie has only a very loose resemblance to the book)

Over There - Arnold Bennett

Greenmantle -John Buchan

The Fringes of the Fleet - Rudyard Kipling

Ramsey Milholland - Booth Tarkington

Jimmie Higgins - Upton Sinclair 

And a couple of poems and the conclusion of Buchan's Battle of the Somme (where he single-handed won it, since no other Englishman ever came close to doing so (paraphrase of some quote)... it was definitely a very bloody tie). I'm not entirely decided yet on what else we'll read (there are several books I've finished reading and several I haven't yet, but also trying to play things by ear). Probably Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw next week, though he purposefully didn't even try to publish it until after the war, but it'd be nice to throw a play in there and we can talk about why he decided to delay publication (he wrote a big anti-war essay early on in the war and became rather despised because of it, and after writing the play he realized that it'd only hurt England's war effort if he were to publish it then (if anybody were to even read/perform/watch it)). 

Edited Thursday at 07:10 PM by luuknam

[lewelma]

8 minutes ago, luuknam said:

This has been mentioned in other threads on literary analysis, but some teachers try to turn English Lit into psychology, sociology, social justice, history, or whatever else they feel like. Which can all be valuable, and as a homeschooler I'm happily doing whatever I want and calling it English Lit, but when it comes to the state making you turn it into that kind of thing... no. And I'm saying this as someone with a 'dark' reading list. We're doing (20th Century) Lit as Propaganda this year, so, you can imagine that's not the most happy fluff positive emotions literature out there (though many aren't as bad as you might think either). Since someone will probably ask... so far we've read: 

The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan (btw, the Hitchcock movie has only a very loose resemblance to the book)

Over There - Arnold Bennett

Greenmantle -John Buchan

The Fringes of the Fleet - Rudyard Kipling

Ramsey Milholland - Booth Tarkington

Jimmie Higgins - Upton Sinclair 

And a couple of poems and the conclusion of Buchan's Battle of the Somme (where he single-handed won it, since no other Englishman ever came close to doing so (paraphrase of some quote)... it was definitely a very bloody tie). I'm not entirely decided yet on what else we'll read (there are several books I've finished reading and several I haven't yet, but also trying to play things by ear). Probably Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw next week, though he purposefully didn't even try to publish it until after the war, but it'd be nice to throw a play in there and we can talk about why he decided to delay publication (he wrote a big anti-war essay early on in the war and became rather despised because of it, and after writing the play he realized that it'd only hurt England's war effort if he were to publish it then (if anybody were to even read/perform/watch it)). 

I agree. It clearly depends on the kid.  My older did Lord of the Flies, Frankenstein, Picture of Dorian Gray, Brave New World, 100 years of Solitude, and even Crime and Punishment. It's not like I'm not into dark or can't teach it. But HELL NO for my younger boy.

What was interesting was that the teacher could not think of any other books that my younger could read that were not dark. She was very clear that teens need it to be dark to be able to write about it.  My younger son's two senior research papers were on conformity in 19th century British women's world, and on the characterisation of Jim in Huck Finn. There is plenty to write about without it being about dystopian worlds.

[Rosie_0801]

1 hour ago, lewelma said:

It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

Wow. Who wants to teach teenagers to be depressed for a living?

[KidsHappen]

9 hours ago, Heartstrings said:

My husband has always been a painfully slow reader, until last year I suggested he try the dyslexia font on my kindle.  He's never been diagnosed as dyslexic but was absolutly amazed at how much faster he could read and how much longer he could read without getting overly sleepy.  

I have heard there is also an ADHD font floating around out there but its only available as a browser extension right now. 

I have ADD and have found that at my age it is easier to read on Kindle than in an actual book. I am not sure why but I assumed it had something to do with my eyesight. You can set the font larger and the difference between the bright white background and black print all makes it easier. I am planning to slowly move all my fiction to Kindle and keep my educational non-fiction in book form.

[Harriet Vane]

2 hours ago, lewelma said:

My younger boy did his NZ national exams through the correspondence school. His senior year English teacher suggested: 1984, Brave New World, Handmaiden's Tale, and Lord of the Flies.  I was like HELL NO. And then I had quite a fight with his teacher.  I finally pulled the Mental Illness card, and only then would she back down. But she challenged me to find any book at a high enough level that that he could have a response to. Her attitude was that books need to be dark to evoke any emotion and therefore a decent English paper in a teen.  My ds choose Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, and Huck Finn. Which made for a wonderful final year for him.

It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

Exactly. This is what makes me sad and worried for teenagers. There are so many wonderful stories out there. Why not celebrate the human spirit? You can do so while including fewer works (like 1 or 2) that are darker.

[Harriet Vane]

2 hours ago, luuknam said:

This has been mentioned in other threads on literary analysis, but some teachers try to turn English Lit into psychology, sociology, social justice, history, or whatever else they feel like. Which can all be valuable, and as a homeschooler I'm happily doing whatever I want and calling it English Lit, but when it comes to the state making you turn it into that kind of thing... no. And I'm saying this as someone with a 'dark' reading list.

 

Yes, this. I have the same perspective--I'm not afraid to read, teach, or write about complicated or dystopian literature. I do believe we need to know about current issues and fearlessly act to help the needy. But I get so very, very frustrated at the intense focus on social issues in lit class at the expense of good literature.

[SKL]

Yeah I agree on the choices of literature they give kids to read.  It should be a bit balanced, no?

Though I must admit that it's hard to think of classics that don't have at least a dark side to them ... some of which leave a good feeling in the end IMO.

I'm trying to remember what all was covered in my high school English classes.  In 10th or 11th, our teacher cried while reading to us a scene about a boy's pet being eaten by vultures (was it the Red Pony?).  We also read Silas Marner in 10th.  Gosh, I really can't remember other books I was required to read in HS aside from Shakespeare.  Maybe Tom Sawyer?  I read a bunch on my own, so I'm not sure which was which.

Also, FTR I don't really view Huckleberry Finn as a feel-good story exactly.  I also don't think most schools are allowed to assign that book.

[regentrude]

2 hours ago, lewelma said:

I read 1984 in 1984 when I was 14.  It was horrid. I still get nightmares over the rat in the cage on his face scene.

I was 15. It was a banned book in our country, but people smuggled it in. The regime didn't want us to read it because it hit too close to home. So we all read the smuggled forbidden copies. And recognized the parallels and understood why being caught with the book would get you expelled from highschool. Because it described the reality too closely.

Literature doesn't have to be all dark and depressing,  but we also shouldn't shelter young people from the reality of the world. Yes, teenagers should learn about slavery and the holocaust. And about war. Other teens were, and are, living it.

Edited Thursday at 09:32 PM by regentrude

[lewelma]

9 minutes ago, regentrude said:

I was 15. It was a banned book in our country, but people smuggled it in. The regime didn't want us to read it because it hit too close to home. So we all read the smuggled forbidden copies. And recognized the parallels and understood why being caught with the book would get you expelled from highschool. Because it described the reality too closely.

Literature doesn't have to be all dark and depressing,  but we also shouldn't shelter young people from the reality of the world. Yes, teenagers should learn about slavery and the holocaust. And about war. Other teens were, and are, living it.

Always good to hear your side, Regentrude. Your life has been very real. The way we handled this with my younger is for my dh to read dark books out loud to him so that they could talk and process as they went, rather than putting him in his room alone to try to make sense of what he read. My dh read out to my younger until he was 17 so they did get through some tough stuff. 

[lewelma]

18 minutes ago, SKL said:

 

 

Also, FTR I don't really view Huckleberry Finn as a feel-good story exactly.  I also don't think most schools are allowed to assign that book.

Agreed. My younger ds can handle difficult content, but it is the TONE that is the problem.

Edited Thursday at 09:45 PM by lewelma

[regentrude]

Since the issue of relatability has come up: one of the great strengths of good literature is that it can get you interested and engaged in stories that are extremely far removed from your own life. I question the notion that kids prefer books they can "relate to",  about kids' daily problems - it doesn't agree with my or my kids' experiences at all.

As a kid, my favorite book was the Count of Monte Cristo. There's no overlap with my own life. Generations of kids have loved swashbuckling adventures, science fiction, fantasy. In a good book, there is enough that is general about the human condition that kids and adults can connect with it. 

The books that stand the test of time and are beloved by kids have good storytelling, great characters, an element of adventure. Kids love the Hobbit not because it has anything to do with their own experience. 

[Eilonwy]

4 hours ago, lewelma said:

1984, Brave New World, Handmaiden's Tale, and Lord of the Flies. 
It was like she had only one way of viewing what an English class should look like, and to her it was about the depravity of the human soul. 

That’s so dark & uninviting, and it’s also not very creative in terms of kinds of dystopias.  There are more things that can go wrong than government, government, government, and complete absence of government. 

[ScoutTN]

20 hours ago, Hyacinth said:

“The high school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.

“And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”

~ Flannery O’Connor

 

So good!

[ScoutTN]

53 minutes ago, regentrude said:

Since the issue of relatability has come up: one of the great strengths of good literature is that it can get you interested and engaged in stories that are extremely far removed from your own life. I question the notion that kids prefer books they can "relate to",  about kids' daily problems - it doesn't agree with my or my kids' experiences at all.

As a kid, my favorite book was the Count of Monte Cristo. There's no overlap with my own life. Generations of kids have loved swashbuckling adventures, science fiction, fantasy. In a good book, there is enough that is general about the human condition that kids and adults can connect with it. 

The books that stand the test of time and are beloved by kids have good storytelling, great characters, an element of adventure. Kids love the Hobbit not because it has anything to do with their own experience. 

Yes. The ideas and big questions are the same over all times and places, because human nature is a constant. Literature should help kids enter The Great Conversation.

[Ali in OR]

So I teach high school math. Thankfully in a school where the English classes read books. I gave a quiz today with twenty minutes allowed but many finished within 10 minutes. Their choices when they are done are to draw on the back, pull out a book and read, or work on math homework. I started reading this thread this morning, then was quite pleased first period looking around the room and finding maybe half the class reading a book after they finished their math quiz. Perhaps there is some hope.

Oh, and these were freshmen in Algebra 1. Not honors kids.

Edited yesterday at 12:32 AM by Ali in OR

[Harriet Vane]

3 hours ago, regentrude said:

I was 15. It was a banned book in our country, but people smuggled it in. The regime didn't want us to read it because it hit too close to home. So we all read the smuggled forbidden copies. And recognized the parallels and understood why being caught with the book would get you expelled from highschool. Because it described the reality too closely.

Literature doesn't have to be all dark and depressing,  but we also shouldn't shelter young people from the reality of the world. Yes, teenagers should learn about slavery and the holocaust. And about war. Other teens were, and are, living it.

I agree, absolutely. I am not saying to read only happy stories. I have always advocated learning about war, slavery, etc., and I have taught such books many times. One of my strengths as a teacher is aligning history study with books of the era. But there are major differences in how a subject is framed in a story. Some authors are more skilled than others. And the modern trend is often overwhelming in terms of graphic description and focus on the very darkest experiences. I scratch my head at some of the choices for high school classes, both in terms of focusing the whole semester around only very dark choices one after another, but also many courses include individual books that are not well written and are graphic and explicit in descriptions of violence and sexual violence. 

[Harriet Vane]

3 hours ago, regentrude said:

Since the issue of relatability has come up: one of the great strengths of good literature is that it can get you interested and engaged in stories that are extremely far removed from your own life. I question the notion that kids prefer books they can "relate to",  about kids' daily problems - it doesn't agree with my or my kids' experiences at all.

As a kid, my favorite book was the Count of Monte Cristo. There's no overlap with my own life. Generations of kids have loved swashbuckling adventures, science fiction, fantasy. In a good book, there is enough that is general about the human condition that kids and adults can connect with it. 

The books that stand the test of time and are beloved by kids have good storytelling, great characters, an element of adventure. Kids love the Hobbit not because it has anything to do with their own experience. 

QFT. Absolutely this. Well said.

[Ausmumof3]

19 hours ago, luuknam said:

My reading speed has dropped over the years, and doing a long, dense work a week would be a major struggle for me. That said, as I've gotten older (and technology has evolved), my reading style has changed. I'm googling more words I don't know (thankfully my vocab is pretty large so usually not too crazy many), doing more fact-checking or looking up background info, etc, all of which takes time. I also have a larger amount of background knowledge in general, so I sometimes end up making comparisons between things or pondering stuff (I did that when I was younger too, but maybe I do it more? not sure). I'm most definitely picking up on more nuances, or rereading things if I don't get it instead of not caring. I've started jotting down some notes while reading about things that are interesting etc, which I never used to do in the past. And yes, I'm distracted more by kids, phone, etc.

Overall, I'm inclined to say I'm studying books more than simply reading them. Which probably wouldn't be a bad thing if I were to take a college Lit class, but it would prevent me from keeping up with the pace some profs seem to think is desired (and yes, I get that being able to adjust your reading speed/type can be a useful skill, but it's just not always that simple to do). The way I currently read would make me a lot more likely to pass my high school Dutch Lit exam than the way I did in high school, when the two teachers administering the oral final accused me of not having read the books at all (I'd read all of them, unlike some of the kids in my class who bragged of having read less than half of them and got what in the US would be like a B as opposed to my very low F - this was after years of struggling to understand what they wanted me to write on book reports and never getting a useful answer out of them). I got an A in English in US community college (which included some literature) without any trouble when I was 23, for comparison - I'd finally figured out what on earth teachers want you to say about books, lol (I'm probably on the spectrum, so that didn't help anything). 

Wrt high school I feel like it's good to have some year(s) reading a bunch of books (my wife had a book a week during sophomore or junior year) and some year(s) doing deeper dives into fewer books - more books isn't necessarily better or fewer worse, but it depends on what you do with them (and not reading any books cover-to-cover at all is just wrong). IIRC in my high school we did about a book a month in Dutch (but also some books for English, German, and French, so that adds a bit to the total, even if it was maybe 5 or so books for English a year and only 2-3/year for German/French). This year my kids are doing a lot of books (6 books in these first 8 weeks so far, though I'll probably give them 4 weeks for Dr. Zhivago once we get to that), but, that means there's only a limited amount of analyzing/discussing we do about them. I outsourced English for my oldest the past couple of years and there he got one novel a year and a bunch of excerpts/short stories, though he read a bunch of books for fun (still does). They're both really fast readers (too fast, really). Definitely feeling less bad about them sometimes not picking up on certain things in books though... because at least they're not going to freak out at the thought of having to *gasp* read an entire book, and between more maturity over time and us working on having them take more note of certain things that's probably easier to remedy than not being readers at all. 

If a Christian bent is not an issue to you you might like the Literary Life Podcast. I have learned so much about story structure and symbolism etc from it 

[Ausmumof3]

Two things that I’ve got over and over again from Angelina from the podcast that I think are super relevant to this thread are:

Art is not made to be used - whether that’s teaching kids virtues or promoting a particular worldview through stories like Christians sometimes like to do or teaching feminism or critical theory or Marxism or anti-Marxism - if the only purpose of the lit class is to use it as a springboard for teaching various world views or unrelated themes it’s not really a literature class at all. This is definitely an issue in my son’s English class. Art is not meant to be used. 
 

Books should be windows as well as mirrors. If all a book is doing is reflecting yourself it’s not really doing its job. And if lit classes are over reliant on prompts that make the students related to their own life or prioritise the students own viewpoints over what the work is actually saying they’re pointless. That’s not to say that we can’t reflect on and apply to our own lives but we need to try to at least understand what the author was trying to say in their own context and time first. And perspectives that differ from us in either time period or place are often better because we are well aware of the errors in thinking (like racism, sexism etc) whereas books that reflect our current viewpoints - we are less likely to see the limitations or issues because they reinforce what we’re already blind to.

[luuknam]

2 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:

Art is not meant to be used. 

I don't know how true that really is. Plenty of literature was explicitly written to draw people's attention to problems in society (and I'm not just talking about literal propaganda). Dadaism was a reaction to the horrors of WWI. The CIA sponsored exhibitions of artists like Pollock as a reaction to Soviet Realism (that said, in all fairness a lot of artists sponsored by the CIA were unhappy when they found out (would they've been as famous without the CIA though?)). But I think that if you were to read Swift or Dickens and only thought about the artistry or quality of the prose and didn't care about the social messages, they'd be displeased as well. 

[Laura Corin]

58 minutes ago, luuknam said:

I don't know how true that really is. Plenty of literature was explicitly written to draw people's attention to problems in society (and I'm not just talking about literal propaganda). Dadaism was a reaction to the horrors of WWI. The CIA sponsored exhibitions of artists like Pollock as a reaction to Soviet Realism (that said, in all fairness a lot of artists sponsored by the CIA were unhappy when they found out (would they've been as famous without the CIA though?)). But I think that if you were to read Swift or Dickens and only thought about the artistry or quality of the prose and didn't care about the social messages, they'd be displeased as well. 

Here's another example  - great art funded in order to reduce a father's years in Purgatory. 

https://images.app.goo.gl/aC1rGeXRoHxcv8uf9

[Ausmumof3]

1 hour ago, luuknam said:

I don't know how true that really is. Plenty of literature was explicitly written to draw people's attention to problems in society (and I'm not just talking about literal propaganda). Dadaism was a reaction to the horrors of WWI. The CIA sponsored exhibitions of artists like Pollock as a reaction to Soviet Realism (that said, in all fairness a lot of artists sponsored by the CIA were unhappy when they found out (would they've been as famous without the CIA though?)). But I think that if you were to read Swift or Dickens and only thought about the artistry or quality of the prose and didn't care about the social messages, they'd be displeased as well. 

Maybe I should rephrase that - Art was not meant to be used for our own ends. Definitely some art has a specific message that it’s getting across and there’s nothing wrong with that - there’s something wrong with taking piece of art and making it mean whatever we want it to. 
 

And I would argue that most of the best literature is multifaceted - I’m not a fan of Rand for example - not just because I disagree with the message but because I feel like I’m being beaten over the head with it.  Otherwise it may as well be a pamphlet or a manifesto. 
 

So for a really obvious example if you’re reading TKAM and seeing racism - good - that’s what you should be seeing (although if you just want to be told racism is wrong you might want a shorter book- there’s much more the the book than that) - but if you’re reading Jane Austen purely through a 21st century feminism lens you’re going to miss the nuances and pleasures of the book. 
 

So yes great art has a message but we don’t get to decide what we think it is based on our own ideas - we need to really let the author or creator tell their story first 

Edited yesterday at 08:25 AM by Ausmumof3

[ScoutTN]

3 hours ago, Ausmumof3 said:

 

So yes great art has a message but we don’t get to decide what we think it is based on our own ideas - we need to really let the author or creator tell their story first 

Yes.

Cf. C.S. Lewis’ Experiment in Criticism

[Dmmetler]

I feel that in some ways I missed a bullet as a teacher because of being assigned to ESL in grad school due to not being able to drive, which limited the schools I could do practicum at. Because the two closest were schools with high Spanish as first language populations, it meant that I spent the classroom time having ESL modeled, and did my lesson writing based on ESL students. 

 

And while in the 90's whole language ruled in my teaching reading classes, the rule of thumb was that Spanish Speaking students  students needed phonics because Spanish is strongly phonetic, and that if they can decode English words in the same way, and we build their listening vocabulary, they'll be able to read. 

 

So, while my classes were teaching "teach multiple strategies", of which "sound it out" came after "look at the illustrations and guess based on context", I was seeing that Spalding phonics, coupled with a lot of vocabulary in context (scaffolding books, picking books with familiar topics, hands on experiences) was working-that the ESL kids were learning to read and doing pretty well at it. We had 1st graders who had only started English instruction and exposure the prior year picking up American Girl books and loving them.

 

Then I had a chance to do Reading Recovery training and get paid to do it in a school two bus rides away, in an area of town that wasn't mostly poor Latino families who were in the US on temporary agricultural visas. 

 

And those kids read SO much worse than the kids in the schools I was usually in it wasn't even funny. 

 

So, when I got handed a group of 4-6th graders who had memorized the 1st grade books in the Success For All system, but couldn't pass the test to move out of that level out of context (and had never been assessed for special Ed because SFA claims that if kids are placed at their level, there is no need for special Ed, and the parents saw the grades on 1st grade level material and assumed their kids actually could read), I pulled out Spalding and taught phonics. And they improved. 

 

And the principal cancelled the music program because she wanted me out of her school.  Because apparently successfully teaching the kids to read was not the goal, teaching "the program" was. 

 

So, I ended up at the ONE school in the district that taught systematic phonics, where every teacher in the school was trained in Slingerland. We got all the kids who were failing and struggling in other schools, taught them to read (and, in many cases, got them evaluated for special Ed, because a LOT of them had good reasons why reading was hard) and then they went back to their home school, to be replaced by another batch that couldn't read. Our test scores always stank---except for value added, because each individual student gained dramatically while they were with us. 

 

So, I'm a 90's trained teacher who pretty much decided that WL was a failure from the start.  

 

Ironically, L probably did learn to read via WL. Or magic, because L was reading words out of context books at 15 months and readinf familiar books at the same age (presumably via memorization), but I didn't start phonics until age 5 (for spelling and because there was NO way I was going to just assume that it had been "caught").

 

[cintinative]

I read some of the comments on FB on the article and it is interesting because there are a number of people saying simply, "this just isn't true" or "this can't be true."  I wonder how many parents actually know what their kids are learning in high school. 

My son and his roommate in college were reading some papers for Comp (peer reviews) and it texted me to tell me it was frightening how bad they were.  His prof had to explain lesser and greater than symbols in a CS class.  Their suitemate is in honors engineering and never took precalculus and is only surviving Calculus because my son and his roommate are tutoring him. 

All of this makes me genuinely sad.

How do we encourage parents to take a more active role in their kids' school without making it sound like we are just being judgey as homeschoolers?  

[wintermom]

58 minutes ago, cintinative said:

How do we encourage parents to take a more active role in their kids' school without making it sound like we are just being judgey as homeschoolers?  

I've seen parents 'fail' at making attempts to change anything about what is taught within schools. The power of politics, unions and tradition within both public and private schools make it impossible for an individual parent to have the kind of power to change a school curriculum. The way parents who have money have influence on their children's edication is through tutoring and supplemental programs (often math). 

[SKL]

59 minutes ago, cintinative said:

How do we encourage parents to take a more active role in their kids' school without making it sound like we are just being judgey as homeschoolers?  

A decade ago, I would have said that parents could regularly review their kids' written work, but now, it's all on the computer, and the computers are all attached to the internet.  The kids quickly figure out how to use whatever essay generating tools are out there, to produce what looks like halfway decent work.

I don't even know how to do this, nor do I desire to learn.  But kids are smart about how to avoid getting smart.  😛 

And I doubt there is any going back to writing on paper.