"What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out"

[wizwor]

Highly regarded is not the same as good. Read a story, find the anachronisms, write an essay, and go see a play at a local theater.

My youngest completed an ancient lesson plan on Shakespeare's sonnets this morning that culminated in his reciting the fourteen lines from memory. Very educational. My oldest did if your years ago, the english teacher did it nine years ago. and I did it 35 years ago.

A more inspired instructor might have found a popular movie spawned by a successful video game that is based on literature and had the kids compare the three venues. The kids might be more interested in literature if they realized their favorite games have roots in it. It turns out video game writers are creative, literary types. Go figure.

My youngest is excelling in history to the point that his teachers have brought it to my attention. I ask if they have ever heard of age of empires. Most haven't. It takes a lot of research to conquer the world. Not so much to teach classic literature.

[jersysman]

Originally Posted by wizwor

I have never suffered more than when reading Moby Dick. Catcher in the Rye is not literature. Shakespeare is boring. Grendel was worse than Beowulf.

The only reason kids are not reading and analyzing Harry Potter and Stephen King is because the teachers would have to read and analyze Harry Potter and Stephen King.

It's much easier to regurgitate the same lesson plans year after year.

I would say that it always depends on the age of the child when they are introduced to these books. I didn't appreciate most of those that you mentioned until I was a lot older. Of course Moby Dick is still boring!!

[teh603]

Originally Posted by wizwor

The only reason kids are not reading and analyzing Harry Potter and Stephen King is because the teachers would have to read and analyze Harry Potter and Stephen King.

I'd take the opposite tack- literary analysis is horrible. Poetic analysis is worse.

When you do "literary analysis" or "poetic analysis," what you're doing is akin to torturers in a concentration camp vivisecting political or ethnic refugees. You don't gain anything from it, and it destroys your enjoyment of it. All you do is satisfy your overseers that you've tortured and destroyed enough victims to get a better posting at a college.

[wizwor]

We experienced the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in high school. The room had two boards covering the front wall. Each day we were greeted with a full wall, full color chalk drawing. The drawing was the point of the day's analysis. I spent most of the class calculating what I would have to read out loud so I didn't look like an idiot when it was my turn to recite.

My favorite literature was Poe. It wasn't good, but when I was in third grade our homeroom teacher would read it to us while we waited for the buses. I thought he was going to have a stroke reading the telltale heart.

Originally Posted by Wes Converse

TRUE! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story...

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by teh603

I'd take the opposite tack- literary analysis is horrible. Poetic analysis is worse.

When you do "literary analysis" or "poetic analysis," what you're doing is akin to torturers in a concentration camp vivisecting political or ethnic refugees. You don't gain anything from it, and it destroys your enjoyment of it. All you do is satisfy your overseers that you've tortured and destroyed enough victims to get a better posting at a college.

Maybe, but the kids are doing analysis for no grade at all. My wife and kids read the books together and relentlessly speculated and analyzed. Then the movies came out and they completely panned the screenplays.

Before you go around criticizing teachers, consider several things (at least at the high school level, which most of this criticism focusses upon):

Curricula often give teachers a choice of books, or specify which criteria the books must satisfy. If the curriculum doesn't specify Harry Potter, or specifies pre-confederation Canadian literature, you aren't going to do Harry Potter.

Even if teachers had complete liberty in choosing books, the lessons must reflect certain curricular outcomes. In the higher grades, this typically involves some form of analysis.

Even if teachers had complete liberty in choosing books, they aren't going to be able to find one boot that every student will like.

Having students choose their own books limits the forms of instruction (e.g. class discussions).

Having students choose their own books isn't practical. (Would you accept it if your boss told you to go home and do six hours of unpaid work each night? Why should teachers who refuse to do so to read all of those books be called lazy?)

Choosing books that lack appropriate support materials isn't practical. Lesson planning takes time. Support materials help to reduce the time it takes. (Calling teachers lazy for not doing everything from scratch would be like same as your boss demanding that you do everything from scratch on your own time.)

[wizwor]

May be better to replace the word teachers with educators. Note that the only critiques of individual instructors were positive (Rime and Poe).

None of what you said makes me feel better about anything. Educators regurgitate the same crap they learned in school. It was crap when they learned it and it is crap as they teach it.

If you want kids to read more, you have to engage them. Reciting fourteen lines out of a sonnet you do not understand does not do that. Neither does reading a two page sentence.

[wizwor]

Watch this and try to stay awake. Watch the movie and you want to buy the book.

Originally Posted by Dr Tony Williams

Sydney Carton is a particularly interesting piece of character creation: the talented wastrel who sacrifices himself for love, so that the woman he wants may live her life happily with her husband. Dickens wrote 'I must say I like my Carton. And I have a faint idea sometimes, that if I acted him, I could have done something with his life and death.' When planning the novel and naming the characters, he originally thought of naming Carton Dick rather than Sydney. Dick would be an echo of Richard Wardour in The Frozen Deep, of course, and the parallelism in the sets of initials (Charles Darnay and Dick Carton: CD - DC) would have further underlined the 'doubleness' in the two male leads of the novel. 'Doubleness' is a massive issue for him at this time. But the initials are his own, of course, and perhaps he felt that this was all coming rather too close to home, at this point of great crisis for him.

It will be helpful to recall the events in Dickens's life at this time...

[teh603]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Having students choose their own books isn't practical. (Would you accept it if your boss told you to go home and do six hours of unpaid work each night? Why should teachers who refuse to do so to read all of those books be called lazy?)

That assumes they have six free hours each night. A most schools expect teachers to put in a certain number of unpaid hours each night anyway.

[wizwor]

Originally Posted by teh603

No surprise. Most of the middle schoolers where I work are still on a first or second grade reading level. Some of them have even lower comprehension- to the point where they can read a passage out loud and then have no idea of what they just read.

Trouble is, that's exactly how most parents like it. Their precious little runts don't have to do any work, and get passing grades just for not demolishing the classroom or murdering the teacher. When the kids don't pass a fairly simple reading test, they demand the principal fire the teacher instead of asking if there's anything they can do to help the kid pass.

20 years before H. Beam Piper's Neobarbarians are rampaging around.

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Originally Posted by BWinmill
Having students choose their own books isn't practical. (Would you accept it if your boss told you to go home and do six hours of unpaid work each night? Why should teachers who refuse to do so to read all of those books be called lazy?)

Originally Posted by teh603

That assumes they have six free hours each night. A most schools expect teachers to put in a certain number of unpaid hours each night anyway.

OP was a link to an article about what kids are reading in and out of school. First followup blamed parents. I wondered if schools didn't play a role. Then we have a flurry of excuses.

Where my taxes go to school, there are teachers and administrators. Among the administrators are curriculum coordinators. Curriculum coordinators do not create curriculum. They select it. So, some fresh minded educator could pick the top ten content appropriate publications each year and develop a lesson plan for that. The curriculum coordinators would only have to deliver the lesson plan to the instructor who could present it in the classroom.

It's easy to see why kids are not reading very much. It's too much work...for someone.

PS teh603 if you are a teacher, you should consider a career change.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by wizwor

May be better to replace the word teachers with educators. Note that the only critiques of individual instructors were positive (Rime and Poe).

None of what you said makes me feel better about anything. Educators regurgitate the same crap they learned in school. It was crap when they learned it and it is crap as they teach it.

If you want kids to read more, you have to engage them. Reciting fourteen lines out of a sonnet you do not understand does not do that. Neither does reading a two page sentence.

Lots of unemployed or underemployed teachers out there who would love to teach creatively. Smaller classes, more teachers, and above all more room to house the classrooms would be very expensive. I read somewhere that to build schools that had ideal class sizes, especially in urban areas where property is expensive would cost each taxpayer several thousand a year.
The cost would go down once the property was purchased and the schools were built, but would still be quite a bit higher mil rate for education.

Kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't

Helen

[teh603]

Originally Posted by wizwor

PS teh603 if you are a teacher, you should consider a career change.

Been trying that for eight years. Between me being unable to confirm that I'm getting good recommendations due to some truly idiotic district policies, and a medical condition that limits my work week and makes me functionally unhireable in any other field, I'm kinda stuck.

So let me leave you with this gem:

School administrators, at least in Texas, don't want success. They want failure, because it allows them to qualify for more grant money. Successful schools have to do an obscene amount of fundraising to get the same level of funding as a failing school does from grants.

Oh, and we also don't have functional unions. The state constitution prohibits teachers unions from collective negotiation of any sort. We *have* to go with what the school district administrators deign to give us, because we don't have a choice. They can literally fire us for no reason at all.

Shouldn't be a surprise that Texas is somewhere around 51st in the US when it comes to education.

[aceflor]

I read the whole thread and was really surprised to see how different things are from one country to another..

Here the mandatory books for next school year for my son, to give you an idea this would be I think his last year of Junior High in the US before entering Senior High.

He is going to a Lycée Français, the main language being French, bust most students are Spanish speakers, so basically they are all fluent in both, many classes are given in Spanish, and the first foreign language is English.

In Spanish:
Artuto Perez-Reverte : El Capitan Alatriste
Carlos Ruiz Zafon : Marina
Gustavo A Becquer : Rimas y Leyendas

In French :
Guy de Maupassant : le Horla
Corneille : le Cid
Edmond Rostand : Cyrano de Bergerac
Prosper Merimée: Carmen
Valérie Zenatti : Une bouteillle dans la mer de Gaza

English :
William Shakespeare : The taming of the shrew

Funny enough, he has lots of classics in French(they had Molière this year, and Homère the year before that) which I am very happy with, but not much in Spanish this year (last year they had Cantar del Mio Cid). I am very happy that they kept those classics in the program, the Ministry of Education was talking about not doing any Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Musset, Rostand, and so on anymore. I would hate that, this is the core of our culture...

But I know that half of his class struggles in French, so for them the classics are probably just plain horrible.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Lots of unemployed or underemployed teachers out there who would love to teach creatively. Smaller classes, more teachers, and above all more room to house the classrooms would be very expensive.

Are smaller classes even necessary? I've often wondered if having two teachers in a single classroom would help. It would certainly help with ability groupings, as well as with the overall administrative headaches. It may also help to tackle this culture of, erm, independence (i.e. lack of collaboration) in the school as a whole since teachers are being forced to work with at least one colleague anyhow.

It would also help new teachers get into the field. I think that a lot of teachers teach as they were taught simply because they are given a year of training then thrust into a classroom to deal with things alone. Professional development is usually a day or two long, which doesn't leave time for things to sink in (especially when you're returning to the classroom the next day). On top of that, it helps if you have a set of lesson plans that you can modify with time. Doing everything at once is nuts. It also helps if you taught from those lesson plans before, because it takes time to learn a programme even if it is handed to you on a silver platter.

Anyhow, the problems with eduction seem to range from end to end: with parents on one end and governments on the other. (Yes, that includes teachers and students as well.) Having too many interests also seems to make the whole system too rigid. It's far to easy to stay with the status quo and tweak the status quo, even when everyone hates it, because noone will agree on how to make more significant changes.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

Are smaller classes even necessary? I've often wondered if having two teachers in a single classroom would help. It would certainly help with ability groupings, as well as with the overall administrative headaches. It may also help to tackle this culture of, erm, independence (i.e. lack of collaboration) in the school as a whole since teachers are being forced to work with at least one colleague anyhow.

It would also help new teachers get into the field. I think that a lot of teachers teach as they were taught simply because they are given a year of training then thrust into a classroom to deal with things alone. Professional development is usually a day or two long, which doesn't leave time for things to sink in (especially when you're returning to the classroom the next day). On top of that, it helps if you have a set of lesson plans that you can modify with time. Doing everything at once is nuts. It also helps if you taught from those lesson plans before, because it takes time to learn a programme even if it is handed to you on a silver platter.

Anyhow, the problems with eduction seem to range from end to end: with parents on one end and governments on the other. (Yes, that includes teachers and students as well.) Having too many interests also seems to make the whole system too rigid. It's far to easy to stay with the status quo and tweak the status quo, even when everyone hates it, because noone will agree on how to make more significant changes.

I cannot say whether smaller classes are necessary as I have no children. From what I gather from people who do and children that I know, classrooms are overcrowded. My own memory tells me that they were when I went to school, both as a child and an adult.

So smaller classes or much bigger classrooms? Or both? Bound to be expensive.

And the system has been going on for quite a while without being totally broken, so it would require massive intervention by a higher power to change it I think. Even if a few schools use different techniques that are much more successful, they will be sneered at by others as being elitist, or hard to implement etc. etc. , but in my mind the real reason is expense and the fact that the system as it is is ingrained in the minds and habits of thousands of educators and officials who either are unable or unwilling to change, and fear that massive changes will put them out of a job. I do not blame them as they have for the most part just been doing what they were told to do as the majority of us do in our jobs.

Helen