In the Classroom: Reading Homework

“The only homework I assign is to read for at least 30 minutes a night.” (said I in yesterday’s post)

“Had an interesting discussion w/ a friend on why I despise using the word homework for reading time. That fosters a hate in my opinion.”   (says @mawbooks)

No, no, no.  It doesn’t foster hate.  I mean, why should it?  It should foster joy.  Kids should go, “I’m reading the best book; I’m so lucky that my only homework tonight is to finish it! “  In fact, I’ve had kids come to me and say, “I’m sorry, but I read more than 30 minutes last night. I just got to a great point where I couldn’t stop!”  (And then I make clear that the requirement is to read at least 30 minutes.)

I  feel very, very strongly about the importance of kids considering their nightly reading — homework.  To my mind it is the MOST important homework they do.  Fourth graders are just developing fluency, becoming independent readers,  learning what their tastes as readers are, etc.  They need to do it a lot more than in school. They need to do it on their own, away from the controlled classroom.  They need to figure out just where they read best (in bed, on the couch, cuddling a pet, under a tree, next to a parent?), whether they need silence, music, or something else.  They need to figure out just what sort of material they enjoy reading. What is their identity as a reader? And do they read in short bursts with little rests?  Or do they read in long gulps?  They need to do this in the classroom (where I can support them) and at home (where they will learn to do it alone, hopefully). I call it “independent reading” because they are learning to do just that.  Without teachers, parents, tutors, caregivers, grandmothers, friends, or anyone.  I want them to learn to be totally happy independent readers — anywhere.

While my nightly homework is that 30 minutes of reading, I should say that my students also get 30 minutes of math from their math teachers, weekly spelling from the associate teacher, and occasionally something else (like interviewing someone for our immigration oral history project).  While each of my fourth grade colleagues may tweak her homework policy a bit differently, we are all in basic agreement on what is done at home and what is done at school.

I often read that research indicates that homework doesn’t help elementary aged kids.  Not sure what sort of homework that would be, but I would pretty much agree for anything other than reading and a bit of math (mostly memorizing those math facts).  Our kids do a lot in school and need to do other things at home — stuff they enjoy (yes, television, computer games, shooting baskets, whatever is fun for them).  Of course that is the situation for the kids I teach; a different population might need a different homework policy.

Main thing is that homework does not have to be synonymous with drudgery.  It can be something kids look forward to doing or, at least, don’t dread.

Edited to add — thanks to @lbraun2000 I just saw  this timely piece in yesterday’s NYT’s about summer homework.  I don’t give it — our fourth graders have NO assigned book to read before they come in over the summer. Excellent points here about all sorts of homework.

In the Classroom: Teaching Reading

In the past week I’ve read two completely oppositional articles on teaching.  The first was “Tyranny of the Test: One Year as a Kaplan Coach in the Public Schools” by Jeremy Miller.  It is a superb piece providing a disturbing, real, and moving view of the specifics of legislation that has made Kaplan such a player in the schools, the sad realities of testing, teaching, and more.  The second was “Students Get New Assignment: Pick Books You Like.”  This is a very different sort of article, Mokoto Rich is a reporter for the New York Times, not a teacher, and so she comes to this topic quite differently — following a teacher as she begins this “new” method in her classroom — children choosing their own reading material.

The method is one of choice — individual reading rather than the whole-class-reads-one book method.  It isn’t, for all Rich suggests it is, new.  It was around when I started teaching in the early 70s and was around even earlier among those with a progressive mindset.  Choice is at the heart of Montessori, open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and many other pedagogies that have waxed and waned in popularity over the years.  I’m glad Rich featured Nancie Atwell, someone who inspired me twenty years ago with her seminal book, In the Middle.  She, along with others, gave me some  excellent tools that helped me to fine-tune a method I already had been using — now known as readers’ workshop.

A few years after that I spent a summer at Princeton studying classical children’s literature. I came back to my classroom determined to bring some of that magic into my teaching.  Since then other experiences have helped me to continually refine how I teach reading.  At the moment, in broad sweeps (leaving out the specific lessons that I do), here’s an overview:

• Independent Reading.  My students are all expected to always have a book they’ve chosen to read.  The only homework I assign is to read for at least 30 minutes a night. I monitor the reading by having the children write the book title and the pages read.  I can easily determine how their reading is going by those pages.  If a child is only reading ten pages in 30 minutes night after night, for example, something is wrong and I will investigate.  I encourage them to drop books they don’t like and work hard to help them find ones they do.  Periodically I invite them to prepare readings from these books for the class for our weekly Literary Salons.   I have private conversations with them about their readings. They write about the books in response journals (and on blogs).  All the stuff mentioned in Rich’s article and many other places.
• Reading Aloud. I always am reading aloud a book, ideally one the kids can’t get themselves yet. Last year I read The Graveyard Book and When You Reach Me before they were published, for example.  I’m still mulling over the first book for this year.
• One Book for the Whole Class.  I do believe in occasionally reading a book together. I think that there can be a very special experience when a group comes together over a book.  And I have to say, I don’t get the vehemence some have against doing this. While I understand how it has been done badly, it can also be wonderful.  I mean, what about those communities that read books together?  Book groups?  Book clubs? Why can’t teachers orchestrate something similar in their classrooms?  Certainly, I hope I do.  We begin the year with Charlotte’s Web and end it with The Wizard of Oz. Both are wonderful experiences.
• Group Books.  We do a study of historical fiction prior to the kids writing their own.  As part of the preparations I have the kids read books in small groups.
• Research. Sometimes I think people are so invested in getting kids to love reading that they forget that there is all kinds of reading.  Sometimes it is to get information.  My students read widely when working on their historical fiction stories about Mayflower passengers. They read primary sources, secondary sources, all sorts of stuff.

Okay. I could go on, but I won’t.  Reading is so many different things to so many different people so it stands to reason there would be many different ways to teach it and many different ways to learn it.

In the Classroom: “Poor Kids” and Reading

The latest to give his list of summer reading books for kids is Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist for the New York Times.  In “The Best Kid Books Ever” Kristof writes:

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.

This is less true of middle-class students whose parents drag them off to summer classes or make them read books. But poor kids fall two months behind in reading level each summer break, and that accounts for much of the difference in learning trajectory between rich and poor students.

Like so many similar well-intentioned pieces, this column bugged me.  Not only are the books Kristof recommends unlikely to end up in the hands of one of those “poor kids” this summer, even if they were in their hands, they might not speak to them at all.  The suggestions pouring in from his readers seem equally myopic— I see next to none considering what the actual reality is for those at-risk children.

If Krisof is so concerned about those “poor kids,” I wish he’d devote a column to them rather than listing books that he and his middle-class kids liked  — why are these “poor kids” not reading? What programs for them are working? Why? And what books are they liking?   What books (or other media, for that matter) are helping them keep those I.Q. points from bleeding away. (For that matter, check out Walter Kirn’s “Life, Liberty, and the Persuit of Aptitude” for another perspective on testing),  Rather than producing yet another list of books for us children’s book lovers to carp over, I’d like to see someone instead really examine those children who are struggling in school, what happens to them over the summer, and why.

In the Classroom: Don’t Blame the Book

I know that I am, like, annoyingly old-fashioned about this, but it seems to me that a big part of the problem is that we have lately empowered students to think that their reading of a book is inherently good and/or interesting.

Too often, we teach kids that all readings are created equal and that there are no bad ideas and etc.

But kids are not in school so that they can tell us what they think about Holden Caulfield. They’re in school to learn what to think about. And whether or not you like Holden is not, imho, the most important or interesting thing you might be thinking about when reading Catcher.

It’s not Holden’s fault if people read him poorly.

Those fighting words are from  John Green in his response to a recent New York Times piece on kids’ dislike of The Catcher in the Rye and, perhaps more significantly, its main character.  I recommend reading the article, reading John’s response, and then — most of all— the comments. For many of them are from high school kids and quite a few of them are fans of Holden.

To me the missing ingredient in this discussion is the teacher.  A great teacher can make most books interesting. (Mind you — I’m not saying likable.  You can enjoy the experience of reading and talking about a particular book — say Catcher — without necessarily liking it.) Now I know that all too often teachers in schools sadly make the experience of reading a book together as a class a misery.  But I have to say that I believe that done right it can be transcendent.  With a great teacher a group becomes a community discussing and considering and wondering and thinking hard about all sorts of stuff by way of a great book.  It bugs me that there is such a negative view about community book readings — IN SCHOOL SETTINGS.  After all, people are big on book groups and whole towns and cities reading a book together. Yet too many of these same folks tear up and spit out teachers and schools for doing something similar.

Good teachers guide and prod and get everyone thinking hard. I teach 4th graders and I like to think I’m able to do this with our study of Charlotte’s Web and am arrogant enough to think I could do it with Catcher in the Rye. It doesn’t always have to be just personal.  Sometimes reading is about something else — about ideas, about the world, about all sorts of stuff. When we do a close reading of Charlotte’s Web we consider the circle of life, irony, nature, death, and tons more.  The kids move outside of their personal response to consider those of others and whether those change their own. The conversation is  exhilarating.  For the kids and for me.  As wonderful as when I first did a close reading of the book with U.C. Knoepflmacher at Princeton in 1990.

I don’t think every book in the classroom needs to be done by the whole class, but I think it is a shame if some aren’t.  Be it Catcher or Charlotte’s Web or another book that is full of meaty stuff to tussle with, to consider, to rail against, or to love.  Books and teachers and students together can create extraordinary classroom communities.  Don’t rule them out.

My Take on Summer Reading

Some recent posts about summer reading reminded me of mine from a couple of years ago; since my feelings are the same I’m reposting it here for anyone who didn’t see it back then (or via my twitter update of today).

To require, or not to require, that is the question:

Whether 'tis safer for the child to tackle

The tomes and texts of summer reading,

Or to rest after a year of standards,

And by resting be just fine?  To bore: to make tedious:

No more; and by saying no required reading we end

The heart-ache and the hundreds of pages down

That eyes are following, 'tis a consummation

Urgently to be wish'd.  To bore, to make tedious

To read: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;

for in required reading what dreams may come

When they are reading not what they chose,

It must give us pause: there's the worry

That makes calamity of so long a summer;

For who would otherwise bear the scores of tests,

The teacher's wrong, the greater authorities correct,

The pangs of summer fun, the sandlot game's delay,

The insolence of NCLB and the spurns

That patient scoring of the unworthy tests,

When the grader himself might his intellect make

content with a book? who would a library visit,

To read and turn pages under a flickering light,

But oh that dread of something after Labor Day,

No matter the undiscover'd book in whose pages

No child is lost, or left behind

And indeed makes us happier for we have

played with others and enjoyed the sun!

But required reading make cowards of us all;

Teachers and parents unresolved

Are sicklied 'oer with the pale cast of thought,

Is casual fun of greater import and meaning

In this regard than our children's future?

And so we go --- required summer reading all!

The fair child!  Innocent, in our eyes

Be all our beliefs --- read required, read.

Revisiting: AS Byatt’s Possession

Okay, it isn’t really quite my revisiting, but I am an AS Byatt fan, loved Possession, and am eagerly waiting for the US publication of her latest, The Children’s Book.  So I very much enjoyed reading Sam Jordison over at the Guardian book club leading a discussion of this title.  Like a fellow Guardian writer, Jordison considered himself a Byatt skeptic due to a problematic experience earlier in his reading career, but this book  changed his mind. He writes:

The first thing that surprised me about an author I had previously pigeon-holed a dry old stick was how witty she is – and how playful. Among (many) other things, Possession is a wonderful comedy of manners. It sends up academics of all stamps (dusty, thrusting, shy, ambitious, greedy, gender-obsessed, sex-obsessed, celibate). It laughs at English eccentricities, foibles and inability to talk about emotion. It lampoons a certain type of overwhelming, over-articulate American. It mocks class mores. Anyone and everything that falls under Byatt’s gaze is a source of fun.

Indeed, the entire book is a clever joke; a sophisticated riff on the manners and tropes of detective novels. It swaps the private dicks for two literary academics – Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell – who use their skills in textual analysis to follow a series of arcane clues in order to unravel a mystery surrounding two Victorian poets (Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte). So it reads like the Da Vinci Code – only with brains and a sense of the absurd.

Since this is a book club, be sure to read the comments.  Fascinating and very smart conversation!

Alexander McCall Smith on Reader Needs and Demands

It can be very inhibiting for an author if he or she knows that what happens in fiction is going to be taken so seriously. I write serial novels in newspapers and have learned the hard way that people will readily attribute the views expressed by characters to their authors. In one of my “Scotland Street” novels a character called Bruce, a rather narcissistic young man, made disparaging remarks about his hometown. Although these were not the views I hold about that particular town, I was roundly taken to task, with the local member of the Scottish Parliament suggesting that I should be forced to apologize to the offended citizens. I pointed out that these were the views of a fictional character, who was just the type to make such remarks. That did not help.

It was very timely for me to come across this Alexander McCall Smith’s WSJ essay, “Lost in Fiction“  because, after seeing the excellent first episode of HBO’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I had a hankering for the books and picked up the latest.  High class comfort reading,  I think.

British Footballers’ Favorite Reads

Rooney’s is Harry Potter, but whose is The Iliad? – News, Books – The Independent

Wonder what our footballers (and other ball players) would name?

Marking Books

Okay, okay, I admit it.  All my life, with library books too.  Hang head in shame.  All those turned-over-corners.  I did it.  You can blame me.

The days of embossed leather bookmarks are of course long gone and 62% of people in the poll admitted they turn the corner of the page to keep their place. “I consider that mutilation,” said Simon. “I would never do that, what’s wrong with using bookmarks – tickets, pieces of paper?”

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust, admitted he had bent the truth. “My first degree was in theology, I got a 2:1 at Durham. I’m embarrassed to say I never finished the Old Testament.”

The results are based on 1,342 responses to a survey on the World Book Day website, and Douglas said that in many ways the results were reassuring. “It shows that reading has a huge cultural value in terms of the way we present ourselves as intelligent and engaged people.”

He said he was far from surprised at the turning down of pages or the 14% of people who admit writing in a library book. “I used to be a librarian and I can tell you books come back in the most horrendous condition. Turning down corners is better than surgical stockings hanging out of Tolstoy.”

From the Guardian piece, Our guilty secrets: the books we only say we’ve read.

Been there about those unfinished books, but what about book marking?  I’m curious — you librarians out there — what sort of stuff have you found being used as book marks? (Or do I really not want to know?)

Vote for One of Your Favourite (this is a UK thing) Literary Characters

Leeds Read 2009: Now we’ve got character

Perhaps because I find him endearing, I voted for Rincewind.