Motoko Rich reports on a new approach to teaching reading: letting kids read books they actually want to read, rather than having them all read the same book. This strikes me as an excellent idea. The established secondary school canon is weirdly random and unchanging. I read Lord of the Flies as a high school freshman in 1984 and apparently it’s still being taught to hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Why? Because it’s mildly literary and being about children makes it “accessible,” I suppose. And because of first-mover advantage–there must be zillions of paperback copies stacked in high school storage closets and if you’ve taught it before it’s easier to teach again.
The article is generally very positive with only one dissenting opinion, from an unsurprising source:
“What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” said Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University who was assistant education secretary under President George H. W. Bush. “Kids will pick things that are trendy and popular. But that’s what you should do in your free time.”
Ever wonder why some people get quoted in the newspaper a lot? There’s a trick to it. Reporters generally don’t call “experts” looking for new ideas. They call looking for quotes that match the ideas they already have. The key elements to being quoted are (A) returning phone calls quickly, (B) having a credible title and organizational affiliation, and (C) being succinct. For example, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, has been quoted I’m guessing hundreds of times over the years in major new outlets about all manner of economic issues. Is he the world’s greatest economist, a financial Renaissance man conversant in the arcane details of myriad topics? No. I’m sure he’s a smart guy, but his real genius lies in providing a credible one-sentence summary of whatever thesis reporters are trying to advance in their story. He’s the King of the Confirming Quote. Ravitch has carved out a related but slightly different niche in recent years. To maintain the appearance of balance and objectivity, reporters like to include at least one opposing opinion, even in a feature story with an obvious point of view. That’s Ravitch’s role. Whether it’s new test score results, a federal policy initiative, a new program from the schools chancellor, a new way to teach reading, Ravitch will reliably lend her deserved reputation as an education historian and NYU pedigree to a quote saying, essentially, that this is all a bunch of B.S. She’s the Queen of the Curmudgeonly Quote.
This one is particularly crusty. “What child is going to pick up ‘Moby-Dick’?” None, I imagine. And good! There’s a tendency in thinking of all the books an educated person should read and K-12 curricula as the same thing. But being well-read is the work of a lifetime; the most important thing schools can do is get that project started and heading in the right direction. If I’d been allowed to read what I wanted during class in middle school, it probably would have been Dune and Stephen R. Donaldson. Or comic books. Thirty years later, I’ve moved on from sci-fi and fantasy (although not from comic books). I went through a William Styron phase in my early 30s, once spent 3 months reading nothing but Paradise Lost, tackled Faulkner unsuccessfully, relished the collected essays of A.J. Liebling, and wondered at the mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Good bookstores make me excited and sad at the same time–as long as I live, I’ll never run out of good books to read, but I’ll also never get to read them all. And during all that time it never really occurred to me to read Moby-Dick. I was assigned The Confidence Man in college, kind of hated it, and that’s that. The number of books I can experience is finite, and I’d rather read Infinite Jest.
The important thing is that I read a lot, and always have. Per Dana Goldstein, that’s the main reason I’m lucky enough to be able to write for a living. I appreciate the importance of exposing students to our shared cultural and intellectual heritage. They should all know that Moby-Dick exists and is considered by many to be great. But given the competing imperatives of getting all students to read something that just happens to be canonical and getting all students to read something, we should be far more concerned about the latter.
Update: Several friends have emailed to assure me that Moby-Dick is a very good book and worth reading, while another says “if I had to choose between Summerhill and E.D. Hirsch, I’d go with Hirsch.” Fair enough! I’m a lot more likely to give Moby-Dick a try now, although I think I’ll let Infinite Jest digest for a while first. Per Summerhill, I don’t think the choice here is between anarchy and an iron-clad reading list. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m pretty sympathetic to a “Great Books”-style approach at the college level. But there are important distinctions between college students and middle schoolers, and between philosophy and literature. There’s simply no way to study philosophy or get a legitimate liberal arts education generally without contending with certain books and ideas. There’s no avoiding The Republic. But when the goal is teaching literature to seventh and eighth graders, I don’t think the same principles apply. I’m also struck by the weight given to 19th century books in the canon. The ratio of great books written in the 20th century to the 19th is probably 5,000-to-one, objectively speaking. What’s the expiration date on Huckleberry Finn–not as a worthwhile book in its own right, but as a book that every single student in America has to read?
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[...] Carey stakes out something of an extreme position here. He’s right about the first mover advantage of some books now commonly used, but [...]
[...] – Drum, Yglesias and Kevin Carey all have good stuff. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Books from the High School [...]
Both sides here have a point– there is value in reading a shared text, and there is value in students having a choice in what they read. However, as a former teacher and professional developer in NYC, I have to disagree with what many reviewers either imply or state– that reading workshop is ineffective and/or that in order to be a good teacher of literature, you must be skilled at getting students to enjoy reading a certain set of books, many of which they wouldn’t be inclined to pick up on their own. So, to that point, two admittedly anecdotal observations from my classroom:
- Most of the students I taught in New York would not have improved in reading nearly as much as they did if we’d read class novels– period. There is just less time with eyes on text if you read a class novel, because more time is devoted to interpretation. Research is clear that more reading time with texts on your reading level= improved fluency and comprehension. I was an English major at an Ivy League college, and I deeply value literary conversations. But for kids who read 3- 5 grade levels behind, I value improved reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension more. Teaching is about making choices– I was comfortable with that one.
- Good teaching in reading workshop requires that teachers have read a lot of the books in their classroom– but this isn’t a crazy expectation. These are middle or elementary level books, and we’re adults. They don’t take that long to read. Once you’ve invested that time, you can actually be conversant with students on a range of books and have deep and meaningful conversations about how these readers “observed what their characters say and do”. And if a 7th grader reads at a 2nd grade level, you have that conversation about Captain Underpants, and you shouldn’t have to apologize for not forcing him to read a book that he has no shot of really reading, even if you could engage him in the plot with a lot of scaffolding, paired reading, class discussions, etc..
Having just completed my student teaching and observations at he middle school level, I must say that I was not impressed by current approaches to literacy. Teachers did not seem textually competent and students mostly reported how they did not like reading. Class discussions of literature were almost completely non-existent. It is no wonder students do not like reading.
Irrespective of what is read in a class, the teacher must be able to lead literate discussions. Too often, this was not the case.
I just did see any evidence of students being turned on to the world of literature and reading. Nor did I see students being led deeper into texts and thought. Whatever starting point one chooses is fine, so long as how you read is emphasized. You can eventually get to better books. Teachers that think Harry Potter is good stuff are by definition idiots and really should be teaching.
To Ms. McNeill’s chagrin, several students, most of them boys, stubbornly refused to read more challenging fare.
[snip]
“I keep trying to get you to read things other than James Patterson,” Ms. Atwell said, tapping the book’s cover. “But if you are going to write a book review of substance, you are going to have to find substance in the book.”
This is not good teaching.
Yet again, “guru” Nancie Atwell and her colleagues on the workshop circuit determine what America’s children will read. Not English professors, not taxpayers, and certainly not parents.
Suppose I want my child to read Huckleberry Finn?
Suppose I’ve taken a look at the College Board’s 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers and I’d like my child to have read 1 or 2 books from that list by the time he’s spent 13 years in the public school system?
Suppose I want my school system to hire teachers with degrees in English literature who can teach my child **how** to read a classic work of literature?
Parents need a vote and a veto.
So do taxpayers.
[...] sensible center. But you can’t spell “contrarian” without C-A-R-E-Y, and the Quick and the Ed’s main man jumps into the fray, unable to resist taking swinging at his personal pinata, Diane Ravitch, who [...]
Wide reading is important and students should be expected to read beyond assigned in-class reading of classic works of fiction and nonfiction. Given their own devices short chapter books and comic books could become the texts of choice. There’s not much critical thinking required of those choices. Children are capable of so much more than you give them credit.
And by the way, to suggest this is a “new” approach to teaching reading is a jaw-dropper. This approach has roots that are 80 years deep, and really took off 20 years ago. It’s certainly the standard approach in elementary school and seems to be have reached critical mass in middle school too.
Whole class reading of novels — the sacrosanct teacher-led “read aloud” notwithstanding — is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.
I could go on about this ad nauseum, but I’ll restrict myself to a couple of points. People in education don’t like to make these choices. Fine. But choice works both ways. If you refuse to say what’s worth knowing, you inevitably choose “nothing’s worth knowing.” Huckleberry Finn? “Kids can live without it.” Shakespeare? “They’ll get that in college.” Langston Hughes? James Baldwin? Maya Angelou? No single work is indispensible, but it’s like pulling a loose thread from a sweater. Keep pulling things out, and eventually all that’s left is “Read whatever you want!”
It’s a formula for illiteracy.
We also forget — everyone does — that there are valid technical reasons for common knowledge. The point is not to enshrine a canon, but to understand that language proficiency requires being familiar with an broad range of knowledge in science, history, the arts and other areas that speakers and writers assume readers and listeners already know. Poor readers suddenly look like good readers when they’re reading about familiar subjects. It stands to reason that we should be doing everything we can to make them familiar with more subjects, and shared knowledge, including well-known works of literature and literary allusions (so yes, I’d agree that while it may not be important for eveyone to read Moby-Dick, being familiar is important. Sometimes a little knowledge is just fine).
Lastly, there’s the question of how valuable the 30 different books for 30 different kids approach really is. I was trained in Readers Workshop and had to use it in my classroom. It wasn’t effective, or satisfying. It becomes almost impossible to have deep, rich conversations about books. You can’t possible be familiar with every book every kid is reading, so you’re encouraged to ask questions that are not terribly deep or interesting: Can you describe the setting? Which character are you most like? Are there any questions you wish you could ask the author? It’s a kind of cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers way to teach literature. If today’s mini-lesson is “good readers pay attention to what characters say and do” it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about War and Peace or Captain Underpants. At one level, that’s true. At another, it’s just plain silly.
You can easily say “not every child participates in those rich, whole-class discussions.” But not every child is engrossed in reading in the reader’s workshop either. A lot of them are just going through the motions.
Robert
I am somewhat disheartened by your update. I actually feel exactly the reverse– college is not the place to engage in “Great Books”, K-12 clearly is. My reasoning:
1) I think that there is a base of information that all people should have access to. While I don’t think this means that 100% of people need to read 100% of the same material, I do believe it means that students should be reading material not just for the sake of reading, but for the sake of learning and understanding. The so-called “great books” are often called “great” because of their importance in historical context, their establishment of new ideas, or their pure quality, as measured by the fact that there is a lot to learn about reading by reading these works.
2) I think it’s therefore important that students experience reading not just for love but for information and context before they leave K-12. Why? Because for many, many students, that’s the only chance we’ll have to expose them to these kinds of works. While Dune is a masterpiece of science fiction that I, too, read at 12, it did not teach me about allegory and symbolism like Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm, both of which I was assigned that same year. Dune helped me love reading, an important accomplishment, but the books I read in school taught me how to read.
3) The conversations that we’d like to have in college classrooms moves beyond understanding these works and into the realm of analysis. Without exposure to a range of books which provide a solid toolkit for understanding different forms of literature, the higher level analysis will never happen. When I look at the “Summer Reading” list for some of my local high schools and find books like “Cut” and “Speak”, both of which are popular YA books that came out when I was a freshman and high school, I am dismayed. These books simply do not help you learn how to decipher Faulkner. Love is not enough, skills must exist as well.
4) In college, you’ll be expected to, and if well-prepared, be able to, do a lot of your reading and analysis independently. K-12 needs to be a space where you can bounce ideas off of peers and instructors so you can learn the process of analyzing literature. I don’t think it’s fair to expect a seventh grader to read Lord of the Flies and see what’s beneath the surface on their own. It takes a little coaching, a little context, and a lot of discussion, but I’m confident with help, a middle schooler can uncover more than the basic plot. How are they supposed to engage in this conversation if Johnny in row 2 read Lord of the Rings and Sally in row 1 read The Hours?
Are students held accountable to any kind of analysis or report on the books they read at will? Then again, it might be difficult for a student to critique “The Pool Boys” without having read something with more literary substance. Congratulations on basing an educational policy opinion on your own experience — I’ve tried that tactic myself and been met with a lot of snark and general insults from those with public policy backgrounds who tell me that’s a no-no. I guess the trick is to do it in a way that you can insult Diane Ravitch. Then anything goes, I guess.