Teacher Magazine features Donalyn Miller, a a sixth-grade teacher and “book whisperer,” who requires students to read 40 books of their own choice “in a variety of genres such as realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction.”
If I teach a lesson on conflict, eventually students will be asked to identify the conflict in their own book and provide evidence to support their observations.
I do not “teach books”; I use the students’ independent reading to reinforce the skills and concepts that I am teaching.
Many children read 50 or 60 books; the lowest number finished is 22.
When my daughter was in school, they read very few books in class but read them intensively. It seemed to me they beat each poor book to death. Of course, Allison read voraciously on her own, as I did (and still do).
In part two, Miller writes about getting boys to read by catering to their interests, even if that’s vulgar humor or video-game strategy guides.
The subject matter that draws high school boys to certain movies and video games can be found in trade books, but rarely the assigned books. I had a whole group of boys one year that passed around and read The Chocolate War because they heard the book contained off-color language, when, in fact, there were just a few inappropriate words.
Part 3 discusses in-class reading time.
When I was in fifth grade (a looong time ago), my teacher set up a big chart on the wall. There were ten categories, like “biography”, “science” and “fiction”, across the top and our names along the side. Every student had to read one book from each category and turn in a book report on it. We had the whole semester to do it.
After our first ten, we could read books from any category, turn in book reports on them, and get extra stars on the chart. He turned it into a competition towards the end of the semester and people really fought it out to the end. I think the winner read sixty-some books. Everyone did the basic ten and almost everyone did at least ten past that.
The real trick was the book report. You had to write the minimal amount that you could get away with, but not so little he rejected the book report as too flimsy. By the end of the semester, we were real experts in Mr McFadden’s sense of a good-enough book report.
It is great to encourage kids to read what interests them, and to provide them with opportunities to do so during the day. However, this cannot supplant the close study of a literary text, and the accompanying essays and class discussions.
The problem is quantity vs. quality. When I read many books, I do not read them particularly closely or well. When I read a book slowly, I might spend months on it and return to it frequently over time. Both are important, but the slower reading is best taught in the classroom. Moreover, when the whole class reads a book together, the teacher can go beyond the teaching of “strategies” to a much more subtle and nuanced understanding.
As a teenager, I read many books over the summers and remember only few of them. I vividly remember the books we read together in class. I was just thinking back on the first sentence of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” which we read in eighth or ninth grade:
“When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”
I have never forgotten that face or the single sentence that created it. I was amazed by that description, which we read aloud, discussed in detail, and read again.
Reading together, a class can tackle complex works; the students’ various insights can give a glimpse into the interpretive possiblities. Far from beating a book to death, a well-planned study of a book can serve as a beginning. Students come to see how much there is to find in a book and how many times you can read it and still find more. I have returned often to literature I read for classes and courses. The closer the analysis, the more came out of it.
Of course, it is also important to read many books, for fun. Sadly, many students do not have the resources or motivation to do so outside of school, so teachers need to make this possible and desirable. This should not replace the teaching of literature, nor should we confuse “reading strategies” with literary interpretation. Let us make room for independent reading, but also bring students into the world of literary texts that we know, love, and are still grappling with after all these years.
P.S. Thank you for linking to my post “in praise of failure.” I am honored.
The commentary on getting boys to read struck a responsive chord. Our youngest son has read voraciously since about age 10, but for what seemed the longest time, it was only that which interested him: sports.
Since my wife and I both are dedicated readers, we persevered, allowed him a fairly long leash (after all, he was at least reading, even if his favorite book was, for a time, the autobiography of A.J. Foyt) and all turned out well.
To this day (he’s 33), he still is a voracious reader of sports and other non-fiction material, though his horizon has broadened considerably. His degree is in economics, and he subscribes to, and reads, technical journals within the discipline that I don’t pretend to understand.
Diana, I take your point. However, when I was a senior in high school 47 years ago, a college study skills teacher, God bless him, spent a considerable time in class having all of us read, digest and discuss How To Read A Book, by Mortimer Adler. And I still am an inveterate underliner and marginal notations maker in every non-fiction book I own and read.
Bill
Bill, I don’t think we’re at odds here. I think it’s great for a class to read, digest, and discuss Adler’s book and develop good habits. Find me a school that actually purchases Adler’s book (in bulk) today, and I will commend it for that alone. (I would buy it myself, for my students, but I have to be careful, having purchased a lot of books for them already.)
I’m wary of something else: the watering down that accompanies a “strategy-based” approach to reading. As it stands now under several widely applied literacy models, the teacher presents a strategy, and the students then apply the strategy to their independent reading. This has its time and place but should not replace the study of literature.
The danger of the “strategy” instruction is that the lesson is often oversimplified. Moreover, if the students are all reading their own books, the teacher has little opportunity to work with the students on their individual books–there are just too many, and the teacher probably has not read them all. Students may or may not apply the “strategy” correctly, and it may or may not even apply to what they’re reading.
Case in point: “Main Idea.” Some of the “reading strategy” manuals out there define “main idea” as “what the book or passage is mostly about.” This confusing and misleading definition could do more harm than good. A more sophisticated concept is the “thesis statement,” but that takes much more instruction and discussion, as well as close examination of specific texts.
Or take “sequencing” (awful verb, almost as bad as “inferencing”). In some cases it is easy to identify a sequence of events. But what about stories within stories, or stories that loop back in time? If all the kids are reading their own books, the teacher has no way of knowing if they are all identifying (let alone enjoying or appreciating) the chronological sequence of events in contrast with the narrative sequence.
When “balanced literacy” came to NYC, many schools got rid of their class sets of classics (threw them away, according to some accounts) and replaced them with “classroom libraries” of teen literature and books on various subjects. Teachers who wished to have the whole class read an excellent book were often forced to buy the books themselves. This is absurd. There are ways to teach specific works of literature while also encouraging independent reading. We do not have to throw out bath, bathwater, baby, house, and town in order to take a modern shower.
Thanks for a marvelous post, Joanne. I think what this woman is doing is tremendous, but I tend to agree with Diane. As a 7th-grade honors language arts teacher, I’m much more concerned with quality than quantity.
My students read three class-assigned novels, along with one, sometimes two, books they choose on their own. We also do some plays and two short story units. These kids tend to read a lot, without me assigning the reading. Where they need the most work is in interpreting more difficult prose.
Although I know Miller’s Trinity Meadow is a public school, I must wonder how large her classes are and what ability her students bring to the classroom.
I do applaud her work, but I wonder how truly difficult it is.
“Moreover, if the students are all reading their own books, the teacher has little opportunity to work with the students on their individual books-–there are just too many, and the teacher probably has not read them all. Students may or may not apply the ’strategy’ correctly, and it may or may not even apply to what they’re reading.”
Thank you, thank you, and thank you!
I am so pleased with my child’s writing instruction in his first year in middle school because his humanities teacher has focused all of the children’s attention on interpreting one self-contained short story, together. The teacher and all of the children know the story inside out. Therefore it is possible for the teacher to hold each child accountable to a standard of evidence in support of any thesis a child cares to develop.
This is completely different from our experience in elementary school where there was a lot of “reading bingo.” No constructive criticism of each child’s book summary was ever possible due to time contraints. Teachers assigned much more writing than they could ever read. And no, the teachers didn’t know the books well enough to know whether each child had done a good job. Assigning writing is not the same as instructing writing.
I hear the “reading-is-boring” mantra all the time from my freshmen. They do not read. Their parents do not read. They hate reading. So I thought I’d try to electrify (not electrocute, but that did cross my mind)them by reading a 2500-word short story on the Vietnam War written by a Vietnam vet. I was pushing the envelope and sticking my neck out on the chopping block to use it, but I went ahead with it anyway. The story, “The River” by Paul Clayton, had the F-bomb in it, and the kids insisted I read it instead of saying “effing,” etc. Every time I read it, the class erupted in laughter, and I kept saying, “What’s so funny? You guys say and hear this word all the time,” but they said it was entertaining to hear me use it. The story had quite a lot of depth and a killer ending, and when I finished it, you could have heard a pin drop. One girl said in a low voice, “That was sad.” Everyone was into it, and the next day I had them answering questions about it and someone writing their answers on the board. An assistant principal came into the room unannounced, stayed for about fifteen minutes, and then left with a copy of the story clutched gleefully in her hand. Her cloven hooves sparked as she left the room as she was probably thinking, “I’ve got him now. Hahaha.” After a week, I was called into her office and scolded for not using district approved material. Only district approved material, including only those short stories, essays and poems approved by the district in our lit books, can be used in class. The kids wanted more stories like “The River,” but they won’t be getting them. Their next assignment will be The House on Fandango Street. The powers that be have assured me that the kids will soak it up like a sponge because it was written by one of their own.