This post was mentioned on Twitter by kriley19: Joanne Jacobs: Teachers urged to read aloud to teens http://bit.ly/4PLqs0 Full http://bit.ly/5NjlGR...

If these teachers are being encouraged to read aloud “more” – it makes me wonder how much they were reading aloud, and how much they’re being asked to. (I wasn’t able to read the full article.)

My pop might be very different from yours, but you might get some ideas to play with.

I never do read-aloud more than 20 minutes at a time. If I’m dying of boredom, so are they.

I read aloud to them initially to set the pace and because of the bad language. (We all know those kids who are going to yell out the bad words in the text because they can. At least they’re reading, right?) Day 2, I tried the round robin approach. This proved disastrous. After about the 4th person read, the others (and I) were getting impatient and beginning to lose focus.

I agree that with poetry and drama and sometimes other works, reading aloud works well to assist students with interpretation. However, I find these kids rely on it. They don’t want to think for themselves. (Not sure if it’s the kids at my school or kids, in general). Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Call it “mission creep” or call it what you will. Secondary level teachers are reading to their students for the same reason that my college president is talking about our university establishing a program for 13th grade students, or the students who can pay money to the institution but can’t read and write or do math very well. And, it’s the same reason that the teacher ed program at our university is establishing a new required course (MTH 090) that does nothing but teach arithmetic computation because the students who want to be teachers can’t do long multiplication and division and can’t handle the mystery of fractions. The same department is considering establishing a new required writing course because their prospective teachers can’t write and don’t understand grammar and the English department at the university refuses to teach those skills in what used to be called Freshman English.

Schools, both public and private, are in bad shape folks and they are NOT getting any better.

I read aloud to my kids (11 and 7)and have no intention of stopping at some magical age (especially since my husband, 36, seems to enjoy read alouds as well). It gives us time together, lets us enjoy a book together, and gives us the opportunity to discuss something as it’s read.

Well, first off, your kids are 11 and 7. That’s not really much of a counterexample. Come back in two years and tell me your 13 year old likes to be read to out loud and I’ll be impressed. 11-12 is, in my experience as a child’s librarian, where kids start to feel like it’s belittling.

On the other hand, maybe things will just be different in your house — which is perfectly fine. Perhaps the Adams household will continue to have a wonderful oral tradition just the way that the Lopez household continues to maintain certain old traditions of hospitality that have been all but discarded in the modern age.

But we have to accept that people will think, justifiably, that we’re weird.

As for my attitude being a bit of “modern snobbery”… well, yes. Certainly. But typical snobs are snobs because they have a lot of money and the targets of their disdain do not. In this case, I’m being a modern snob because my culture has massive levels of literacy. Historically speaking, we’re doing pretty good. We seem to be backsliding a little into more of an aristocrats-can-read sort of world, but things haven’t gotten that bad yet.

Maybe the world would be a better place if we all sat around and read novels to each other instead of watching movies. But seeing as we can all read to ourselves, much faster and on our own time, people seem to have decided to go with that instead.

And, for the record, I admit that Homer and Beowulf and Shakespeare are special cases.

There’s nothing wrong with reading some things out loud. It’s when the teacher reads everything out loud that I become concerned. As an English teacher, my sole responsibility is not to foster a love of reading, though I certainly count it as one of my objectives. Another, more important, responsibility I have is to teach students how to find information in the printed word, how to understand the language and all its wonderful devices, and how to analyze the ideas and information being presented. Part of that requires students to process words on their own without my oral interpretation of tone, character voices, action, etc.

I use a variety of strategies for novel reading, but would never read an entire novel out loud.

That makes little sense in regards to reading aloud.

I read aloud to my kids (11 and 7)and have no intention of stopping at some magical age (especially since my husband, 36, seems to enjoy read alouds as well). It gives us time together, lets us enjoy a book together, and gives us the opportunity to discuss something as it’s read.

Reading aloud was a form of entertainment for people of all ages for a very long time and those who could do it well were admired. It’s a bit of modern snobbery that’s it’s something just for little children. I’m rather hoping my daughter will start reading prose to me soon (she does read poetry to the family now) Granted, not every book works well as a read aloud. Lord of the Rings kills your voice and Little Women is tough to make work but anything by Roald Dahl is great fun and Anne of Green Gables is a treat. Epics like The Odyssey and Beowulf are properly read aloud as they were products of oral tradition in the first place.

Whether this works in school is a much different matter. It works in my home because the kids don’t go to school and we can devote and hour or hours a day to it. Where a teacher only has a student for a relatively short time in school it may not be appropriate at all. But whether it’s proper for school shouldn’t be a judgement about reading aloud in all circumstances.