School assignments killed his son’s love of reading, writes Tony on Leading Motivated Learners.
Reading logs and summaries became a chore, he writes. Written responses were “never checked or responded to.”
“Book reports . . . became more about drawing some amazing picture to go on the cover of the report than anything else,” Tony complains. “They were also so formulaic that little thought went into completing them.”
Johann Sebastian Bach
Instead of reading a passage, then answering comprehension questions, his son “would just read the questions and the multiple choice answers and then scan the passage for the correct answer – no reading really involved there.”
Close readings, a Common Core staple, meant “reading the same book for months and doing endless assignments around that one book.”
Even before the close reading era, my daughter would complain that it took forever to read a book, hunt down its symbolism, “journal” about it and beat it to death in class.
We did almost none of this when I was in school, except for writing book reports.
My fifth-grade teacher told us to write a 1 1/2-page book report for every book we read. I was reading a book a day, so it was a lot of work. I suspected she didn’t read the reports. One day, in my largest handwriting and widest margins, I wrote:
Johann Sebastian Bach is a book about Johann Sebastian Bach. Sometimes Johann Sebastian Bach was called Johann Sebastian Bach, but sometimes Johann Sebastian Bach was called Johann, Johann Sebastian or Bach. However, Johann Sebastian Bach was not called Sebastian or Sebastian Bach.
That was the first page. On the second page, I wrote:
Johann Sebastian Bach is a very good book for boys and girls who are interested in reading about Johann Sebastian Bach.
The teacher never said a word about it. I kept churning out book reports, because that’s the sort of person I am. did not lose my love of reading.
In sixth grade, we just had to fill out an index card for every book we read. For years after, the teacher used my stack — 184 books, I think — to terrify her new students.
Robert Pondiscio wrote on Facebook: “You know what REALLY kills the love of reading: Not teaching kids how to @#%*! read…. ”
How can teachers teach reading without boring readers?
Update: A New Jersey district lets teachers assign short excerpts from a novel for close reading, then show a movie based on the book. In my school days, we watched the movie of Julius Caesar (James Mason!) and Pride and Prejudice (Laurence Olivier!), but we read whole books, not excerpts.