Wanderings…

I’ve just read “Children need books, not quangos”
(Quango – Translation for Non-Brits: “government committee”)

In the article, Gillian Bowditch writes:

At my daughter’s school, literacy levels rose — especially among boys — when the headmaster ended formal reading homework for children from primary four upwards and replaced it with 20 minutes of reading of the child’s choice per night. Magazines, comics and football annuals were all acceptable. Parents were told that the aim was to present reading as an enjoyable activity and to encourage a basic level of competency.

What is so discouraging, however, is the way that fostering basic literacy has become an end goal for politicians, when it is really just the equivalent of reaching base camp.

Sounds like the government in the UK is also suffering from a similar strain of the “No Child Left Behind” disease.

Of course reading for fun improves reading skills! What a treat for young children and their parents to have a break from homework, a chance to have a good time together and improve reading skills at the same time.

I know the roadblocks to providing children with fun reading time. NCLB testing is the biggest culprit at the elementary and middle school levels. But high schools here in New York State have always had “high-stakes” testing and still manage to provide a range of learning activities. Yet any kind of school-wide, “drop everything and read” kind of activity is often resisted by some (many?) high school teachers. They cite the pressure to cover the curriculum – and that pressure is very real. Still, encouraging students to read for fun will improve student comprehension skills, and developing lifelong readers is at least as important as covering the curriculum.

Librarians – myself included – do not get away from criticism here. Perhaps the author is correct when he says:

School libraries have given way to “resource centres” and librarians have lost out to “information technology specialists.

At any rate, this article interested me because it promotes a free reading activity outside of class time. Perhaps such an activity would gain more support amongst busy teachers. Once in awhile, instead of assigning that essay question or that list of math problems to solve, they could change the assignment to:

For homework tonight, read something you enjoy for at least a half hour. Talk to someone in your family about what you have read, and be prepared to tell the class a little about your reading tomorrow.

If the teachers in each subject area would give that assignment to all their students just once a month – it would mean that students would be doing some free reading at least once a week. Surely a teacher could forgo the usual homework assignment once a month? Who knows – reading skills might improve. If not – at least everyone (teachers, students and parents) would get to relax a little.

I ran across an interesting question on a LM_NET today. Here is part of it.

….The [Newsweek] article focuses heavily on a recent book by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, entitled “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)”

So what is the opinion of the online school media community? Is this generation dumber in comparison to others? What’s the cause? Can it be traced to television, computers, video games, the Internet, the new communication technologies? What, if anything, can be done
about it?

Ed Nizalowski, SMS

I just read the book. There is much I agree with and many things that I do not. It is a book that I plan to read again.

There is a lot of talk out in blogland about the book and, judging from some of the comments, many folks have NOT read the whole book. I have read the Newsweek article as well as the book. I am not entirely sure that the writers of the Newsweek article have actually read the book in its entirety. The magazine writers cast blame for the educational deficiencies of young people on the parents, teachers and baby boomers – implying that Mark Bauerlein is solely – or even mostly – placing the blame upon the NetGens. He most definitely is not. He casts big time blame on teachers (and librarians) for abdicating their role as cultural guardians and warriors. He casts blame upon parents who allow their children to come home and immerse themselves in “screen time” as opposed to spending time reading, doing homework and interacting with parents and other adults. Bauerlein’s primary thesis is that the social aspect of net use is keeping kids in an extended period of adolescence. The social side of life has ever been the favored domain of adolescence. But in the past there were large chunks of time that were spent away from other teenagers, allowing more space for them to read, think and communicate with more mature minds. There is a lot of truth in what he says.

This book will probably equally infuriate teachers, librarians, parents AND NetGeners. Interestingly, a few days ago I found the most thoughtful responses on the school newspaper of Emory College. Mr. Bauerlein in a professor there. The article and comments appeared to be primarily student written the last time I had a look.

You will find more of my thoughts in the last paragraph of this blog post. Who Are You & Why Should We Believe What You Say

Mark Bauerlein sees a return to a more scholarly, traditional approach to education as the answer. For another point of view on the efficacy of “traditional” education, I found Doug Johnson’s post today to be very interesting. The Impetus for Educational Change

This post is based on an email conversation with one of our Social Studies teachers. Neither of us is happy with the quality of research projects that many of the 9th graders turn in. For next year – I have an idea.

If you read my last blog post, The Sanctity of Time, you will see that I am beginning to associate poor research with poor reading skills and habits. I’ve always instinctively felt that it’s better for kids to start with books and then go to computers. On the other hand – why should the format of information matter? After all, encylopedias, books and periodicals are all available now on the net as well as on our shelves. I was considering trashing any requirement to use books as well as internet sources. Why require books? Is it because I personally prefer reading hard copy rather than reading from a screen? Am I foisting out-dated research techniques on the net generation?

Ultimately – I have decided that the requirements are still valid – but not because of the format. I now think the problem is a lack of serious interaction with text – no matter what format it is in. The problem is the endless hunt which sucks up thinking time.

Guess what? Teachers and librarians can fix that. We need to create more opportunities for kids to get away from the hunt and interact with the information they find – reading, highlighting, taking notes etc. We can create opportunities for them to progress from general overviews to more detailed sources. Sometimes librarians and teachers can choose preliminary readings for them. Sometimes kids could spend 15 minutes or so to locate an article themselves and print it out. Sometimes we could require that the sources be from a physical book or an online database. Other times the information could be from the web. Either way – the article needs to be a general overview of their topic. Once they have a printed article in their hands, students would then be required to sit at the tables, read their articles, highighting,taking margin notes, asking questions etc. Once they have a beginning understanding of their topic – THEN they can go back to the computers and search for more books, periodicals or venture forth onto Google.

Again – the problem isn’t format. It’s taking the time to read and think. Our kids suffer way too much from the “I love to hunt – but I really don’t want to deal with all that bloody meat” syndrome.

In his post The sanctity of print Doug Johnson asks:

..is requiring print sources of information in a paper or project desirable, practical or effective in 2008?”

I understand why he asks the question. I agree – it is quality, not format that should matter the most.

But …. I confess.

I too have projects that require books. These projects came about in reaction to poor quality research papers based on poor quality web sources. So the requirement seemed like a good idea. After all, for many topics, the first 10 books you run across in a good school library collection are likely to provide higher quality, more objective information than the first 10 hits on Google.

Don’t believe me? Try it out.

Compare the gun control books in your library colletion to the first 10 results on Google. What do you discover?

What about cocaine? Have you looked at www.cocaine.org? It turns up in the first 5 results of every search engine I have tried.
And yet…I understand the argument. I too am ambivalent about the “you must use at least 1 book” requirement. I know I need to expand my teaching to include evaluating all formats – not just the web. Still – I have no immediate plans to abandon the requirement. I think it is important to push kids out of their comfort zone a little. And increasingly – that means pushing them to look further than their favorite search engine. Students are depending too much on “information bytes” and are increasingly unable to deal with the complex, multi-level arguments that are more often found in books.

Our school has been thinking about literacy a lot lately, thanks to our new literacy coach. The more I think about literacy and examine the techniques our coach recommends, the more I think the problem is not really “print vs. web.” Think back to the pre-internet world. Yes – there WAS life before Google. And guess what? Kids turned in bad research papers then too. Papers based on haphazard research – albeit using high quality library books. Indeed, it could be said that they were plagiarizing from higher quality sources back then.

No – the problem really is not web vs. print. The problem is literacy. The problem is the “instant access” – “good enough” – “cut and paste” mentality that the web encourages. We are all afflicted these days with I-ADHD (information attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). We stalk information, we hunt it down, we cut and paste it to read later. We bookmark it, we blog it, we save it in our del.icio.us accounts. Multiply that exponentially – and you see the problem that our students have.

They are great at gathering – but not so hot at interacting. They are terrific at building beautiful (and distracting) PowerPoints behind their information bytes. But they can’t summarize their findings in a few coherent sentences. They can’t pronounce many of the words in their own presentations.

What is missing?

Is it too many web sources and not enough book sources? I don’t think so. What’s missing is READING. What’s missing is THINKING. What’s missing is CREATING. Why?

Because…. the biggest thing missing is TIME (and skills) for DEEP READING.

We’d worry less about format if we gave kids more TIME. Time to interact with the information they have gathered. Requiring them to sit down, read, highlight, summarize and take notes will increase their understanding. Providing them with activities that force them to read actively and ask clarifying questions will increase the quality of their research. It will give them the chance to see whether the text is one-sided or lacking in depth. It will lead students to ask questions which will in turn lead them back to search for answers.

Of course we need to give the kids time to search – but more than that, we need to give them time to read. Some teachers might resist using library time to read. It’s a radical concept after all. Somehow we have fallen into the trap that library time = searching time. I think that is a mistake. Library time should be “understanding” time. The kids need time to think. Problem is – they don’t always know how to do that. They need their teachers and librarians by their sides to help them understand what they read. They need to get off that addictive searching treadmill and take a breather. They need to be still and listen to what they read.

Meanwhile – the “you must use at least 1 book” requirement is not really all bad. The kids sometimes groan about the requirement – but once they find a book they often settle down with it for some quiet time – away from the ever-dazzling, distracting lure of the web.

Besides – if worse comes to worse – I can always use the requirement to entice students into using our databases to locate ebooks!

Steve Jobs was quoted today on LM_NET in reference Amazon’s new Kindle book reader:

“Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading. ‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.’”
I wonder…. Has he shared this view with Jeff Bezos? I know, I know… Amazon is not just books. They have diversified their inventory. Still – they have done pretty well with books over the years. Truth be told, I have “warm, fuzzy” feelings about Amazon, because it was the first internet business I patronized. As a matter of fact – I patronized it so often that they sent me a thank-you present at the end of the year. Time to let the credit card cool down a little bit =)

If I had only bought stock with them….I’d be retired now, sipping pina coladas under a palm tree.

Anyway – I am always puzzled by statements like this reporting on the decline of reading. Perhaps it is just my community, but every time I go into a public library or Barnes & Noble, they are packed. If all folks wanted was a mocha latte, they’d be hanging out in Starbucks.