Plunging Standards: Why Students Don't Even Know The Word "Canon"

Okay, so the new craze sweeping the teaching profession is to let students pick their own reading material. Oi vey.

As a professor, I already get enough students who have sub-par reading skills -- I really don't want to see more. I also see too many (college-educated) adult friends of mine who read virtually nothing past a sixth-grade reading level (Harry Potter, anyone?). If we keep on dropping the bar on students, soon they're not going to read anything complex or challenging until grad school (if they get there).

Quite simply, they won't be prepared to be the type of citizen who can weigh options when voting or participate in the arts.

I know the NYT article was talking about junior high, but it's all a pyramid, and elementary schools lowering their standards for reading drops the standard for junior high, and lowering junior high standards drops high school levels, and lowering high school levels leaves me with students in college who are so unable to interact with language that it's obvious the university is only trying to turn a profit.

And this parsing between junk and worse junk is hilarious:

"Despite the student freedom, Ms. Atwell constantly fed suggestions to the children. She was strict about not letting them read what she considered junk: no “Gossip Girl” or novels based on video games. But she acknowledged that certain children needed to be nudged into books by allowing them to read popular titles like the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer."

Catherine E. Snow, quoted in the article, says:

“But if the goal is, how do you make kids lifelong readers, then it seems to me that there’s a lot to be said for the choice approach."

Notice how low the bar has dropped. Now it's not about teaching how to read, but just getting anyone (anyone! please!) to scan words for the rest of their lives. Twelve years of mandatory education, with millions going through sixteen years, and our goal is only to make lifelong readers? Please. Teachers: you need to have a bit more self-respect. You need to be just the tiniest bit more ambitious.

Another way at getting at the problem: The teacher (who can't read ALL the books her students pick) has no additional insight to offer to the student.

In other words, once again, this style of teaching encourages reading as a medium of communication, but doesn't teach how to read well, because the teacher can't point out anything her students didn't notice.

I suggest a different motivator than the "choice approach" Catherine E. Snow seems to find so efficacious. What about teaching students about the mysteries inside books? What about teaching them to see that what they read was only a small fraction of what was there? What about treating books as treasures that can be mined again and again, full of secrets and surprises?

Because that type of teaching not only promotes literature, but also would seem to be a pretty great motivator.

Comments

[Flower Cannon]

this depresses me. I'm currently a college student studying fiction. I've been lucky enough to have wonderful professors and wonderful fiction classes, in all of which we've been assigned reading I would not have picked up myself - and I mostly consider myself a discerning student who chooses quality literature to read on her down time. Without my professor last year, I would never have read House of the Sleeping Beauties by Kawabata or Motorman by Ohle! and so even for a student who does choose her own reading (albeit on her sparetime..), a class would lose its color and vivacity and discussion and uniqueness if a teacher didn't assign books. maybe, as a sort of compromise, a teacher could take recommendations? but even then, the bar is being lowered and the chance to open a student's minds to new books is being lost.

[G]

This actually blows my mind.

I've been a voracious reader ever since I could remember, and when I was in high school, we were assigned books that at least encouraged discussion (The Good Earth, MacBeth, Of Mice and Men).

This just smacks of "oh look, let's not hurt the child's self esteem by making him/her think while reading".

[Pipedreamergrey]

*Applause*

[Brent]

I sort of like this approach, actually. I wonder if kids need a bit of freedom to learn to like reading itself, before they are forced to read things. You could argue that they should do this on their own, but do they? And especially if they don't have reading modeled to them by anyone they value. Perhaps junior high is too late, though. Perhaps this is better done earlier?

[BookFox]

I think it's better done in small measure, perhaps as a summer requirement, rather than as the umbrella concept for English class. I'm not 100% against the concept of having kids choose their own books, just 90% against it.

In other words, most of the time the kids should be guided through literature, and then, on occasion, cut them loose and let them pick any book they want to read from a long list.

I think that if used in small measure, the desire and fun created while reading what you want to read will actually fuel the required reading list.

The problem is adopting this free-for-all as a steady pedagogic tactic.

[Richard]

I first read Nancie Atwell's first book in a Teaching Writing class at Teachers College, Columbia, in the fall of 1988. It was taught by Lucy McCormick Calkins, who was also mentioned in the article and wrote some really good books on teaching writing to children (she basically created the current NYC reading program).

I'd taken the course because although I'd taught college writing and lit classes for 13 years at that time (going on 35 years now), I had gotten a grant from the NY State Council on the Arts and was going to be teaching kids from third grade to junior high for several months.

There's something to be said for the kind of rigid curriculum I got as a kid in the 1960s. Even as a poli sci major in college, I got a really broad, deep knowledge of English and American and world literature due to core curriculum requirements at my college (Brooklyn, cited recently as one of six colleges with the best core curricula).

I find a lot of younger writers, some of them famous, haven't really read Shakespeare, Greek drama, Dante, Chaucer, and all the stuff I was given - not to mention the kind of 18th, 19th and 20th century lit I got in the 1960s and 1970s.

But of course I was in high school and reading excitedly then exciting new writers who, in the way we spoke back then, blew my mind: Vonnegut, Coover, Farina, Pynchon, Brautigan. And I read best seller novels by people like James Michener. But I was the type of kid who loved books.

As a law school administrator, I used to deal with students in academic difficulty. In our counseling sessions, a lot of them would tell me that they "hated reading" - the same thing my first-year comp students have been saying since, oh, the mid-1980s. This was once new to me. Everyone I knew read. My brothers and parents, who didn't go to college, were/are avid readers.

At this point my expectations are low. I'm just happy that anyone reads anything. So I basically applaud the article, though obviously I think a mix of a required curriculum and free choice works.

This is NOT a new idea. See John Holt's 1966ish article "How English Teachers Make Students Hate Reading," often reprinted in first-year comp essay anthologies like The Norton Reader.