The Book Whisperer (15 page)

In addition to the tips I mentioned in the preceding section, I find it important to share my reading challenges with my students. When I read
The Time Traveler's Wife
with my book club, I talked with my students about how challenging the book was for me to read. I enjoyed it tremendously, but the shifts between narrators and the setting changes made it hard for me to follow. I revealed how I had to slow down my reading pace and focus on the details more than I would have with a chronological narrative. They were surprised to learn that I, too, experience difficulties when reading.

Share with your students what you enjoy about the books you read, what makes them hard for you, and what strategies you use to get through challenging reading material. Students feel inadequate when they have to struggle. Knowing about your reading challenges can help boost their self-esteem. I have seen teachers “fake model” the experience of having reading obstacles with their students while guiding them through test practices. Students know that a teacher does not struggle through a fifth-grade-level reading passage, and faking it only serves to lessen their trust. It's better to be honest.

Standing off to the side and telling students to read doesn't work for most of them. How are they supposed to become readers if they don't have any models to emulate? Remember that you are the best reader in the room, the master reader. Embrace that, and wear your reading love proudly in front of your students every day. The reality is that you cannot inspire others to do what you are not inspired to do yourself.

—Augustine Birrell

—Christina

 

 

I
N THE FALL OF 2007, the National Institutes of Health awarded $30 million to four research centers—the University of Colorado at Boulder, Florida State University, the University of Houston, and Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute—in an Houston, and Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute—in an attempt to uncover why reading interest declines and ability dips as students approach adolescence (Samuels, 2007). While I cannot fully explain this demotivation or why it happens to so many children, I can tell you who to ask about it: the children themselves.

Over the course of my teaching career, students have told me consistently that reading as it is traditionally taught and assessed actually encourages them to hate reading. My student Skylar told me during a conference, “What makes reading painful is when it takes longer to do reading worksheets about a book than to actually
read
a book.” And Dana shared her previous experiences in fifth grade: “Every day we would read a chapter of a book and spend the rest of the day either discussing [it] or doing worksheets. When book reports came around, I read the book in two days and finished the book report by the end of the week. We still had to work on it two weeks later, and I had nothing to do.”

Reading has become schoolwork, not an activity in which students willingly engage outside of school. Teachers tie so many strings to reading that students never develop a pleasurable relationship to reading inside or, regrettably, beyond the classroom. Referring to the endless activities piled onto reading books in school, my student Jordan writes, “I want to scream, this doesn't help us!”

My principal often asks us, his teaching staff, to examine traditional practices and question whether these practices are what educational policy leader Richard Elmore calls “unexamined wallpaper”—classroom practices and institutional policies that are so entrenched in school culture or a teacher's paradigm that their ability to affect student learning is never probed. Are the activities and assessments we use accomplishing our intended instructional goals, or are they simply what we have always done?

As I mentioned in Chapter Three, whenever I encounter a practice that is widespread in reading classes, I consider what the goal of the practice is and then look at ways to reposition the practice so that it is more motivating to my students and more in line with my personal beliefs about reading and the habits and skills shown by life readers, not just school readers.

Let's unpack some of the tried-and-true (they have definitely been tried, but are they really true?) language arts standbys and examine their intended learning goals. In addition, let's consider alternatives that accomplish the same goals but are more in keeping with the habits of true readers and what matters most to students.

—B. F. Skinner

Teachers build elaborate units of instruction around novels, breaking down a text into discrete concepts for closer study. If you are a new teacher, you might feel that your best hope for survival is that some wiser teacher will share these Rosetta Stones that decipher how you are supposed to teach reading, complete with all of the activities you need to “get students through” books. If you do not have a mentor teacher to feed you lesson plans, you need look no further than your local teacher supply store, where a wall of prepackaged novel units awaits you.

Some schools and school districts create lists of required novels for each grade level. These lists are revered as sacred law despite the fact that you cannot find a single national standard that requires students to read specific texts.

Teaching whole-class novels does not create a society of literate people. Take a poll of your friends and relatives (those who did not become teachers), and ask them how they feel about the books they read in high school. Now, ask them how much they still read. In the
Phi Delta Kappan
article “Farewell to
A Farewell to Arms:
Deemphasizing the Whole-Class Novel,” Douglas Fisher and Gay Ivey question the widespread use of whole-class novels in reading classes, claiming, “Students are not reading more or better as a result of the whole-class novel. Instead, students are reading less and are less motivated, less engaged, and less likely to read in the future.”

If reading a book together as a class doesn't improve students' reading ability or enjoyment of reading, what is the purpose of this practice? Some teachers assert that it is critical to expose students to great literature (think John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne) as part of their cultural heritage. How else can we motivate teenagers to read these authors on their own?

I don't disagree with this goal, in theory; after all, I had to smile when my teenage daughter, after reading
The Crucible
, referred to Salem in a joke. But is the ability to generate a pithy literary reference all she got from reading Arthur Miller's play? Reading historically and culturally significant literature enhances readers' background knowledge, to be sure, but at what cost? My teenager only reads the books she prefers in the summer because she is burdened with required reading during the school year. Consuming a literary diet built exclusively on the classics does not provide students with the opportunity to investigate their own personal tastes in reading material and narrows their perspective of reading to the school task of hyper-analyzing literature. There needs to be a balance between the need to teach students about literature and the need to facilitate their growth as life readers. What about the greater goal of encouraging students to read when the time for dissecting classics ends?

Indoctrination into the classic literary canon supersedes all other aims for the readers in our classrooms, it seems. Teachers can always point to a few students who love these classics, but I argue that they are a minority or that few
become future readers
as a result. Why would they? Every student that moves through our classes is not destined to become an English literature major, and we cannot gear our teaching as if they were. Using whole-class novel units as the primary method of delivering reading instruction has inherent problems. Witnessing these problems in my own class and others, and listening to the complaints my students have shared about whole-class novel units has led me to these truths:

Yes, students benefit from the deep analysis of literature that a thorough look at one book provides, but there needs to be a balance between picking a book apart to examine its insides and experiencing the totality of what a book offers. There are other paths to teaching critical analysis and reading skills than belaboring one book for weeks. Let's not lose sight of our greater goal: inspiring students to read over the long haul.

My first suggestion on the topic of whole-class novels would be to evaluate whether you are truly required to read certain texts with your students or whether this is just a tradition. When your department has invested budget money and time in a closetful of whole-class novel sets, it is hard to break away from the entrenched attitude that reading the same book across the grade level is the best instruction for students.

If your school district, language arts department, or school culture requires you to read certain texts with your students, look for ways to provide support to students who may not be able to read the book on their own, and limit the amount of time spent reading the book.

Some ways to compromise:

I cannot deny that there are merits to reading one book with an entire class of students: the text serves as an example for the skills and knowledge you are teaching; you create a common literacy experience to which you can make future connections; and reading a book together fosters community among your students and you. The balancing act involves looking for methods that honor these goals while removing the factors that make the whole-class novel a detrimental practice for students.