Reading - a whole language perspective

The Gift of Reading

Feel free to quote me or to use this guide

“The single greatest gift we can give our children and/or our students is the gift of reading. There are two reasons for this: 1. No matter how poor, how underprivileged, how shy or how challenged, there is one way that every person can access anyone or anything. That is through reading. 2. Non-readers in Canadian and American schools are doomed to fail. Sadly, even children who might have it in them to become strong readers but who are slow starters are often destined to a similar fate. Our schools are not for children; they are for children who can read. And more and more, they are for children who can read at an early age. ” David Bouchard

John Dewey: “Schools should not be about handing down a collection of static truths to the next generation but about responding to the needs and interests of the students themselves.”

John Goodlad: “Almost everywhere I go, individuals endeavoring to bring about change report that teachers are paying less and less attention to the needs of individual children and more and more to the “standards” being imposed on them.”

 

1. Testing:  We are testing our children too much and we are testing them too often. Standardized tests are too costly, both in terms of money and of time; the time it takes to write, prepare and mark these tests and the time that preparation and testing detract us from our true purpose which is and will always be: to teach. 

Shelly Harwayne (2): “Not so long ago at an airport gift store, I noticed a schoolhouse music box. I couldn’t resist turning the key. It played, “School days, school days, dear old golden rule days. Reading and writing and arithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick…” We may not have actual hickory sticks in our school anymore, but standardized tests are serving the same purposes. In some schools in this country, those tests continue to dictate teaching practices, and there is as much pain and punishment attached to them as to those old hickory sticks. Even in our school where we downplay the yearly plague of tests, we have children who in the not-so-merry month of May complain of stomach cramps and develop asthmatic attacks from which they do not suffer at nontesting times. The teachers who have to administer these exams to children who have only been on this planet seven, eight or nine years, wince as much as if they were witnessing a child being physically abused.”

Alfie Kohn: “All of us with children need to make it our business to understand just how much harm these tests are doing. Every time we judge a school on the basis of a standardized test score – indeed every time we permit our children to participate in these mass testing programmes – we unwittingly help to make our schools just a little worse.”

“The party and even the name of the president don’t seem to matter. Virtually all of Bill Clinton’s lengthy remarks on education in his 1997 State of the Union message could have been delivered by George Bush or even Ronald Reagan…and indeed, the speech reportedly pleased Republican governors. …He framed the task at hand not as enhancing the quality of student learning but as making sure the USA was number one in educational performance. He called for competition among public schools and for rewards and punishments to “motivate” teachers. Most of all, he said that the solution to our educational problems was more testing (Clinton, 1997).”

William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy (3): “Ignore the questions on the paper. Write about what you know best. Give them your best. …These tests are like giving tests in flying to fish. Let’s each of us do what we’re good at doing.”

2. A major concern: What if the children who are being subjected to standardized tests are not, at the age of their being tested, capable of passing them? What if Frank Smith, Alfie Kohn, and Maria Montessori are right?

 Frank Smith (1): “Parents aren’t challenged by the mystery of teaching their children to walk, talk, and read faces, they just have to give them support and a nurturing environment. Reading is simply a matter of looking at print and making sense of it.”

“Why do some people have so much trouble learning to read? 1) They are confronted by reading when it is not the best time for them to learn, just as not everyone learns to play the piano, to swim, or to play chess at the same time. They may be too involved in other things, or trying to recover from some trauma. Learning to read is not necessarily a problem at any age – unless there are years of reading confusion and failure in the past.”

Marlene Barron (4): “Reading is a natural process. Children’s first babbles are a beginning stage of talking. Children’s first scribbles are the beginning of writing. It happens easily and quite naturally. Through these first scribbles children discover that writing is much, much more than just spelling, grammar or penmanship. Writing is expressing ideas and feelings as information on paper. And when they “read” their marks – their writing – back to us, they discover what reading is all about. It is making sense of print. And this sense-making process is much more than just sounding out letters in words.”

David Bouchard: “The act of reading is as natural as the acts of walking and talking. Children learn to recognize words just as they learn to identify faces and objects. There is no rushing a child to walk or to talk or to read. Under the right conditions, children will read when they are ready, and not before. No toy, no programme, or no specialist can rush the process. Children must be given the time, the setting and the care that they require in order to become readers. We are inflicting serious damage onto children by subjecting them to programmes that are meant to teach them to do something that comes naturally. We are force-feeding them before they are ready. And to our shame, we are then labeling them in a way that has life long consequences on many.”

3. The Solution:

Einstein: “Modeling isn’t one way of influencing people. It is the only way.”

Brian, a cab driver in Calgary, Alberta: “I’ve never read a book from cover to cover. I’m not a stupid man. I listen to the Canadian Broadcasting Network (CBC). I read newspapers and such.  Yet when people who read books get into my cab, I always feel less than them. Whose fault is it that I don’t read?”

Einstein: "The Inspired Mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind a faithful servant.  We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the master" 

Administrators:

Model

1. Seek out and purchase the books you should be reading 
   
   
   
2. Set the scene: a reading corner in your office, a good reading light, etc… Re-decorate your workplace. This picture is my principal’s office taken the day I retired.
3. Change your timetable and INSIST that those around you discover you reading: Do Not Disturb: Director/Principal is Reading!!!
4. Once your fire has been lit…spread the flame to parents, educators, and students alike.

Dawn Adams: “Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.”

 

Motivate – You MUST model and more…

1. Book talks – led by you
2. Professional Days that focus on your personal love of reading
3. Community reading programmes
4. Use of technology

Manage

1. Protect children from everything that detracts from the love of reading and that includes the plethora of standardized tests.

• Augustine Birrell: “Reading is not a duty and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.”
• James Cook: “A person who wants to lead the orchestra must be prepared to turn his/her back on the crowd.”
• Einstein: “Whenever mankind has made a fatal mistake, it has never been because of a lack of intelligence but rather a lack of imagination.” 

2. Schools need teacher librarians!

Roch Carrier: “School libraries, which have been weakened by budget cuts in recent years, are the nub of Canada’s illiteracy problem. Restore the strength they had in the 1970s and the whole country would be better off. The state of our school libraries can only be described as desperate in almost every province.”

 

Research in 3300 schools since 1999 shows that the positive impact of school libraries is consistent. Test results are 10-20% higher. (Lance and Loertscher, 2003). Yet, Canada is declining:

• 2% of Ontario elementary schools have a full-time teacher librarian compared to 42% 25 years ago.
• In B.C., teacher librarian positions are written into the collective agreement however, there was over 100 teacher librarian positions cut in the year 2000 alone. Funding in B.C. has been reduced from one for every 400 students to one for every 700 or fewer.
• In 1978, Alberta had 550 teacher librarians that were half time or more. In 1998, that number dropped to 252. In 2000, according to Alberta Learning, they had but 106 teacher librarians remaining. This translates to a provincial ratio of 1 teacher librarian for every 3000 students.

3. Children AND teachers must have access to good books – school and classroom libraries

4. ALL schools should have DEAR time (we are all someone’s hero) and other programmes that highlight reading

Stephen Covey: “It’s easy to say “no” when there’s a deeper “yes” burning inside.”

 

Teachers:

Light your personal reading fires

• William Yeats: “The best of teachers do not fill buckets. They light fires.”
• David Bouchard: “We cannot light fires in the hearts of our children unless we have flames burning in our own.” 

Look for those who look up to you then go out and…

Light their fires – Even if we give our students the skills with which to read and we do not give them the heart, we are doing them an injustice! 

* Mark Twain: “A person who can but who chooses not to read has no advantage over another who cannot read.”

Parents: 

“Childhood should be a journey and not a race!” 

Read

• C.S. Lewis: “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten that is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.”
• Gail Haley: “Children who are not told stories and who are not read to will have few reasons for wanting to learn to read.”

Rule the television

• Stephen Krashen (The Power of Reading): “Television is not the culprit in the literary crisis. The culprit seems to be the absence of good books.”
• E.B.White: “I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world and that on this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television – of that I am quite sure.”
• David Bouchard: “Having a television in our home was like having a sewer pipe that carried the occasional shiny rock dumping into our living room. It wasn’t worth putting up with all the garbage just to get an occasional gem. And worse, TV made no demands on our children’s imaginations. Reading demands that the imagination be in full gear.”

 

Reach Into Your pockets

• Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire): “Show me the money!”

 

 

 

THE ANIMAL SCHOOL:

 

The Administration of the School Curriculum

with References to Individual Differences

 

An excerpt from an address by: Dr. George H. Reavis

Assistant Superintendent Cincinnati Public School

1939-1948

 

Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of " a new world".  So they organized a school.

 

They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming, and flying.  To make it easier to administer the curriculum ALL the animals took ALL the subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming, in fact better than his instructor, but he made only passing grades in flying and was very poor in running.  Since he was slow in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming in order to practice running.  This was kept up until his webfeet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming.  But average was acceptable in school so nobody worried about that except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up work in swimming.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustration in the flying class where his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the tree top down.  He also developed a "charlie horse" from over-exertion and then got C in climbing and D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and was disciplined severely.  In the climbing class he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way to get there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well, and also run, climb, and fly a little, had the highest average and was valedictorian.

 

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum.  They apprenticed their children to a badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school.

Suggested Reading:

 

Frank Smith, Unspeakable Acts – Unnatural Practices  - Flaws and Fallacies in “Scientific” Reading Instruction, Heinemann Publishers

 

Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve – Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards”, Houghton Mifflin Publishers

 

Shelly Harwayne, Going Public – Priorities and Practice at The Manhattan New School, Heinemann Publishers

 

Marlene Barron, I Learn to Read and Write the Way I Learn to Talk – A very first book about Whole Language, Richard C. Owen Publishers

 

Stephen Krashen, The Power of Reading – Insights from the Research, Libraries Unlimited, Inc.

 

Charles Ungerleider, Failing our Kids – How We are Ruining our Public Schools, McClelland & Stewart Publishers

 

William Nicholson, The Wind Singer – from the British YA trilogy Wind on Fire, Mammoth Publishers

 

 

(1)   Frank Smith – Ph. D. from Harvard. World travel researching, lecturing and writing on thinking and learning. Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE); the University of Toronto; the University of Victoria, B.C.; The University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. Author of many articles and books, including, Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices, Insult to Intelligence, Between Hope and Havoc, Essays into Literacy, and Joining the Literacy Club.

(2)   ) Shelly Harwayne - More than thirty years with the New York City public schools as a teacher, staff developer, co director of the Teachers College writing project, principal, superintendent, and author of several books including Going Public.

(3)   William Nicholson – Two Oscar Award nominations for the screenplays of Shadowlands and Gladiator. The author of the Smarties Award winning trilogy Wind on Fire. If you love children, you will read this series.

(4) Marlene Barron – Head of School at New York City’s West Side Montessori School. President of the Board of the American Montessori Society. On the faculty of New York University. Author of I Learn to Read and Write the Way I Learn to Talk.