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
- Seek out and purchase the books you should be reading
- 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.
- Change your timetable and INSIST that
those around you discover you reading: Do Not
Disturb: Director/Principal is Reading!!!
- 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…
- Book talks – led by you
- Professional Days that focus on your personal love of reading
- Community reading programmes
- Use of technology
Manage
- 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.”
- 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.
- Children AND teachers must have access to good books – school
and classroom libraries
- 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.
