National Merit Scholarships

The New York Times on how the University of Oklahoma, as well as other universities, court National Merit winners.  The article is here .   National Merit winners are the high school juniors who score well on the Preliminary SAT exam.

I have paid attention for years to the kids who win these scholarships.  I can't remember one who wasn't an avid reader.

E-Readers for the Elderly

The New York Times, in “The Gift of Reading” in its New Old Age Blog, describes research that shows that elderly readers read a lighted e-book faster than they do a newspaper. The e-book benefits are substantial, especially the ability to increase the font, and to light the screen. The article is here:   And here is my comment on it:

My plea to Apple and other makers of e-readers is that they put out a version that is very, very easy to use--no small knobs, no tiny places to touch on the screen, a screen that doesn't all of a sudden jump away from the book, a good light.

My mother loved to read, and in the few years before her death at 92, I searched all of the libraries in the area to find large print books. A really easy e-reader would have been a Godsend, but there is no way that she could have managed the e-readers available now. She couldn't even work a CD player--I had to put all of her favorite music on tapes. And even working the tape player became hard.

There are enough of us boomers that, in a few years, I imagine there will be a huge market for an e-reader for the elderly.

Bad Reviews of Great Authors

The Huffington Post has an amusing article titled "Bad Reviews Of Great Authors: 9 Scathing Insults" here.  I was amused because the majority of my students would have agreed with most of these insults.  Here is my comment on the article:

I think the point here isn't whether or not these criticisms are justified, but why a certain few books have been glorified and stuck in a high school curriculum for all students to read.

As a high school English teacher for 35 years, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to teach Gatsby. "Tried" is the operative word here. A few students will love it; many more will be indifferent; a few will actively hate it. 

Finally, I started teaching just short parts of required books, and assigning the students to find authors of their own that they could easily love. My classroom became flooded with exciting, wonderful authors--many of whom I didn't know at all. We all started reading like crazy.

I really think that the insistence on class-assigned reading of the canon is a major reason that SAT scores--all reading scores, really--have remained static or dropped over the years.

Gap Between Business Needs and Skills

Forbes Magazine has an interesting article titled "Growing Gap Between What Business Needs and What Education Provides" here.  The article describes the frustration many businessmen feel in trying to find employees who have a skill set that matches the needs of their company.  Here is my comment on it:

I still think the major two skills are excellent reading and writing skills. Then, when job requirements change, the worker can educate himself and keep up to date.

Currently only about 7 percent of high school graduates have advanced reading skills, and this has stayed consistent over the last forty years. This impacts their learning of all other skills, including writing skills.

Schools are stuck in their old ways of teaching a so-called canon of literature that simply turns off the majority of students.

Young Latino Readers

A New York Times article called  For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing, here, makes the point that few books for children feature Latino kids, even though the Latino percent of the public school population is large.  I was shocked at many of the comments, which said, essentially, so what?  People wrote in saying that they didn't need characters that reflected them to enjoy reading.

I think avid readers can enjoy almost any kind of literature, but my experience has been that children who are just coming to reading need to read about characters they can, in some way, identify with.  Here is my comment on that article:

As a high school English teacher for 35 years, I rarely saw Hispanic avid readers and, by high school, it is the avid readers who are the excellent students. I think if we had more series books (it's series books that develop avid readers) that featured Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American youngsters we would go a long way towards raising reading scores.

Better readers can enjoy a wide variety of books, but I found that when my students were just starting to enjoy reading, the books they most liked were ones that, in some way or another, illuminated their own lives. I could usually get black students reading with the Spenser books by Robert Parker because they loved reading about Hawk, the great black character. They also loved the Terry McMillan books. 

But by high school it's late to get kids reading. We could do it earlier with high interest series books, with characters and settings, that better reflected the lives of our children.

Making Money on the Common Core Standards

A Washington Post article, "America’s next education ‘crisis’ — and who benefits" here details how much money companies are planning to make developing materials to teach the new common core standards.   Here is my comment on it:

I taught very high-achieving high school students in one of the best districts in Massachusetts, which is the state that regularly scores in the top one or two spots for the country. So I had some of the very best students in the country in my English classes and, indeed, they regularly went on to all of the top colleges. 
 
Were these students who had spent a great deal of time studying for tests and learning skills? No way. These were kids who loved to read and who had a wide variety of independent intellectual interests. They hated the very little bit of test prep that we did with them before the state assessment tests. 
 
We will never get a country of high-achieving kids if we reduce school to skill-training and test prep. Students acquire sophisticated skills through wide reading and through a passionate interest in various subject matters. Skill training and test prep drive out the possibility of this happening. 

Keeping Kids Reading:  How to Raise Avid Readers in the Video Age.

Updated and Revised

I've just uploaded the revised edition of Keeping Kids Reading.  It's available on Amazon right now, and will be available on the other e-bookstores soon--although Barnes and Noble has been taking a very long time to get books into their catalogue.

This is my personal favorite of all of the books that I've written, because it is the one that is most filled with the voices of my students.  My goal was to figure out the reading paths that avid readers followed.  Do girls who read teenage romances go on to read Danielle Steel?   Or do they branch out to more complex literature?  How about boys who read only science fiction?  What do they read by the time they are in high school?

I think you'll be interested, and surprised, by some of the answers.  I identify a number of reading paths that my students took, as well as certain reading "hooks" that drew them into books.  For example, humor was almost a universal hook.  If you're looking for a book to give a child, and you're not sure what kind of reading the child likes, you're safest getting a book that is comic.  It's why authors like Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling are so widely loved.

I also spend some time talking about how to get kids writing, as writing and reading are so closely intertwined.   It's interesting to me that just as certain children prefer certain kinds of books (relationship, good versus evil, etc.) children also have their own style of writing.  Kids who are very visual, for example, are much more likely to use imagery and description in their writing, while kids who are very verbal are likely to use irony and dislogue.

As always, I would love to hear any comments or suggestions.  It's an exciting time to be looking at books for kids, as--with the availability of e-books--the field seems to be rapidly changing.