Letting Children Go

A Motherlode blog in the New York Times here has a column by a doctor about how he keeps in contact with this four adult children who are in college and graduate school.  Most of the comments suggested he was too much of a helicopter parent.  He does things like requiring that they call each other at least once a week.  A lot of the comments are pretty funny.

It's always hard letting go--letting children go and now, for us, letting grandchildren go.  I've always loved that poem by Kahil Gibran:  "Your children are not your children . . . "

Our reward is watching our children, and their familie, be strong and independent--and freely give us love back, without any demands or guilt-trips from us.

Girls and Education

The Huffington Post has an article here describing how many girls world-wide lack access to even a basic education.  It's really shocking.  The article goes on to describe how that holds a society back.

I used to teach The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to my high school English classes.  That book (which is free as an e-book on Amazon) is a passionate, poignant account of how he taught himself to read and write, and how that changed his life.  When he lived, it was against the law for slaves to be taught how to read.

Being literate empowers people, especially now with the Internet and e-books available through cell phones.  Having girls and women able to access this wealth of information must be incredibly destabilizing for cultures built around their subjugation.  But it will happen.  Girls will learn to read.  I'd love to be alive a hundred years from now, and see the social changes this will drive.

Common Core Curriculum

Ed Week has an article titled  A Happy Tale From a Common-Core Classroom  by Lyn Caddaday here.  She talks about how the common core has shown her how to greatly improve her classroom teaching of high school English.  In my view, her report is undercut by the note at the bottom of the article stating that she works for publishers who are writing, and selling,  Common Core curriculum.

I’m glad that Ms. Cannaday is having success in her classroom.  Here’s my worry:

I taught high school English as well, for thirty-seven years.  What I found—the elephant in the living room if you will--is that assigned reading like this drives out all other reading.  In addition,  few students (and I had many, many excellent students) do all of the assigned reading—or even most of it.  They dip into it here and there, and listen to class discussions.  They may even go on the Internet and read summaries.  But the actual amount of reading they are doing is small.

I’m sure she can have interesting discussions with her students.  I just don’t think a few essays and All Quiet will substantially improve her students’ reading skills—although selling the curriculum will surely improve the bottom line of her employers, Scholastic and Student Achievement Partners.

Professor Stephen Krashen, of UCLA, is adamant that the research shows that teaching skills is just testing skills;  kids acquire skills through wide, avid reading.   The kind of curriculum that Ms. Canndaday advocates does little to develop a love of reading in students.  Actually,  it will drive most students away from books.

The only way that students acquire sophisticated reading, and thinking, skills is by forming a habit and love of reading.   That’s what schools should focus on.  Interview the top SAT scorers.  You’ll find they are all avid readers.

SAT Scores and College

The New York Times Choice blog here discusses the option some colleges offer of applying without submitting SAT scores.  Some students just feel tests shouldn't be used, but most who don't send scores have taken the SAT and are not happy with the result.  The blog discusses the pros and cons of not sending scores:

There is another option low-testing students can take, and that is to become an avid reader—of anything!—at least a year before taking the SAT.

As a high school English teacher for 37 years, I saw again and again that the high-scoring students were the avid readers.  The kids who thought they were “poor testers” were almost always students who worked hard and were bright, but read only what they had to for class. 

A remember one year a parent asked me to coach her daughter so she could get into Stanford with mediocre SAT scores.  It was a boarding school, and I simply got her daughter reading—bodice-ripper romances as I remember.  She read all the time. Within a year her verbal score had risen a hundred points, and she was admitted.

I don’t think many people understand that sophisticated reading skills are a result of falling in love with books, and forming a habit of reading

Are Teachers Ready for the Common Core Standards

Ed Week reports on a survey here that showed nearly half of the teachers felt they were not prepared to teach the Common Core Standards.

The real issue is whether or not the common core standards are appropriate—not whether or not teachers can teach them.  Here is a the 4^th grade language arts one:

“CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.7 Make connections between the text of a story or drama and a visual or oral presentation of the text, identifying where each version reflects specific descriptions and directions in the text.”

Oh please.  Nine-year-olds need to be avidly reading books they love, not being dragged through exercises like this that will be tedious, difficult, and boring for them.  The research showing that children acquire sophisticated reading skills only through wide reading—not through skill exercises—is overwhelming. 

I spent a lot of time interviewing my top 12^th grade students.  They hated skill exercises and avoided them at all costs.  No way did they acquire their advanced reading skills by doing the kind of dog and pony shows these standards are advocating.  No, they just fell in love with books and read everything they could get their hands on.