I should add that the fireman now reads for pleasure so at least some of my efforts were not wasted. If I were doing it again, I would not have a TV in the house. I don’t watch it myself and might have had trouble getting my wife to agree but that would be the best suggestion I could come up with.

I have also looked at my youngest daughter’s curriculum at U of Arizona and am appalled but that is another story.

As all 4th grade teachers today know – because they are the experts in the classroom working with kids – reading skills are on a dramatic decline. We reading and writing teachers have tried to come up with a way to get young readers actively engaged in reading books to develop critical thinking and writing skills, not necessarily to merely ‘read for pleasure’. Reading for pleasure is definitely important – but today’s students generally do this when reading on the internet, gaming instructions, or favorite websites that follow their interests (sports). While this is great –they simply do NOT read books. Their parents do not read books or newspapers or magazines. Books are not valued anymore. The culture our children grow up in is an electronic one with a lot of reading, a lot of visual representations and a lot of instant information readily available. The near future will give them broad access to electronic books –that’s for sure a good thing because at least literature has a chance for an electronic renaissance. The paper print culture is over. Take a look at the publishing industry data to confirm the fact that a very small, elite audience exists for printed books, especially literature. It will seem bizarre to our grandchildren that the news was actually printed on paper and delivered to our homes everyday.

Yet schools are still bound to printed textbooks across the curriculum – even the fourth grade curriculum will have many printed texts to be covered. How do we teach students to read for a purpose – a coming test, a report to write, or an analysis of any text assigned? We teach them the ways that the good readers know how to read for a purpose. Literature remains a great vehicle for teaching students to learn the language of good, critical reading. This is what the wonderful 4th grade student was doing so well – she was showing the way she can connect to the text. Good for her.

What was missed in your commentary here is the knowledge that very few students read actively. Very few students know what to say (ergo think – write) about a text other than “It made me sad”, “It was funny”, “She was sad”, “He was angry”. This should be the ‘ghastly terminology’ we need to worry about. It is a disservice to allow students to go through the curriculum responding emotionally to texts because this is the opposite of disciplined, critical thinking. I would say that this “feel good” approach to teaching students how to engage in printed texts is akin to the “feel good” politics that got us in the political mess we are now in. The days of the ‘touch feely” and ‘whole language acquisition of literature’ are over because they failed, the students failed and the world found out students were graduating elementary, middle and high school without the reading and writing skills needed for even modest success in college or the workplace.

This is why NCLB came to be and still exists. Phonics and direct instruction are back and in a big way, especially in urban schools. Balanced literacy is the approach you ran into with your 4th grader – a belief that we can teach students to learn the language of what good readers and writers just know how to do instinctively. Yes, it sounds awkward to you, a good reader. Yes, it’s different. But it is a genuine effort to give students a chance to get into printed texts in a culture that does not provide them with any other models. Text to self, text to others, text to world. This is the formula for teaching students what to WRITE about in the body paragraphs that follow a thesis statement. What you call ‘ghastly terminology’ is really a way to give non-reading students topic sentences for the paragraphs they will write in essays or book reports. Why should we continue to let only good readers and writers know how to do this well without the script? Why can’t we let all children have a chance to learn these skills?

You must take my word for this – other than making emotional connections to texts in endless ways, students are entering college in droves (even the BEST colleges, I assure you – look up MIT and Harvard: remedial writing) without the knowledge that they have to make more analytical, critical connections to texts beyond retelling the plot and talking about how it made them feel. Unless they plan on becoming speech writers for the powers that be right now – or unless they plan on being herded around like sheeple into supporting politicians they vote for to just ‘feel good’ – they will do poorly as workers or citizens in a world that cries out for good critical thinkers, now more than ever. It is certain that they will not be able to persuade others with good critical arguments because they never learned how to do anything in school but react emotionally to the texts they encountered there.

“cultural competence” from educational, and medical education, literature. Not necessarily a bad concept, just such a jargony term

’tis true, terms like “kanban” can be used to mystify and impress…but used properly, can be useful shorthands…easier to say “kanban” than “the card that means gimme some more of this stuff.”

Whereas for much educational jargon, it’s hard to imagine any purpose other than obfuscation.

You gave a pass to the term ‘kanban’ but I think it, along with “sensei”, “kaizen”, “hoshi kanri”, “kaikaku” and a bunch of others, is quite often used by lean ‘authorities for the same reason the left is bombarding us with their newspeak – that is to cover up ignorance, or to mask a lousy idea. If your point is valid, and you know what you are talking about, you should be able to explain it is plain English. If you are on shaky ground, however, techspeak, tossing in a few foreign words, or convoluted newspeak can give you an aura of wisdom you don’t deserve. The old “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, then baffle ‘em with …”

And I am enjoying the comments. ElamBend’s “random” story is very funny.

Students in New York City (and other cities) are subjected to Balanced Literacy. Balanced Literacy is all about “strategies” (including these various “connections”). Any study of literature occurs on the periphery.

Hence the lunchtime club.

Nope. It is a book about a whale.

Coercive ‘edjumacaters’ inculcating their viewpoint whether you like it or not. They all thought they were so ‘creative’ in their interpretations.
Bah humbug.
tom

Luckily, I shave my head, so I don’t have to deal with the instructions on shampoo bottles.

Just to clarify: the book is indeed A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I, too, loved it as a child and love it still, and no, I was not teaching it in a “socialist realist” way.

The girl made an observation about the beggar girl. It was one of her favorite passages. I am not one to pound social justice themes. And I never encourage the use of terms like “text-to-self connection,” much less “self-to-self connection.”

When discussing the book I have pointed to various beautiful passages, and students often come in with their own observations and concerns.

The club meets once a week, over lunch. It’s the best we can do.

It is an opportunity for them to discuss literature for its own sake (as opposed to “reading strategies”).

Diana Senechal

The assignment had been to read a selective short piece and discuss it. At this time, the word ‘random’ was just coming into favor to relate something being odd or weird or unexpected. However, for this particular session we must of heard the word used 30 times for a multitude of uses. It was if the other students entire vocabulary of adjectives and adverbs had been replaced by the word random and each time someone else uttered the word, it would send my friends and I into new fits of giggling we attempted to hide.

The Teaching Assistant never asked any of the students to better elaborate or to stop using the word, but we all received dirty looks for our giggling. We chose another comp class.

Perhaps it’s unconnected to the discussion above, but the memory always stuck with me. Most of the students likely went to much better high schools than mine, but they were trapped by their desire to avoid speaking plainly.

Glad you finally got out of the infinite loop.

My career in HVAC wholesale distribution is tough, but I have to admit I like it. The equipment quoted will either work, or it will not. It costs “x”. If the equipment fails, you get sued, or have to do the job over at zero cost to the customer. Things are pretty black and white.

I am from Rockford, IL originally, a place where people say exactly what they mean for the most part. When I moved to Madison, WI, I couldn’t figure out what the hell people were saying for the msot part. Still can’t. At work though, people still spoke, and speak, “my language”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Princess

from the wiki: “The novella appears to have been inspired in part by Charlotte Brontë’s unfinished novel, Emma, the first two chapters of which were published in Cornhill Magazine in 1860, featuring a rich heiress with a mysterious past who is apparently abandoned at a boarding school.[1]

The thread of the book is evident in the novella, in which Sara Crewe is left at Miss Minchin’s, loses her father, is worked as a drudge, and is surprised with the kindness of an Indian gentleman who turns out to be Captain Crewe’s friend. However, at just over one-third the length of the later book, the novella is much less detailed.”

A Little Princess, the one I loved as child, is quite a charming book. As I said, I loved it as a girl, and it would never have occurred to me to read it in the way depicted in the link above. It’s actually a bit old-fashioned, I thought, but I read it in the seventies/eighties and it’s from a serialization from the 1880s, I believe.

Worst of all, I followed the links five times before I figure something was wrong…