Why John Still Can't Read...

dont expect to ever find one in a school, as they have been transformed into "media centers" with ever fewer books in them. City libraries are going the same way, and are also closing or cutting back services as they increasingly are not funded.

In another thread you will see that Borders is expected to file bankruptcy in the next day or so, and close about a third of their stores....

These are not good times for people who believe that reading is important.

I would suppose there's truth in that. I am inclined to believe the challenge lies in how to produce the desire to use the imagination. Reading provides so well for that, but how to best expose the kid.
I'm not sure the material makes as much difference as the subject matter.
Once a kid catches on they'll seek thier own level.
How do we show a kid the independence that reading can provide? Is it even possible for everyone to enjoy that kind of independence?

I am not seeing any lack for fantasy lives, but I am seeing a lot of lack of education. I don't think that there is a substitute for vocabulary, and reading is very difficult to replace.

I was really upset to read about Borders a while back, I just love that place.
The cost is becoming prohibitive to any but diehard collectors. Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks were 15$ when I was there at x-mas, kinda puts a damper on it.

There is a particular use of the imagination in reading which I think is quite different than the modern fantasy. It's one thing to imagine Africa from ones reading, quite another to fantasize about it. The imagination I mean, is the learning one, the one that develops and grows. I think that's the grabber that makes lifetime readers. Vocabulary follows naturally if you can get that started.

Two habits I never expected to go away were having a cable news channel on the TV and spending hours at the bookstore going through books . Both are gone now. Barnes and Noble sped up the process greatly when they got rid of most of their chairs. It was never as good as going to an independent used to be but it was tolerable until they forced me to be uncomfortable.

Now I read my library, or buy from Amazon. My girls and my wife all have kindles.

A few years ago our new and used bookstore closed, now I've got to go to Wichita. Add to that the dearth of new writers worth reading, the increased cost of the old books. I look for books everywhere, our library is tiny, but I seem to be just able to keep a couple ahead. I guess the world has moved on.
I may have to get a Kindle myself, and some glasses too, (sigh)
Garage sales can be productive.

I would suggest that gungasnaKKKe and his extreme right-wing loony compatriot Sam Blumenfeld, who wrote the silly article he cited, sit down and watch a week of "Sesame Street", and then report back. Hint: it's all about the phonics. "Today's program is brought to you by the letter 'S'". Further hint: it's government-subsidized, which you hate. It came out of the War on Poverty, which you hate. It's on PBS, which you foam at the mouth about. AND IT TEACHES PHONICS AND IT HAS GIVEN TWO GENERATIONS OF KIDS A LEG UP ON READING BY THE TIME THEY GET TO KINDERGARTEN. So much for the gunga crapola.

You are absolutely correct. I began reading to my kids when the oldest was 6 months old. We looked at picture books together at first. I would point to the pictures and say the words. Then I began reading the stories. She taught herself to read at 3 and 1/2. Today, she is a Spanish and French teacher.

I teach remedial and college writing at a community college. All of my colleagues would love to see diagramming returned to public schools.

Today, we have to teach students that the subject of a sentence is never the object of a preposition. If they diagrammed, they would never think that.

Most of the educational reform that took place from the 80s on centered on the idea that there are different learning styles.

For once, I agree with you. Although economic stability is not as important as vocabulary and respect for learning and the written word. While my mother did not read out loud to my brothers and me, she walked with us to the bookmobile every week so that we always had plenty to read. She read as well.

What is sad is that the size of kids' vocabularies is shrinking.

the first time i ever skipped school (grade 3) was to go the library

reading in the home is important, our family were big readers, i could read when i went to kindergarten

i still read, but i know folks who basically have never read a book since being assigned ones in high school (some 30 years ago now), i wonder how their kids made out in school

I'm not certain what you mean by dumbed down. I posted a thread about the death of children's author Brian Jacques. Now, his books were not the intellectual highlights of the 20th C., but the Redwall books were set in the High Middle Ages, a favorite historical period for children that invites the study of history.

Jacques, who was born in the 1930s, had a father who loved reading. The Jacques family admired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose work is a favorite for kids from the fifth grade up; Edgar Rice Burroughs, who consciously imitated and responded to pulp fiction, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Doyle and Stevenson demand a solid ability to read and a significant vocabulary. I have no experience with Burroughs.

However, the common denominator in this list is adventure. During the 1960s, I read an interview with a symphony conductor (sorry, do not remember which one) who was asked if he allowed his own kids to listen to the then still controversial rock and roll. He said yes, because the aim is to get them to listen to music. They will move to more sophisticated music by listening and understanding music.

Well, time has proved that rock musicians are often among the most sophisticated but if kids start reading basic books, they will develop a reading habit. The answer is to do what my mother did: walk kids to the bookmobile/library. And to read them as I did.

Youre talking among colleagues on the subject of ""diagrmming" . You have to instill in the kids heads that there is some kind of use for this besides something to make the teachers feel secure.
I too always wondered what the hell were we wasting time on diagramming?
Im sure I learned omlex senetence and thought structure from a combination of listening to my english and german neighbors and from reading what the great authors had to say (I wonder whether Rudyard Kipling ever digrammed a sentence).

What I am pointing out is that the education that took place in the 80s was quite effective as evidenced by the accomplishments of the people it produced. The education of the 70s was also effective, as was the education of the 60s.

In each of these generations were people, just like people here, griping about how the American education system was failing.

I mostly agree with this, but I think there are still better and worse ways of teaching. I think that there is an eternal search for the silver bullet, and education is just way too messy and variable and complicated for there to be any single silver bullet.

As someone who wanted to be a teacher, someone who got a master's degree in teaching, and then someone with a school-age child, I've followed educational trends closely for over 20 years. What I've become convinced of overall is that individual gifted teachers are the answer -- and are very, very hard to select for.

A gifted teacher or small group of teachers can come up with a pedagogy that seems to work fantastically well, and is then hailed as a silver bullet. But then when that same pedagogy is exported to less-gifted teachers -- perfectly adequate, not-bad teachers, who just don't have that spark of inspiration, the art to go along with the science -- then it doesn't work as well. And the pedagogy is blamed rather than the implementation.

But I do think that there are better and worse ways to teach, and that it's not pointless to strive for better ways.




This I agree with very strongly.

This just isn't universally true. My kid's school has a computer room, and then also a very well-stocked library. She brings home four books a week from the school library, and I've been pretty impressed with them.

I'm sorry you two here are so negative about diagramming. Perhaps, you would prefer the system used in Montessori Schools, where symbols are placed above the words to indicate which is the subject, the predicate, an adverb, a preposition, etc.

With 30% of college freshmen taking remedial classes, we would do well to utilize a system for analyzing grammar.

Did you ever think that the object of a prepositional phrase would be the subject of a sentence?

Either you teach the matter in the 3rd grade or you wait until the student tries to go to college and has to make up for several years spent in the dark.

Anyone who thinks the subject of "John put the laundry into the washer" is "the washer" is unable to read.

I think that "kid lit" produced in the 60s and later is superior to the kid lit of the fifties.