A better question

Even before I joined the MAT program, I was warned to expect to have students who couldn't read, at least not past an elementary school level. There's a part of me that balks at this and wonders how the American education system could so thoroughly fail its children; but then another part of me thinks, oh wait, its Georgia. Now, blaming the state or the culture of learning is unfair, but failing that, how does a student get to high school six or eight years behind in their reading abilities? That's a lot of people who have all agreed over and over again to let that child slip through the cracks. This doesn't just include people in the educational system, like teachers and school administrators - but the student's family and their networks of social support (their churches, their family friends, etc.).

I have no idea how a student can fall so behind in reading ability. While naming the reasons for this problem are important, there are more immediate questions to answer, like how in the world do I teach a class of students with wildly different reading abilities? I wonder about this not simply because of a few dire warnings about the situation but because I've seen it confirmed in my observations at local public schools. An eleventh-grade English teacher I've just finished observing spent some time after school tutoring a girl whom she later told me was, at rough estimate, at a fifth-grade reading level. A few other students in her class are at a third- or fourth-grade level. Many students are at, maybe, an eight-grade reading level.

Though the reasons they are so behind are important, even more important is how to teach these students the content I'm required to, and help them improve their reading abilities. I'm not so idealistic to think I can get their reading abilities to an eleventh-grade reading level, but I can't imagine simply ignoring their reading deficiencies.

Last week, I wrote a query about how much students should read, but I see where that question can't be answered until student reading ability is realistically considered. There are some eleventh-grade texts a student will not be able to read, and certainly not with the same depth an on-track student will. But what to do with them?

How much should students read?

I just finished observations of an eleventh-grade American Lit teacher. Let me tell you, American literature is a hard subject. Colonial diaries and Puritan sermons are difficult to wade through, and to any high-schooler, hopelessly boring. That's why I wasn't surprised when the teacher told me she would be teaching The Red Badge of Courage, but offering an alternative text for students, Slam, by Walter Dean Myers.

Slam is the story of a young black student coping with domestic trials and honing his basketball skills. I have no idea what it has to do with The Red Badge of Courage, though my teacher sees some parallelism. Once upon a time, I would have raged against this decision. I was a canonical purist who believed that reading something like Slam in class would be a crime against a student's education.

Alfred Tatum, though, would think it was a great idea,and recommended other books by Walter Dean Meyers in his own book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males. Tatum argues strongly for using texts that young black men can identify with and that reflect their own circumstances or culture. He is not the only educational scholar by any means to argue this, but Tatum is unique among the teachers I know in that he argues for a rigorous reading curriculum.

Most teachers I know, including the high school teacher I observed, argue that we shouldn't make students read whole books, whole plays, whole texts. I've been shocked to hear this advice from the teachers I know, but they argue that students don't want to read, they don't know how, and so it just turns students off to reading. Tatum, citing studies that show the whiter and wealthier you are, the more you read for your classes, argued that students should read not only read complete texts, but should read supplementary materials in addition to the full texts. The only excuse for reading a fragment of a text, he writes, is as a hook into a larger, complete text.

I like Tatum's argument, and it apparently works in his classroom, but I'd be interested in getting feedback from teachers about their classrooms. How much have you gotten your students to read? What got them into reading?

Assessments

I'm getting a bit baffled by this concept of assessment. I mean, I thought I had this down prior to joining the MAT program. You teach students a small chunk of your content, and then you test them on it: multiple choice, a few well-stated true/false questions, and some short answer questions. If need be, punctuate the times between tests with a quiz here and there. Now, I understand, those methods are right out. Mostly.

Part of the problem is that I've never taken a course that covered assessments as a core topic of the class. I'd love to take one class entirely on assessment (a class on creating lesson plans would be nice as well), but assessment shows up in each class, briefly, touched on in relation to whatever the class is about. What I end up getting is a lot of disconnected snippets: quotes from published articles or texts, the informed opinion of a professor, and anecdotes from my classmates. I'm slowly putting together a meaningful picture about assessment and how I should assess my students, and I understand that traditional testing has taken a backseat to new models of assessment, but I'm still baffled as to what those are.

Tovani, for instance, cites a guy named Grant Wiggins who writes, “the aim of assessment is primarily to educate and improve student performance, not merely to audit it.” Wait, wait, wait. Doesn't the word assessment mean “to evaluate, to audit?” Hasn't the point of assessment always been to gauge student learning? If you're going to expand what assessment means beyond the limits of the word, at least give it a new name!

Tovani's citation adequately sums up my confusion about assessment. How is assessment supposed to improve student performance while you attempt to audit it? How does assessment educate a student while at the same time testing their knowledge on a subject? If not traditional tests, then what? Maybe I'm just not imaginative enough.

Tovani, Chapter 5

When I first considered teaching English, it was, like most teachers, out of a passion for the content. I really, really like literature. I own books I've never read for the sole purpose of creating a kick-ass library I can loan books from. I mean, geez, I think libraries are "kick-ass."

Since I've started classes, though, its become painfully obvious that most of teaching English is teaching reading and writing. The eleventh-grade American Lit class I've been observing has been doing almost nothing but working on persuasive writing, and the short story they did read was barely discussed in class. It kills me a little inside - I know literature, and I can teach it well! I don't know much about teaching reading and writing, and what little I thought I knew has been constantly challenged by the classes I'm taking.

So when Tovani writes that "one of my biggest challenges is helping content teachers identify a clear instructional purpose for assigned reading" (54), I balk a little. Who needs clear instructional goals?! Can't we read books for the sake of reading good literature? Books aren't tools in an English class as they are in a science or math class; they're the things being studied!

But then, students don't read the way I do, do they? They're still beginners. So, really, its my job to teach students how to read books like I do, critically, with an eye for certain features in the text that will unfold its meaning for me, the reader. It's not so much that I have to justify the text to students, as to open up the text for students, and show them how to open up a text on their own. That activity of teaching them critical reading can be the purpose for reading a text.

Of course, this still leaves me with the question that plagues every English teacher, the question all students patronize their teacher with: "why do we have to read this?" For us teachers, its a matter of reading texts we enjoy and respect. Students, though, rarely approach books with the same reverence teachers do, and we still have to defend and justify the reasons we teach students a canon of literature. That, though, might be easier for me than teaching reading like Tovani does.