Vicki Cobb writes books about science for children. In this post, she says that children are “learning to read” from dull and disjointed textbooks. They should be reading lively well-written trade books by accomplished writers.
“Each book is extensively researched and vetted for accuracy and beautifully designed and illustrated. If it is a narrative, the story is told in a compelling, page-turning manner. If it is a how-to book, directions are clear and motivation is embedded in the exposition. History, geography, sports, science, nature, art and music are all represented in this small library. Yet, for the most part, these engaging books never make it to the classroom. Instead, children read flat, dry, “informational” material that comes with work sheets and lesson plans. Teachers do not know that these books exist, that they cover the same topics that are in their curriculum, and even if they do know about them, they are not sure of how to use them in the classroom.
“You know who does know about these books? The standardized testing companies. They excerpt passages (paying licensing fees) for the test questions. So if this writing is good enough for the tests, don’t you think kids should read them in the classroom?
“Without experience in reading high-quality nonfiction, children are not building a foundation of knowledge, not learning to think in a disciplinary way, and are not preparing to be informed decision makers. The main difference between these books and those written on these subject for adults, is that children’s authors assume that their readers have little to no prior knowledge. Concepts are carefully introduced and reinforced so that the content is not overwhelming to the reader. Authors honor their readers and assume they are writing for intelligent human beings who may be uninitiated in the subject matter. The authors’ voices, their humor, wit, passions, inform the books. As an author of science books for children, I have often said that if one of my books is the first book on a subject a child reads, I have failed if it is the last.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Strong agreement that reading “real” books is an extremely valuable part of a youngster’s education.
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Exactly! I can barely get through a page of the textbooks my children bring home. They might as well be lists of facts. What we are doing now is absolutely counter to what we know is good for human beings.
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Thank you Vicki Cobb. But I would say that children need access to high quality books of any sort – in a school library – that is run by a professionally trained librarian and given money every year to stock the shelves with books. Wish she hadn’t confined this to “quality nonfiction” although I understand it’s the way she makes her living.
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She focused on quality non-fiction because it is sorely lacking in schools. My 12-year-old has been encouraged to read wonderful fiction throughout her public school years. But when it comes to social studies and science she is given awful textbooks with crappy worksheets. It’s memorize facts and regurgitate it on a test. No thinking involved. Luckily she lives both subjects and so I supplement her learning with interesting, stimulating non-fiction from our library. Such a shame the schools waste money on textbooks for any subject. We fon’t need them, Luckily I teach public school preschool and no one has -of yet!- forced me to use boring textbooks.
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For this reason, I encouraged my students to only read books that they enjoyed for the monthly book report. The book was for fun and they were told that if they did not enjoy the book, they had to return it to the library and find another one because the book reports could not report on a book they did not enjoy.
And that resulted in this real life scene that opens my teacher memoir:
A loud voice: “Mr. Lofthouse, I hate you.”
I was leaving my classroom a few hours after school had let out. I looked around.
Nothing; then, a familiar face with no name attached. He was standing at the far end of the building by the back gate, holding a paperback book and shaking it for emphasis.
“When I was in ninth grade, I hated you,” he said. “I hated reading. I hated those essays and book reports you made us do, over and over until we got them right. You even got my mom to sit by me at home to make sure I read those books and finished the homework. Now I’m hooked. These fucking books are like drugs. I can’t stop reading them.” He delivered all this with an expression of disgust. Then his face blossomed into a smile. “And I still hate it.”
He turned and walked off campus and into the barrio where his family lived. Then I remembered who he was. Four years earlier, Fabio had been nothing but a pain-in-the-ass full of verbal irony and sarcasm. He’d fought me every inch of the way, but his mother became my ally. She was one of the few parents who listened to my advice, ditched the self-esteem movement, and learned to say no.
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The school library became the back bone of SSR in my classroom. The many quality science-oriented books were favorites of the boys. I also encouraged parents to accompany their children to our neighborhood libraries. Both strategies backfired when library hours were cut and school libraries closed to save money.
Eventually an aide was hired to check books in and out. Fortunately, the qualified librarian who had retired when librarians were cut had updated and strengthened the collection prior to leaving.
Furthermore, I contributed my son’s childhood collection and colleagues contributed their grown children’s collections to my classroom collection. I also brought in my father’s 1940 to 1980’s collection of National Geographics. Yes, these magazines are on line, but there is nothing like accidentally encountering an interesting topic while leafing through the pictures, which happened frequently in my classes.
I also paid for a yearly subscription to “Kids Discover,” using the civil rights issue as the material for the month of January, teaching the history of the African-American experience in my multi-ethnic class. This became a lesson on the importance of cooperative, multi-layered support from many citizens for true reform of the American system.
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I was lucky enough to grow up loving to read. By eighth grade I had pretty much wiped out the local library’s Sci-fi shelves.
But I’ll have to say that anything I read in school for school before high school seemed a waste – especially the readers.
In high school English we always had a literature text with fictio – short stories and poetry – and some non-fiction.
But it wasn’t until college that I actually grasped Shakespeare.
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I too was a born bookworm, but would never have discovered sci-fi without a 7th grade [unpaid] job as a school-library asst. I stuck my toe in w/Conn. Yankee in K Arthur’s Court & finished those meager shelves that yr. That experience kept me adding LeGuin, Bradbury, Heinlein, Herbert, et al into usual lit fare for decades. It makes me sad to think that there may be many kids today who aren’t exposed to a free flow of wide-ranging topics in primary classrooms, and that there are public schools without libraries.
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As a school librarian I can tell you there are different types of nonfiction books. Some are useful for research, some are appealing due to the illustrations but have limited text, and some are both informative and exciting to read. The author makes the subject come alive in a format/style which is competitive with a popular fiction book.
Obviously, the committee selecting reading materials for students did not know these differences. They also failed to recognize reading level, interest level, and age level appropriateness when assigning “suggested” titles. I bet they didn’t even open a book to compile their choices.
And that could make all the difference in the development of an avid reader vs a nonreader.
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I’m proud to be a non-fiction author for young people. My audience is brighter and less hidebound than most of the folks who read the NYTimes bestseller list. Their minds are welcoming to reality and most definitely to quality. The notion that writing for kids is what you do if you can’t write for adults insults the high standards of my audience. If I don’t make my sentences crisp and lean, if I don’t choose action verbs and stirring modifiers, my readers simply stop and drop the book. Talk about harsh reviews!
Lack of respect for my readers is endemic and is nowhere more blatant than in textbooks and school reading lists. “Educational experts” clutch the vain and irrational notion that they can meter kids’ minds and know at what levels they should be reading. Which average child would that be, we wonder? Are all children average? Are all fifth graders doomed to read the same simple-minded, pre-digested, conflict-filtered fifth-grade oatmeal?
And is there one style of writing on the kid-mind-meter that’s best for a given grade? Or might we dare to let them read many voices at many levels in many moods? Will every kid understand every line? I hope not. If a young person completely exhausts the message of any book on the first reading, its writer failed. If the writing and the (real) story excite them, they’ll filter out what doesn’t make sense at a given moment and COME BACK TO IT. You may have noted that kids enjoy repetition: if they like a book, they’ll read it repeatedly. Young people should always be reading at challenging levels, reaching for understanding, learning through context, assembling new vocabulary. Reading isn’t about comfort. It’s about being driven by books that intrigue your fascination.
Vicki Cobb knows that writing facts isn’t enough. Nor is writing simply. To beguile readers she must write at her best, with sparkle and humor, with suspense and grace. We’re bringing on a new era of reading and writing in which non-fiction will carry young people into a keener interest for the real world around them. We need their young brilliance to solve our problems and to soothe our fears. The scientific and poetic minds who will battle our future’s difficulties won’t grow out of state-mandated levels of “appropriate” reading levels.
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““Educational experts” clutch the vain and irrational notion that they can meter kids’ minds”
Bingo, bango, boingo!
TAGO!
I’m trying to imagine writing as you do, Jan, with those “metrics” as THE guiding factor and the only thing that pops into my brain is: “Insane is as inane does”.
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I always liked to preview the nonfiction books I purchased for my LMC. Sometimes the text was dumbed down, simplified, white washed, misleading, or even inaccurate – leaving out relevant information which might show the US in a bad light.
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Wow, Jan, you’ve really captured this situation from the kids’ POV. It drives me nuts when people talk down to kids or act like the young mind needs coddling. It need challenges that help awaken it. I know we’re focusing on nonfiction, but just look at how kids of many ages including single-digit ones devoured those hefty volumes and often reread them.
When I was young, I read mostly nonfiction. Most of it was for adults, for there was very little in the way of nonfiction for kids in those days. Now that we have so many wonderful books on just about any topic for them, let’s rejoice and make them available to their intended audiences!
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Yes, indeed! So true.
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When I designed my own fully public fully union public school, I used only 1 textbook and that was only for a reference. Textbooks should never drive the curriculum and narrow the scope of education. Who really did discover America? The textbooks don’t have a clue.
Read books that inspire!
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Like!
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“Textbooks should never drive the curriculum and narrow the scope of education. . . The textbooks don’t have a clue.”
No, it’s not the textbooks that “don’t have a clue” but the teachers who don’t know the scope and sequence of a class curriculum and over rely on the text to provide everything. And, no, they shouldn’t “drive” the curriculum, but if well written, organized and sequenced a text can be THE students’ guide through the subject matter.
I’ve never understood this “You shouldn’t use a textbook” and having teachers reinvent the wheel in providing classroom instruction. A good text with proper supplemental materials provided by the teacher form the foundation of providing a good teaching and learning environment for the students. And determining whether there is a good text should be each teacher’s own decision (or at least in conjunction with other teachers of that subject area both vertically and horizontally speaking).
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Ms Cobb is so right about textbook-driven curriculum. English (alone) was never taught that way in my own ’50’s-,60’s public ed. Creative lesson-planning with various interesting texts happened in one 7th-gr history class, never in science or math.
By the 90’s-’00’s when my kids attended, even English courses (at least in grades 2-8) seemed already long-entrenched in deadly, yearlong “Language Arts” textbooks loaded with snippets of actual lit subsumed under somebody-or-other’s heavy-handed approach. Perhaps Ms Cobb sees as opening for bringing her type of product into the regular classroom, as Common Core practitioners look for non-fiction works to ‘practice skills’. But the deck seems stacked against it.
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Remember the SRA reading program. I love to read, but that was Hell!
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Thank you, Diane, for this post! I am a science writer for children and I get so much positive feedback from the students who read my books, but so many more students do not have access to nonfiction trade books and rely on textbooks and the internet for scientific information. My research pulls together information from many sources and then I create a narrative, illustrated with primary source scientific imagery. My books, along with the many, many other excellent nonfiction books by other writers provide a rich resource specifically created for children–children want to read these books, unlike the textbooks they are required to use because they are interesting, visually beautiful, and well-written.
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Text books are the equivalent of mind control as they tell kids what to think rather than give information for them to use critical thinking. I always use the example of who discovered America. We are finding out the murderous terrorist Columbus was not the first by far.
And the chapter tests are a kin to the standardized test. Believe what I tell you and you better regurgitate it correctly or you will FAIL into oblivion. Critical thinking not allowed.
When I designed my fully public school w/ union we only had a couple copies of 1 textbook as a guide. Many other books relating to many academic areas were utilized.
It is time to stop the brainwashing of kids and not only allow but expect critical thinking.Of course that would require that schools be allowed to innovate. Given that freedom, public schools would once again thrive as public school teachers are the best there is at innovation, meaning finding the way kids learn best.
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Cap – you should see some of the “politically correct” crap that is being put into some of the nonfiction books put out by the publishers to sell to school libraries which reflect these same concepts. The Corruption of Common Core is more widespread than you realize.
Luckily there are still authors such as Vicki Cobb to demonstrate how it should be done.
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