Paul Thomas Taught for nearly 20 years, then became a teacher educator at Furman University in South Carolina. He often writes about the media and its misperceptions of teaching. In this post, he laments the fact that the media is constantly in search of a scapegoat for whatever goes wrong in education.
The latest scapegoat, he writes, is teacher education, and the latest lamentation is that teacher educators fail to teach the “science” of education.
The scapegoating deepened because of Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top. If every child was not 100% proficient, someone must be blamed. First, the outcry was “blame the teacher,” but when VAM backfired, it became blame the teacher educator.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Teacher educators do deserve critique. Why shouldn’t they?
Many are failed teachers who failed upward. I had one who admitted this fact. She said she couldn’t hack high school teaching. These hacks parrot career-advancing orthodoxies, but have no sound internal faculty of judgement, i.e. wisdom.
My own education school was an indoctrination factory, not a place for free inquiry. The dogma we imbibed said “teach critical thinking; facts are not that important” even though critical thinking about their dogma was not welcome.
The program had very little sound practical advice for teachers. It was largely ideology.
From talking to many other teachers since then, I infer that many other teacher ed programs are similar.
Does any education school in America not marginalize or demonize E.D. Hirsch’s profound ideas? I doubt it. Faulty groupthink, faulty orthodoxy predominates. Hirsch discredits their constructivist orthodoxy, so they don’t want their students to know about him.
I do think our education schools should be roundly scrutinized and criticized. They have a crucial role in our society; if they’re failing, we should do something about it.
I’m curious – how many of the facts that you learned in school do you remember? Speaking personally, I have a huge jumble of words, phrases, names, places tossing around in my head that I learned at some point, most of which don’t mean a lot to me (although I could certainly look them up if I wanted to) – Boyle’s Law, Teapot Dome, quadratic equation, etc. I have just enough recognition in most cases that I could probably answer multiple choice questions about them (which is probably all I needed to do when I “learned” them).
My daughters, however – who have been in progressive school all their lives – don’t have nearly such a rich font of “knowledge” (trivia), but what they do know, they actually know and can speak intelligently on (as well as understand the backgrounds and controversies related thereto) because they’ve studied it in depth with a focus on relevance and how do we know what we know.
If we’re going to “measure” [sic] knowledge by any kind of test, I am clearly more knowledgeable than my kids. But if we’re talking about being able to understand, analyze and use knowledge critically, they’ve got my butt pretty thoroughly kicked.
“I am clearly more knowledgeable than my kids are.”
I wonder if this is, in fact, true Dienne. What I’ve noticed is that I tend to know a few things at a lot more depth than the young people around me do, but they tend to be superficially knowledgeable about a LOT. I think that there is a new kind of cultural literacy emerging in the Internet age. I am continually surprised by how much they know a little bit about. And they tend to be very good at taking a deep dive into something that they become enthusiastic about. I have two sons. One his a high-powered, highly educated professional. Another is an auto mechanic. But the kid who is an auto mechanic continually surprises me with what he knows from all that Internet surfing, and when he becomes enthusiastic about something (heavy metal guitar, EDM, motorcycles), he rapidly develops considerable expertise. Here’s the thing: he’s only interested in news he can use, and he’s very good at finding it. My students, generally, are.
Bob – I guess that’s what I’m saying. My kids have been in progressive education from day one. So they’ve never had a text book where they learn snippets of hundreds of things across a “subject” area. They do project-based learning which requires a deep dive into the subject area. They learn about the history, science, math, etc. surrounding any given topic all at the same time and in a very connected way, so they understand much, much more of the implications of what they’re learning, certainly than I did at their age, maybe even now.
I spent my “education” learning things like the dates of battles, the generals who led them and who “won” in the end. I learned very little of the context or meaning of such historical events. My kids couldn’t tell you much about specific information like that (they never had to memorize it for the test before forgetting it for life), but what they have studied, they can talk about with remarkable depth.
Dienne,
you just described the nature of textbooks. Snippets of disconnected, decontextualized information.
Not all textbooks are “snippets of disconnected, decontextualized information.” A good text is a trove of connected, contextualized information that can help the student to learn the subject matter provided that the teacher knows how to use said text.
Perhaps it is the nature of the subject I taught, Spanish, that the texts had to be connected and contextualized. Now were there some that were not as well written and organized as I would have liked? Yes, but the students could still use them as a daily resource-it was my job to show the students how to use them. I never understood the desire of some teachers to remake a text year after year, many times copying others materials without permission, when what was there could easily be utilized.
Maybe other teachers here have had different experiences in their respective subject areas.
Common Core made English textbooks snippets of unrelated, decontextualized tweets. They have us reading part of one chapter only of a novel, for example. Subject areas not annually tested escaped a lot of that.
English textbooks before Common Core were also rotten. See my book The Language Police, where I read and reviewed every English and history text for high school. 2006.
True. Common Core just made textbooks worse than they already were. The California textbooks in the early twenty-aughts were disjointed collections of excruciatingly boring short stories. At least there was plenty of fiction, though, dry and meaningless as it was. Common Core books have far too much nonfiction.
I don’t remember having English textbooks when I was a California student in the ‘80’s, other than books with grammar exercises. I just remember checking out a grammar book and novels for each English class. I remember reading “classic” novels, stacks of them. Some of those novels had me hooked, unwilling to turn off the light, pull up the covers and go to sleep, no matter how tired I was from basketball practice.
Entirely agree, Diane, about how rotten ELA textbooks have been for a long, long time (even though I worked for decades in the textbook industry). However, they have become significantly worse since the advent of the Common Core. If you want a decent high-school literature text, you have to go back to the 1960s or 70s. LOL. Smart ELA teachers always put the textbooks aside, used whole novels and plays, and dipped into the texts occasionally for the text of a particular short story, poem, or essay. But yes, the ELA texts now deal in random snippets of text that are present only to be objects of test-prep-style exercises keyed to the Common [sic] Bore, uh Core [sic]. I put my utterly ridiculous Pearson literature program aside and taught almost exclusively from photocopies and pdfs and whole works.
For a long, long time, most K-12 ELA textbooks have looked as though they were designed by gerbils on methamphetamines. I call this the “and now for something completely different” approach to literature and writing and grammar instruction. They suffer from extreme featuritis. They interrupt a feature with a feature containing call-outs and a feature, have 87 different fonts and colors on a single page, and rarely present any information. When their editors do, by mistake, include some actual content, it’s typically wrong.
When I was handed the Pearson lit to use for my classes and told by my Department Chairperson that it was to be treated like the contents of the Ark of the Covenant, I opened it at random to a two-page spread and made a detailed list of 57 errors on those two pages. Then I sent this list to every administrator and English teacher in my school.
Though the analogy breaks down, minds can usefully be thought of as connection machines. Knowledge builds on knowledge to which it is connected. Sustained work in a subdomain is essential. But these contemporary texts completely lack unity and coherence. And they teach almost nothing. Their editors seem to think that they only things worthy to put into textbooks and the only things that will garner any student attention are pop culture references, but these, in textbooks, are so lame that students react to them with groans.
Like Cuchulain with his sword drawn on the sea, I fought against this for most of my career in textbook publishing. But the marketing people generally called the shots, even when I had risen to an exalted rank. One thing was clear, the educational publishers would put ANYTHING between two covers or online if they thought it would sell one additional copy.
It was not always thus. When I started in the industry, there were a couple hundred educational publishers in the US, and many of these were run by educators and scholars. Now, they are run by financial types. They are interested in generating hype, making a killing, and moving on. Twenty years ago, a typical freelance writer for one of these textbook programs would be a scholar/educator who was getting $150 a page for his or her writing. Now the stuff is farmed out to development houses and to inexperienced hacks who follow detailed scripts prepared by marketing people, and the writers are lucky to get $10 a page. The publishers get what they paid for. Junk, with lots of garish design elements intended to make the junk look appealing and random headings touting whatever happens to be hot on the educational midway this carnival season. Of late, that’s been test prep and the Common Bore.
What annoyed me about the textbooks I read was the huge proportion of pages given over to illustrations, graphics, blank space. Sometimes it seemed that the textbook designers thought they were competing with TV. Zip, flash, boom!! Gotta grab their attention. The text doesn’t matter.
It literally does not matter to the publishers. All that matters is that the thing sells. It wasn’t always this way. Where there used to be 200 educational publishers, now there are four that have almost all the business, and they are run by financial types who will perpetrate any sort of scam (standardized testing, anyone) to turn a buck. The current ELA texts are a terrible waste of trees. They could be used, I suppose, to line the floor of an aviary. No, not even for that. Too garish. And almost content free. I think it was LeftCoastTeacher who said that they are like instruction by tweet.
Duane, I only know the for-lang textbooks used in my region’s pubschs for the last 6 or 7 yrs, courtesy of my midsch/ hisch-level tutees (the bulk of my teaching is at PreK/ K level). They are well -described by Diane’s “snippets of disconnected, decontextualized information.” Each page is a crazy-quilt of pop-up tidbits & distracting graphics. I was only able to help these families figure out what a given chapter was trying to impart via the teacher’s edition, which had complex info-maps for chapters and units.
There was a lot of willful (e.g., intentional) misreading of Hirsch’s work, which wasn’t helped by the fact that his work was embraced by far-right conservatives who thought that he was all about defending the canon of work by dead white men against multiculturalism. And, unfortunately, his Core Knowledge Foundation had a brief flirtation with Common [sic] Core [sic] advocates, which Hirsch later renounced as a mistake.
So, here, a brief tutorial on his major ideas:
Hirsch first made his name as a proponent of a particular approach to literary interpretation, or hermeneutics. He was a champion of the traditional notion that the meaning of a literary work lies in the intention of the author and that the practice of interpretation is about recovering that intention, which requires not only close reading but also familiarity with the author’s life, the social and historical context of the work, and the literary genres and tropes employed in the work. Well, this poem was written by a courtier, sick of court intrigue, who longed for a simpler, more noble, more real, more honest life and adopted the pastoral mode as an expression of these longings.
In other words, his was a defense of a traditional view of interpretation that required considerable knowledge of the text in context.
Then, Hirsch became interested in freshman composition (which is interesting because, by that time, he was a well-placed public intellectual, and those freshman comp classes are usually foisted off on people low on the academic totem pole). He soon realized that people who don’t read well can’t write well, and this led him to think carefully about the problems he was seeing in his comp students’ ability to read. He soon realized that a major problem, overlooked by “reading specialists,” was that poor readers didn’t have the background knowledge that the writer had assumed they would have.
This important insight led him to formulate a theory that a culture is bound together by inherited, shared, common knowledge. The members of this Amazonian tribe have a shared knowledge of the uses, medicinal and otherwise, of hundreds and hundreds of indigenous plants. People in the English-speaking West are bound together by shared knowledge of things like Mother Goose Rhymes (“Simple Simon said to the pieman”), the Bible, a few plays by Shakespeare, and so on. So (and again, this is rare among English professors) Hirsch set out to conduct studies of what educated people in the United States know. He chose as his representative group lawyers because they were an easily identifiable group of educated professionals. On the basis of those studies, he came up with a list of stuff that educated people in the U.S. know. This list became the core of his best-selling book Cultural Literacy.
Unfortunately, this book hit at the very time that multiculturalism was making great headway in U.S. education, and Hirsch was perceived by many to be a reactionary figure in opposition to that movement. This bothered him a lot because politically, Hirsch was always a liberal.
Here’s what Hirsch was definitely right about: knowledge is an essential component of reading ability. Any approach to ELA that discounts knowledge, that considers the field to be all about the teaching of abstract skills, is doomed to failure because writing and reading and public speaking are extremely dependent upon both descriptive knowledge (knowledge of what) and concrete procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
It’s possible, of course, both to embrace multiculturalism AND Hirsch’s core ideas. You want to understand Emerson and the Transcendentalists? Well, then, you better understand the Hindu Upanishads, that great spring from which Emerson drank.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not the Upanishad spring. Ha ha!
Tat tvam asi.
Yeah. Come to think of it, the Bhavagad Gita and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism don’t really mix well.
Yeah, Jones, who discovered the cognates between Sanskrit and the European languages was born a couple years after Pope died. But I suspect that Pope would have really dug his work. Pope was a smart cookie, and perhaps the major theme of the Essay on Criticism is the value of depth in learning–drink deep, fools rush in, etc.
Essay on Criticism is one of my favorite poetic works; I have a good deal of it committed to memory, and having read it so many times am pretty sure that the visionary theme is “nobody gives a sh**” what David Coleman thinks.
LMAO!!!
Media makes money by stirring the pot or poking the bear. One of their objectives is to drive readers to their publication or site. Controversy captures attention. That is why so many writers ride the coattails of so-called reform.
For many years teachers were given more autonomy. Now that private companies may benefit, bashing a national pastime. “Reform,” which seeks to move tremendous amounts of public money out of public education, made teachers and public schools scapegoats in order to undermine the institution.
Now that deform is in full bloom schools of education are also in the sights of those that seek to delegitimize the training that traditional colleges of education provide. TFA believes it can churn out so-called teachers with just five weeks of training. Schools like Relay seek to expand their watered down teacher training brand so one of their strategies for expansion is to bash traditional teacher training programs.
So-called reform has created a veritable cottage industry of foundations and billionaires that want access to public money. Undermining the credibility of existing institutions is one of their strategies. The media rides on their coattails.
Good for Mr. Thomas for pushing back against the tendency on the part of would be “reformers” to make sweeping, unsubstantiated claims about this or that being THE problem in education. And, of course, now that we have overwhelming evidence that sanctions tied to high-stakes standardized testing lead neither to improved scores on high-stakes standardized tests nor to decreases in achievement gaps, the Deformers are searching around for excuses: oh, this would have worked if the implementation had been better or if teachers had been better prepared to become data mongers.
Often, the issues in education are complex and involve multiple variables, and one of the big problems in education research (and in research in the social sciences generally) is that it’s often extremely difficult, if not impossible, to control for significant variables. Because of this complexity, true statements regarding education often require a lot of qualifications, and sometimes it’s just a pain to include those qualifications every time one writes. They make the writing cumbersome and difficult to follow, especially by the media and by politicians, who deal in sound bites.
It’s tempting, when writing about the failure of Ed Deform, to make statements like this: “High-stakes testing hasn’t improved outcomes” or “Teacher quality’s impact on measurable student achievement has been identified repeatedly as only about 10-15%.” But such statements require a qualifier pointing out that what’s meant is that the testing pushed by the deformers has failed “BY ITS OWN PREFERRED BUT DUBIOUS MEASURES.”
The high-stakes testing in ELA is purest numerology. It’s not valid, it’s not reliable, and these flaws are inherent to the process and are not fixable by creating better summative tests. The ELA “standards,” as written, are not validly testable, and even if they were, they cover only a small part of what they purport to cover–proficiency in writing and in reading of substantive literary and nonfiction works.
The grain of truth in Mr. Thomas’s statement about the impact of teacher quality is that, of course, student environments outside of school have enormous consequences for their academic success. Those of us who have actually taught know from experience that there is no curricular or pedagogical panacea that is going to counter, miraculously, the dire effects of extreme poverty. The kid who is living in her Mom’s car; who sees her Mom stressed out, continually, by bills that cannot be paid; who has addicted or imprisoned parents; who can’t afford eyeglasses or tampons; whose role models for success are the drug dealers on the corner; who is continually subjected to shaming and bullying; and so on, is not generally going to go from pauper to princess because she has to pass a test to graduate from high school. It doesn’t require research to figure that out. It requires having a freaking clue (something that the pundits in the Deformer-funded astroturf organizations are paid not to have).
All that said, here are my suggestions for a high-quality teacher prep program in the English language arts: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/what-should-be-taught-in-an-english-teacher-preparation-program/
Yes, the Deformer attacks on teacher prep programs are garbage, but it’s a very good thing to have vigorous debate about bottom-up continuous improvement.
Gee, what happened to “No Excuses!” So-called reform is full of them. Remember how they ridiculed teachers for acknowledging the existence of poverty. Twenty years later they see what we’ve known all along.
Ha! No accountability for the accountability folks and plenty of willingness to ignore data when it isn’t what they want to see. “What we’ve known all along”? Exactly.
In yesterday’s Curmuducation, Peter Greene discussed “mea culpa” from the reform crowd in response to Nick Hanauer’s article in The Atlantic. He included the following tweet from Obama.”This is worth a read: a thought-provoking reminder that education reform isn’t a cure-all. As a supporter of education reform, I agree that fixing educational inequality requires doing more to address the broader, systemic sources of economic inequality.” Shocking after eight years of test and punish!
Thanks Paul Thomas. and Diane. This is an excellent summary of the many ways that teachers have been scapegoated. It touches on the new marketing language for snake oil, just add the word ” science,” as in “the science of school improvement” or “school improvement science.”
I am underwhelmed by “improvement science” as set forth by Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Byrk is among proponents of “improvement science” for education, achieved by non-stop experimentation. “The method is based on Deming’s iterative four-step method of business management (plan–do–check–act or adjust) with workers trained in statistical analyses of outcomes. Workers learn in quality circles to propose ideas to management.” https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/our-ideas/
This iterative process is common in certain varieties of process engineering, just-in-time-delivery systems, industrial design, and in prototyping for manufactured goods. I do not have the interest or energy to explain why I am offended by the idea of improvement science and especially another round of ideas from business management being offered up by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
“Another round” means that I recall that Obama/Duncan enlisted Byrk to devise a plan for coopting teachers into accepting Race to the Top. Byrk led the initial meetings of the “Reform Support Network.” He did not raise red flags when he should have. Byrk’s predecessor at the Carnegie, Lee Shulman, would have been an opponent of Race to the Top nonsense and likely would be skeptical of improvement science.
Principle two in Byrk’s version of Improvement science is this:
“Variation in performance is the core problem to address. The critical issue is not what works, but rather what works, for whom and under what set of conditions. Aim to advance efficacy reliably at scale.”
As I read this principle, effectiveness or efficacy means that the more you can standardize the results of an intended intervention the better… and even better if you can do that at scale.
I think this is a fancy way to say you want standardized results. No thanks. Here is a longer article by Byrk. https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/nivlR./JY.5Y6/full
I think this is a fancy way to say you want standardized results. No thanks.
Exactly. Wrong from the start.
I am a big fan of Deming and of bottom-up approaches to continuous improvement, but mostly because I strongly believe that we need to decrease top-down micromanagement and increase teacher autonomy–to return to local (really local–i.e., school and department level) control, subject to general oversight with limited scope–ensuring equity and safety and adequate funding and facilities and teacher training (the proper roles of educational management). But I do understand, Laura, your concern about racing ahead with yet another business-inspired educational panacea that is likely to result in MORE (or simply different), not less, micromanagement of teachers. We could easily end up with the equivalent of, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” For ofc these people will want to apply generalized “metrics” to the evaluation of improvements, without regard to specific circumstances–the same foolishness we’ve seen during these dark decades of ed deform.
Does anyone really believe that we are doing a better job of educating our kids than we did back when teachers and department chairpeople at the school level made the decisions about what and how they were going to teach? Anyone who does, I think, is deluded. Why did that work so well? Well, here are a few reasons: a) teachers were able to assess and respond to the particular needs of their students; b) they were empowered to innovate based on new discoveries/learning; c) they tended to be fairly conservative about their innovations because of social sanction (the habits of the tribe); d) their autonomy was highly motivating–it made people feel like and act like professionals; e) people tended to follow the lead of the best and brightest around them, and f) there was a vast industry of educational researchers, theorists, and practitioners who shared new ideas with teachers because it was possible for teachers actually to adopt and adapt those ideas.
The good old days of local autonomy provided a much richer educational experience than what we have today with all the rules, micromanaging and testing.
Indeed!!!
But I do think the Deming concepts that underwrote “quality circles” in Japanese corp mgt have an application in teaching. While ed measurements have to be much looser & more interpretive, there’s no question that teaching improves from collaboration in the trenches on best practices, & ground-up generation of curriculum adjustment. These are features lacking in US pubschs– in fact structurally discouraged.
“in fact, structurally discouraged”
That phrase says it all. It brilliantly encapsulates how far we’ve fallen, the dire consequence of all this standards-and-testing nonsense and top-down micromanagement. Having taught before and after deform, I’ve seen this first-hand. It’s really, really shocking. Many teachers today have no clue how different things once were, how much better. They’ve become rats in a maze, subject to experimental proddings. It’s a dystopian horror brought to you by the Ed Deform social engineers. Thank you, Mr. Gates, Mr. Coleman, Mr. Bush, and thank you to all those edupundits (and even union leaders!!!) who collaborated with deform. You brought this upon us. You gave us the ugly before picture that will be erased when teachers take back their classrooms.
It’s wonderful to read such a vigorous debate about what teaching is and can be. (Bob, you need to come to a SoCal university and teach a class. I want to be your student.) As Paul Thomas pointed out, the problem is not one pedagogical theory or another and is not “bad teachers” or “bad teacher educators”, but the problem is scapegoating. We can all thank the PISA, and the NCLB with its revisions, for the scapegoating. Harmful school rankings, devastating VAMming, delirious data-driven drivel, privatization, nonsensical Common Core methods, top down administrative practices… all caused or exacerbated by giving invalid test scores to politicians. If we have to scapegoat something let’s scapegoat the scapegoater — testing. The testing must stop.
LCT,
“(Bob, you need to come to a SoCal university and teach a class. I want to be your student.)”
Go to Bob’s site and you’ll get more than a class worth of learning:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/
And it won’t cost you a thing. . . .
Yes! But Bob’s site makes me want more. Online learning has its benefits, outweighed by its limitations. Nothing beats a good class discussion and debate, face to face. Take that, critics of teacher educators!
Nothing beats a good class discussion, face to face.
Exactly! One thing that the Deformers who push depersonalized education software do not understand is that from time immemorial, education has been about people who know something and care deeply about what they know passing this on to the next generation via personal mentoring. “No,” the teacher says. “Don’t try to strike the wood. Strike THROUGH it.” Is that “wood-chopping skill?” Well, I suppose. But it’s more properly thought of as useful procedural knowledge. The student says, “Holy. Holy. Holy. Give me some of what this guy’s got!” and then “OMG. I can do this too!” Teaching and learning are two-way, INTERPERSONAL transactions. The relationships MATTER. And so does the content because that’s what gets buy-in from the kid. Ah, this person has news I can use. He or she is the real thing.
Good teachers are models to students of what an intrinsically motivated, life-long learner looks like.
Think back on your greatest teachers. What did you get from them? You got the windfall of their passion for their subject. They said, “Look at this. Do this. Isn’t that freaking cool?” And it was. Try as they might to make software and videos do this, the developers of depersonalized education software will fail. You simply can’t remove the personal stuff from education because it is TRANSACTIONAL.
It wasn’t the particular learning that mattered most. It was the model and the success in following that model, in developing a vision of what you, as a student, could be and do.
Harmful school rankings, devastating VAMming, delirious data-driven drivel, privatization, nonsensical Common Core methods, top down administrative practices… all caused or exacerbated by giving invalid test scores to politicians. If we have to scapegoat something let’s scapegoat the scapegoater — testing. The testing must stop.
So well said, LeftCoastTeacher! Beautifully written. Yes. Yes. Yes. Maybe Bernie could appoint you Secretary of Education!
Bernie would do something like that. Feel the Bern! Bernie Beats Trump!
YES!!!
The thing I recall about my favorite learning experiences was that the teachers were so different. The similarity was that they seemed to be willing to listen to me and respond with enthusiasm.
Some, however, were like intellectual parents. As I grew up, I encountered ideas that challenged the general wisdom my culture taught me. Once I was sharing my questions about whether we should have gotten into the Vietnam war with a parent of a friend who accused me of being influenced by a communist or being one myself. I felt as if someone had robbed me of an inheritance.
The next day I went to see my USHistory teacher at the university. Dr. Barton McCash was always willing to listen. I related my tale to him, and he exploded in his usual bullish way: “You have to arm yourself with the facts!” He exploded. Before long he was guiding me in a three hour course under the university honors program studying communism as an issue in American politics from 1877 to that day.
There is no teacher training that creates a relationship between teacher and student. Rather there is a sense of caring that develops into action. This takes time. That is why small classes and personal relationships are the only way we will get better results in education. there is no theory that will free us from this process. Nothing in the halls of teacher colleges will replace this ancient art.
“That is why small classes and personal relationships are the only way we will get better results in education. there is no theory that will free us from this process.”
Bingo Bangle Boingo! Give that man a Kewpie doll! 🙂
As you do so often, Roy, you nailed it.
I used to teach gifted ELA and had a new home-schooled student who was substantially above her peers in vocabulary, grammar and comprehension. She also got a perfect score on the state end of year assessment.I asked her parents what method (if any) that they followed to teach her and they told me: We just basically let her read whatever she wanted to. Some things are quite simple, really. Get them reading – the earlier the better!
Amen
One of the best English teachers I ever know was a young women (in her mid 30s) who had a VAST knowledge of YA literature–much of it pretty trashy, pulpy stuff–romances and fantasy and so on. She devoured the stuff, and at the beginning of the year, she would haul into her classroom a bunch of bookcases and an enormous collection of YA books. She would GET TO KNOW HER STUDENTS, find out what excited them, and recommend books to them. And they would read, read, read, read, read. I would often see her students carrying around the sixth or seventh book by the same YA author and talking about it with their friends. Were her seventh and eighth graders reading great literature? Well, maybe not. But they were going to be in a position to do so later on because they had caught the bug. Not a complicated thing, this. But this woman was making a LOT of difference in a LOT of kids’ lives.
Her vast knowledge of YA lit was key.
Sadly, she often got into trouble because of parental objections to content in the YA books her kids were reading. She was continually being raked over the coals by fundie parents because of this–ones who had know idea how much of a gift she was to their kids.
no idea, ofc. LOL.
YA??
Oh, sorry, Señor Swacker. English teacher, book trade speak. Young Adult.
Not to be confused with the YAhoo serving as President. The “adult” part doesn’t apply to him.
So true! I had an 8th grade strict Catholic nun English teacher who had an enormous library from which we could check out books any time we wanted. I remember reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, In Cold Blood, War and Peace, Wuthering Heights…these books introduced me to a world I had never known…Without that class my life would have been very different.
Your teacher reminds of the author Mary Leonhardt.
Her library ran more to Ender’s Game, Divergent, The Hunger Games, Go Ask Alice, Twilight, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Gossip Girl, How to Build a Girl, The Outsiders, The Giver, stuff by Judy Blume, and a lot of fantasy series that I don’t remember
I’ve had a few students in recent years ask me to buy the Tom Clancy genre for them. Alan Gratz, Scott Westerfeld and Jason Reynolds have put out some YA books lately that are very popular with my students these days. But the author they truly love, the one whose books I have trouble getting the kids to return to my shelves, and the one whose books are of fairly mature subject matter and thankfully haven’t gotten me into hot water yet (there are benefits to being on the lefty coast) is Angie Thomas. Some of the classics still work too. Harper Lee! And Jack London is very readable if the students can handle his vast vocabulary.
The Outsiders…an absolutely amazing classic, written by a 16-year-old. We read it in 7th Grade English Class when I taught middle school. The depth of student response was always astonishing.
retiredbutmissthekids: that book (The Outsiders) got my youngest & least-readingest kid into years of gobbling up various fiction series. I can’t say it made a literati out of him: he is a musician/ piano teacher, & spends most waking moments on the intricacies of compositional harmony… But he retains an in intense interest in stories [expressed via finding & binge-watching a wide variety of fictional & non-fictional video series], & loves to discuss how they are told & why that way & might alternatively be told…
One can do much worse than to devote a life to “the intricacies of compositional harmony.” And what a lesson your post is about the long-term value of real education. I love the short story form and have written sixty or seventy of them myself, and I sometimes despair that there are so few readers of them these days. There was a time when most magazines published short stories, and most writers could earn their quotidian livings churning them out, in between the novels. That time has passed. But storytelling remains as strong as ever in these video/film formats. And much of what really matters to people (and what concerns them, worries them) is reflected in those stories, as always. It’s interesting how much near-future dystopian storytelling there is in film these days–every other new work on Netflix or Amazon Prime. What does this tell us? We are undergoing a phrase transition. Big, big changes coming. Turbulent times. And as always, the storytellers knew it first, for they are the antennae of the collective organism that we are.
The Outsiders is an astonishing accomplishment for one so young, up there with Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley when she was eighteen. I love how the novel eats its own tail, like Finnegans Wake. One can learn a lot from this book about what matters to young people. There are reasons for its enduring popularity with them.
Wow, Abby! That’s a GREAT reading list!!! LOVE those books!!! I’m quite impressed that you were reading them at such an early age!!! And your nun was WAY COOL. I had the same experience with the nuns I taught with at an all-girl Catholic school. They were so loving and generous of themselves and knowledgeable and open-minded. Really impressive people.