I have said before that I love Peter Greene. He has turned his four decades of experience as a high school English teacher into a compendium of wisdom. He knows when to listen carefully to new ideas and when to throw them out with the garbage. He usually says what I have been thinking, but writes it up better than I could. This is one of those wonderful pieces that are trademark Peter Greene.
He writes:
Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simply referral to Dana Goldstein’s New York Times pieceabout how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It’s a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible).
The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on “Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here].” Also variations on “Aren’t books over, really?” and its cousin “I didn’t read any books and I am just swell.”
Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it’s great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name).
One problem is the Core’s focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn’t matter what or how much you read. If today’s lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn’t matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don’t need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.
And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem.
The Big Standardized Test doesn’t just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o’writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work.
To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.
If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading “skills,” then you have to take the time to pursue it.
It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room).
And look– I don’t want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it’s worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren’t even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don’t read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy– “Kids These Days don’t remember the old songs and stories any more.”
Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial “skills” over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read.
If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world.
The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.
Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we’ll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So I keep hearing that teachers and teachers’ unions are the reason kids can’t read. Current test scores are really bad, worse than ever. When did this happen? People have been saying it for a long time. So when will the teacher blamers start looking for other reasons? Other Scapegoats? Is there a way to make them understand that many of these problems started with No Child Left Behind and Common Core? Maybe some day.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Current test scores are really bad, worse than ever.”
Who gives a rat’s patoot about those completely invalid standardize test scores other than those who have no clue about the teaching and learning process? What you state is a common maltrope that has served as the main rationale in continuing the standards and testing malpractice regime.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This might be a good time to remind ourselves that the Nineteenth Century way to establish good education was the Normal School. The idea was to teach teachers what a good education looked like, then encourage teachers to pass that on to society. Notwithstanding the embedded racism in the system and society, that worked pretty well. It took testing to erode that system.
LikeLike
Reading entire books promotes deeper understanding and critical thinkers. Frankly, it our current political climate we are in dire need of more critical thinkers, not that literature should necessarily be political, although some may be. It encourages young people to question, to discuss and formulate defensible opinions in group discussions. I tend agree with Frank Smith’s view of reading that “reading is thinking.” Reading whole books enlightens readers about politics, culture, history and the human condition itself. Good literature gives young people vicarious experiences that contribute to who they are, who they want to become and perhaps even alerts them to mistakes they should avoid in life. In other words books can help young people develop academically, socially and emotionally.
On another one of Greene’s posts, he also defends the reading of excerpts from fiction and non-fiction. If we are going to persists in administering the big standardized tests, then some time should be spent on helping students with the “fast track” skills-based goal of reading excerpts. Unfortunately, in some school districts today, excerpts with multiple choice questions are the main source of reading today. Selecting correct answers does not promote critical thinking and rarely teachers young people much about life other than they despise this type of robotic charade that pretends to “educate.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
This, as usual, a brilliant and thoughtful evaluation of the conundrum greeting all teachers. Since the movement to codify curriculum, the experience of being challenged by this problem is not happening as often. Many of my colleagues who are still teaching are forced into a sort of script. That in itself is problematic. Resourceful and imaginative people avoid such experiences, dumbing down the teaching corp by selecting for those who either have no imagination or have to have a job.
We need thinkers like Peter Greene in the classroom.
LikeLike
As a matter of general education, you are ABSOLUTELY right. As a matter of education in a school, in an American public school, you need to integrate into your analysis awareness that: distinctions are necessary; choices among students will be made; rankings are inevitable, and time is limited. There’s also the bogey man of capitalism and its grip on American governments. Education should not capitulate to their requirements, but it must figure out how to deal with them. That task is both intellectual and political.
LikeLike