Rcharvet, a retired teacher and regular commenter here, explains how the pedagogy of the Commin Core taught his students to dislike reading. They were supposed to read excerpts of books, not a complete book. They were expected to analyze the meaning of words and sentences instead of following the narrative of the story. Mr. Charvet became a subversive. He explains here.

We had to use a program called Study Sync. The kids called it, “Study Stink.” It was a canned computer program that used excerpts from stories. It drove me nuts. A lot of highly-intellectual processing for kids who were “emerging readers.” I had to “study my brains out” to figure out what the “end game” was and then how to explain/teach it to my students. Once “I” got it (not lying took a lot of study time on my part) I could teach it. It was still boring.

We had “Lord of the Flies” but only an excerpt. None of the kids got it. I found several YouTube videos that reviewed and explained the story. Once I did that, one of my students said, “I went home and read the whole book three times! It was one of my favorites.”

When I taught reading, I would read out loud so kids would HEAR the characters voices (yes I did the voices as well). For struggling readers they typically move through a sentence like they are walking on glass. But, we worked together.

One book that we started was “The Pig Man.” It started out slow (geez I was slow) but started liking the book to the point kids were saying, “Can we read The Pig Man and find out what happened?” They felt the words. They connected to the characters. We could ask questions like, “If you were Tommy what would you do in this case? What should the Pig Man do about the broken statue?” Then because I was making a connection to the book and trying to follow the curriculum I was deemed “moving too slow” and the department head said, “Just collect all the books and move on.”

What did I know?

And then the kids had to take Accelerated Reader tests. This told them what type of book they qualified to read by their AR or Lexile number. When they went to the library the librarian would tell them, “Oh, the rocket ship book is not in your Lexile number range, you cannot read about rocket ships.” I grumbled something like, “This is f-ing messed up under my breath.”

Then, I noticed their test scores all went down. I asked them, “I am curious. You were all doing so well and then I noticed that your AR scores dropped (it’s okay) but I am just curious.” They told me the test added a clock-timer that their eyes kept looking at. “We got anxious because we could tell we only had so much time to answer the question.” Some Kids decided to punch any answer just to be done. Wow, that was fun.

And when we went to distant learning, one little girl asked, “Mr. Charvet, can I read this book because it is not my Lexile number.” I told her, “You read any book you want. Just do what I told you: if you don’t understand a word, look it up or put it on your sticky note so you can keep reading. I will help you later. But if you keep stopping, you will lose the flow and that’s no fun.”

The reading was painful to the point, I wanted to skip it. But, I did find some great FREE programs online that the kids loved as long as they didn’t tell anybody — making reading fun, our little secret.

I printed out all the papers because most kids like to have something they can “feel” when they read. The computer reading hurt my eyes; it created headaches for many of my kids.

When I taught art I had a magazine cabinet for collages. I looked up one day and there were a group of middle school boys giggling and having a good time. “Hey you kids! What are you doing back there?” I reminded them there was no reading, just collecting pictures. Then I said, “Nah, what did you find?” “Mr. Charvet, check out this giant spider egg that was buried in the ground. And look at this old boat they found. And look at this…and this… and this. They had so much fun. I said, “You know I come back here to look for pictures, too. Then an hour goes by after I read all these great articles and learned so much. You know, this is the stuff (by knowing) you can win thousands of dollars on a game show!” For crying out loud, they gave away $250K for knowing that Frodo (LOTR) was not a Pokemon. We all laughed, but that kind of reading didn’t count because they could only read books. You know REAL books.

I loved reading everything from matchbook covers and especially on the back of cereal boxes — to the comics that would take me on adventures.

Nowadays, “Yes we know Spiderman saved the day. But what was the tone of his thinking? What do you think he meant by using this word? In sentence three, he used plethora. How can that be applied in other ways?” Man, we were just happy Spiderman got rid of the bad guys. Peace out.