Nancy Schnog had an article in the August 24, 2008, Washington Post, We're Teaching Books That Don't Stack Up.
As a teacher herself (of juniors and seniors in high school) she has some reality based observations. I don't agree completely with the implications of some of her analysis, but it is well worth reading. At the core of her article, she obliquely identifies the issue - the challenge of matching a child to the books that she might love so that interest fuels passion for reading rather than that academic exercise smothers the fire.
It is not easily done at all, and especially in these days of ever broadening social norms, inflated expectations of (mental and social) maturity, and attempts at standardization of education. I am not against rigorous performance measurement of children and schools but do recognize that that presents some very legitimate challenges that have not yet been effectively addressed.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Neurology of learning
From an e! Science News article, September 25, 2008, From 12 years onward you learn differently.
It is a short article and worth reading in its entirety.
Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.
It is a short article and worth reading in its entirety.
Adam Gopnik on Babar
From Adam Gopnik's article in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. A reflective article with some interesting observations. I particularly enjoyed his concluding paragraph.
Far more than an allegory of colonialism, the “Babar” books are a fable of the difficulties of a bourgeois life. “Truly it is not easy to bring up a family,” Babar sighs at one point, and it is true. The city lives on the edge of a desert, and animals wander in and out at will, and then wander out again to make cities of their own. The civilizing principle is energetic but essentially comical, solid-looking on the outside but fragile in its foundations, reducible to rubble by rhinoceroses. Even the elephants, for all their learning and sailor suits, can be turned into slaves through a bad twist of fate. The unruliness of natural life is countered by the beautiful symmetries of classical style and the absurd orderliness of domestic life—but we are kidding ourselves if we imagine that we are ever really safe. Death is a rifle shot and a poisoned mushroom away. The only security, the de Brunhoff books propose, lies in our commitment to those graceful winged elephants that, in Babar’s dream, at the end of “Babar the King,” chase away misfortune. Love and Happiness, who are at the heart of the American vision, are, in Babar’s dream, mere tiny camp followers. The larger winged elephants, which are at the forefront of this French vision of civilized life, are instead Intelligence, Patience, Learning, and Courage. “Let’s work hard and cheerfully and we’ll continue to be happy,” the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add.
Insight without illumination
I often am exasperated by the large community of well intended readers (most often out of academia) who spend so much time harping about the purported disguised messages (and thereby corrupting dangers) hidden in classics of children's literature, usually with the resulting advocacy that children should not be exposed to these books. My exasperation is threefold. First, that the critiques leveled at the books (usually race, class, and gender or some combination) are so extended that they would encompass virtually all well written books and thereby leave us without reading material. Second, that the messages are often so hidden that they are only discernible to an adult rather than to a child; and an adult, at that, with plenty of time on their hand for reflection. In addition, that which is being criticised is open to multiple equally legitimate interpretations - i.e. the criticism is speculative rather than fact based. Third, that the critique is so completely divorced from any sense of proportion or perspective. Proportion in that the element being criticized may only be a small part of the story. Perspective in that a parent needs all the help they can get to find an engaging story quickly and doesn't have time to read/comprehend a forty page explication about the inherent class bias exhibited in Lassie or the dangers posed by the disguised misogyny of the Hardy Boys. They just need a good story - Now!
All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.
All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.
It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.
If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.
All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.
All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.
It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.
If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.
Insight without illumination
I often am exasperated by the large community of well intended readers (most often out of academia) who spend so much time harping about the purported disguised messages (and thereby corrupting dangers) hidden in classics of children's literature, usually with the resulting advocacy that children should not be exposed to these books. My exasperation is threefold. First, that the critiques leveled at the books (usually race, class, and gender or some combination) are so extended that they would encompass virtually all well written books and thereby leave us without reading material. Second, that the messages are often so hidden that they are only discernible to an adult rather than to a child; and an adult, at that, with plenty of time on their hand for reflection. In addition, that which is being criticised is open to multiple equally legitimate interpretations - i.e. the criticism is speculative rather than fact based. Third, that the critique is so completely divorced from any sense of proportion or perspective. Proportion in that the element being criticized may only be a small part of the story. Perspective in that a parent needs all the help they can get to find an engaging story quickly and doesn't have time to read/comprehend a forty page explication about the inherent class bias exhibited in Lassie or the dangers posed by the disguised misogyny of the Hardy Boys. They just need a good story - Now!
All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.
All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.
It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.
If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.
All that being said, sometimes these cogitations do turn up some interesting points. It is rather as if these deeply knowledgeable critics entered a darkened room with a laser pointer. They can point out all sorts of interesting little features of the room in a strange red light but can give no overall illumination of the nature of the room. The parent gains more understanding of the room with a one second flip of the light switch than three hours of a laser pointer tour.
All this is brought to mind because of an article by Adam Gopnik in the September 22, 2008 New Yorker, Freeing the Elephants. Gopnik addresses a central charge leveled at Jean de Brunhoff's Babar books for the last two or three decades; namely that they are purveyors of an imperialist mind set and are therefore dismissive of the non-European world.
It is an interesting article for pointing out different ways of understanding the context in which the Babar books were written and ways of interpreting the stories. Gopnik is as deeply knowledgeable as the critics but takes a more tolerant and encompassing view of the stories.
If you are short on time though - just read the Babar stories. They are still great after all these years and will almost certainly hold your child's interest.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Books as catalysts
I have completed Nicholas A. Basbanes' wonderful Every Book Its Reader. He is eminently quotable and I will be posting a number of items here shortly.
Let's start with this simple observation:
Let's start with this simple observation:
That literature is fundamental to our cultural heritage and our shared patrimony is a given. The Greeks have their Iliad and Odyssey, the Chinese their Tao te Ching, the Indians their Mahabharata, the Italians their Divine Comedy, the Spanish their Don Quixote, and each of these works is a literary masterpiece that is transcendent, every one an epic in the most fundamental sense of the word. Even among cultures that have not survived to our time, great works that helped define who these people were live on - the Mesopotamians with their Gilgamesh, the Persians with their Shahnameh, the Anglo-Saxons with their Beowulf, the Romans with their Aeneid, the Maya with their Popol Vuh, to cite just a few examples. But books not only define lives, civilizations, and collective identities, they also have the power to shape events and nudge the course of history, and they do it in countless ways. Some of them are profoundly obvious, as in the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the 1852 novel that, some believe, moved Abraham Lincoln to remark, "caused this great war," or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, an eloquent condemnation of the pesticide DDT issued in 1962 that questioned the sureness of technological progress and ushered in the environmental protection movement.
Anne Frank and library books
From Anne Frank's diary. A Dutch friend, Miep Gies, helped shelter Anne and her family and retrieved her diary after she and the others were arrested. One of his contributions was to bring five books from the library each week.
Later she records:
We always long for Saturdays when our books come. Just like little children receiving a present. Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here.
Later she records:
I can hardly wait for the day that I shall be able to comb through the books in the public library.
How many books does the average child read in a year?
We know from the Census Bureau and Commerce Department that the average household spends about $35 per year on books.
I have often wondered how many books an average household contains but have yet to come across any sort of information that might answer that question.
The other day it occurred to me that I don't know how many books an average child reads each year. The question came to me while following a list serv discussion where the majority of the participants were advocating limiting access to books that, while popular for many decades, run counter to current social sensitivities. My initial thought was - We alredy have a hard enough time getting many kids to read much at all, why keep cutting back on books that are known to attract them?
Which then led me to the question: just how many books do kids read? It is not an easy one to answer and if anyone has better information I would be very interested in hearing about it. The best I could come up with is some calculations from raw data released in a report this year by Renaissance Learning, What Kids Are Reading. In it they report the number of books children read per year by grade. They then also provide the same information for the readers performing in the top decile of reading proficency.
There are obvious issues with this source of information. It is a structured reading program: presumably school districts that can afford such a program may already have a higher than average reading population. It is unclear that the results capture summer reading volumes. The results are self-reported by students (though they are subsequently quizzed on content) which might lead to higher than accurate reported reading. It should also be noted that the decline in number of books read, makes some sense as children move from 32 page picture books to 80 page intermediate readers, to 150 page young adult books.
The average child starts school reading 39 books per year. This goes up a little their first couple of years in school and then declines steadily. In their high school years, they are reading about 6 books a year. This latter number is consistent with surveys that are conducted periodically in which adults are asked some variation on the question of how many books did you read in the past year and in which the results typically vary between four and ten books as an answer.
The interesting aspect is that Renaissance also reported the results for the best readers. They start first grade already reading at nearly twice the volume of their peers, i.e. 74 books per year versus 39. They also exhibit a decline in number of books read per year till by high school they are reading 25 books per year. However, this represents more than a four-fold multiple of number books they are reading over that of their peers (25 books versus 6 books).
It would appear that the culture of reading is already established by high school years and that it represents a pretty wide variance between the top readers and everyone else. Mathematically, the implication is also that 76% of all books read, are read by only 10% of the population, again a number consistent with other data. I see this concentration of reading little remarked upon in the various articles and research I come across.
While these numbers are provisional, I suspect that they are in the ball park (potentially too high) and probably directionally correct. So on average, each househlod spends about $35 on books each year and the average child reads around forty picture books per year in their young years (1st through 3rd grade), about fifteen books per year in their independent reader grades (4th through 8th grade) and six books per year in their young adult years. Those are soberingly small numbers when you think about which books you would prefer that they read at each of those grade levels.
I have often wondered how many books an average household contains but have yet to come across any sort of information that might answer that question.
The other day it occurred to me that I don't know how many books an average child reads each year. The question came to me while following a list serv discussion where the majority of the participants were advocating limiting access to books that, while popular for many decades, run counter to current social sensitivities. My initial thought was - We alredy have a hard enough time getting many kids to read much at all, why keep cutting back on books that are known to attract them?
Which then led me to the question: just how many books do kids read? It is not an easy one to answer and if anyone has better information I would be very interested in hearing about it. The best I could come up with is some calculations from raw data released in a report this year by Renaissance Learning, What Kids Are Reading. In it they report the number of books children read per year by grade. They then also provide the same information for the readers performing in the top decile of reading proficency.
There are obvious issues with this source of information. It is a structured reading program: presumably school districts that can afford such a program may already have a higher than average reading population. It is unclear that the results capture summer reading volumes. The results are self-reported by students (though they are subsequently quizzed on content) which might lead to higher than accurate reported reading. It should also be noted that the decline in number of books read, makes some sense as children move from 32 page picture books to 80 page intermediate readers, to 150 page young adult books.
The average child starts school reading 39 books per year. This goes up a little their first couple of years in school and then declines steadily. In their high school years, they are reading about 6 books a year. This latter number is consistent with surveys that are conducted periodically in which adults are asked some variation on the question of how many books did you read in the past year and in which the results typically vary between four and ten books as an answer.
The interesting aspect is that Renaissance also reported the results for the best readers. They start first grade already reading at nearly twice the volume of their peers, i.e. 74 books per year versus 39. They also exhibit a decline in number of books read per year till by high school they are reading 25 books per year. However, this represents more than a four-fold multiple of number books they are reading over that of their peers (25 books versus 6 books).
It would appear that the culture of reading is already established by high school years and that it represents a pretty wide variance between the top readers and everyone else. Mathematically, the implication is also that 76% of all books read, are read by only 10% of the population, again a number consistent with other data. I see this concentration of reading little remarked upon in the various articles and research I come across.
While these numbers are provisional, I suspect that they are in the ball park (potentially too high) and probably directionally correct. So on average, each househlod spends about $35 on books each year and the average child reads around forty picture books per year in their young years (1st through 3rd grade), about fifteen books per year in their independent reader grades (4th through 8th grade) and six books per year in their young adult years. Those are soberingly small numbers when you think about which books you would prefer that they read at each of those grade levels.
Reader Testimonials
The stories of readers' interactions with books seem evergreen to me. Here are some stories from the Vancouver Sun, Tuesday September 23, 2008. I particularly enjoyed those of Rae Ellingham and Elsie Wollaston.
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