NH literacy journeys

Hello all,Most of you have not posted yet about Tom Newkirk’s article on reading, but I found this blog essay over break and wanted to share it with you. It is another thread to our discussion of reading. You can respond to this essay and post or Tom’s, or both. Let me know if you’re having any trouble posting.One of the things I love about break week is the opportunity to read. I finally picked up and finished Three Cups of Tea coauthored by Greg Mortenson and a journalist, who’s name I have forgotten. This is a book that definitively answers the question: can one person make a real difference in this world? It is about his mission to create schools in Pakistan. It is great reading, filled with adventure and insight into an area of the world I know too little about. It also reminded me of how many people in our world are desperate to learn how to read. I hope you had a chance to do some light reading of your own….Below is the blog essay I mentioned. I think you’ll enjoy it. February 20, 2008Book Lust by Timothy Egan, The New York TimesEvery now and then, someone who is brilliant says something stupid — often the result of spending too much time riding a jet stream of high praise. Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple Inc., did such a thing last month when he all but declared the death of reading.Asked about Kindle, the electronic book reader from Amazon.com, Jobs was dismissive. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”This is nonsense on several levels. But before we get to reading, let’s stipulate that Jobs is deserving of his 2007 ranking by Fortune Magazine as the most powerful person in business. Anyone who can cause revolutions in five industries, as Fortune noted, is a titan — capable of touching a billion lives.His life story is inspiring. An adopted child, he drops out of Reed College in Portland, Ore., but remembers the calligraphy classes when he designs the typography for the Macintosh. Gets rich. Gets fired. Gets cancer. Survives all three. Takes acid, wanders around India, dates exotic older women. Marries. Has kids. Loves the Beatles, and cites their creative tension as a business model. Gives great commencement speech at Stanford, concluding: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”The Mac, Pixar, the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes. This stuff is cool. Lighter than air. iGetit. But it’s just product, dude.Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.For most of my lifetime, I’ve heard that reading is dead. In that time, disco has died, drive-in movies have nearly died, and something called The Clapper has come and gone through bedrooms across the nation.But reading? This year, about 400 million books will be sold in the United States. Overall, business is up 1 percent — not bad, in a rough economy, for a $15 billion industry still populated by people whose idea of how to sell books dates to Bartleby the Scrivener.Next year, business may be down, and several publishers may merge, and certainly more of the poor, beloved independent bookstores will cling to life support. Steve Jobs will stroll into a room filled with breathless acolytes and pull a must-have trick from his bag. We’ll oohh and ahhhh about it, then go back to lives where a good book still holds more power than anything with a screen. Power to transport the reader to another world. Power to get inside somebody’s else mind, to live their story, to be moved.Yes, the act of reading takes some effort, unlike the passive act of using the products Jobs has created, which involves little more than directing eyeballs to a flat patch or putting a plug into the ear. True, reading is down, somewhat, from 1992, especially reading of literature. So what? People are eating fewer vegetables than they used to – or should – but that doesn’t mean carrots have no future.When Jobs cited the 40-percent-who-don’t-read figure, he was no doubt referring to a hand-wringing and possibly erroneous 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts. “This report documents a national crisis,” the chairman, Dana Gioia, said at the time. Message from the cultural elite: read, you morons, and eat your spinach while you’re at it!Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. Steve Jobs may be many things – maestro, visionary, demi-god – but he apparently isn’t a careful reader of certain market reports.The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.Most companies would kill for a market like that – more than one-fourth of the world’s biggest consumer market buying 15 or more of its items a year. And half the population bought nearly 6 books a year. If only Apple were so lucky. The latest Harry Potter book sold 9 million copies in its first 24 hours – in English. “The DaVinci Code,” a story of ideas even with its wooden characters and absurd plotting, has sold more than 60 million copies.By contrast, Apple reported selling a piddling 3.7 million of the much-hyped iPhones through 2007. Is the iPhone dead? Of course not. But what should be dead are foolish statements about how human nature itself has changed because of some new diversion for our thumbs.Jobs was prompted by the excitement over Kindle, the $399 electronic book reader that shows signs of being a blockbuster for Amazon.com; demand is much higher than supply, according to the company.Paper or plastic, it doesn’t matter what form the book takes. What is timeless, Steve, is story, and that’s why people will never stop reading. I loved Sara Rimer’s piece in The Times about how immigrant children were taking to “The Great Gatsby,” the perfect novel about the tragic side of the American Dream.Our teenage son put his text-messaging aside when he discovered “Friday Night Lights,” by H.G. Bissinger, and “Hate Mail from Cheerleaders,” a collection of Rick Reilly’s spot-on sports columns. Those were his gateway drugs. He’s moved on to the Tobias Wolff memoir, “This Boy’s Life,” and “Seabiscuit,” by Laura Hillenbrand. He even sets aside his iPod when he reads.I look forward to a first-rate biography of Steve Jobs, an American original. His life – what a story! I’d read about it any day, in any form, long after the iStuff is forgotten.

Like all of you, I read this article with a mixture of wonder and frustration. So few adults read anymore, so no wonder our students do not read, and rarely read deeply. Plus, the superficial standards and expectations that come out of state departments of education undermine what we believe we need to be teaching: to read, write, and think with clarity and power.What to do?Su gave me an article from Harper’s that I found interesting. I liked this quote in particular:Once you’ve pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your heard. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not ‘interactive; with a set of rules and options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it. ~Ursula K. Le Guin, “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading”I like all of that quote, in fact, except that last line. I want to add, not everyone is up to it YET. Because I do believe we can teach students to read deeply like she explains, and we can build stamina in adolescents so that they can tackle challenging texts. But I’m afraid there are too many short cuts that students access (like Spark Notes) and so they skim through high school not reading much at all. As Newkirk said, they become better readers by reading a lot, so how do we make that happen?I look forward to your thoughts…Penny

John Merrow’s article brought up several things for me. I found myself nodding in agreement to his thinking around rewriting. It is important for students to write, yes, but more important that they get feedback and rewrite. My students make the most real progress when they go back to revise something several times. But of course this means that they may not produce as many final products in the end. Which matters more: lots of adequate first drafts or a few sterling last drafts? It’s that same old argument about trying to do too many things at the surface level instead of digging deeply into learning fewer things in whatever content we teach. We all battle with this: so much to teach, so hard to teach it all well. How can we build rewriting into our courses so that students realize the value of the writing process?I appreciated how frank he was about the conditions in different public schools in this country, since it is a real injustice and one that fires me up. After five years as a student teaching supervisor in Michigan where I visited inner-city Detroit schools in the morning, then the wealthiest Bloomfield Hills suburban schools in the afternoon, it is an issue that still eats at me. He said, “We have, increasingly, two worlds: the comfortable and smug world of wealthy public schools, and the underfunded and inefficient schools in which the poor are isolated.” Why is this true in this country? We have good conditions here at our new high school, but we can easily remember how different things were just last year. Why should some students have opportunities determined by where they live and what taxpayers in that district can afford? It’s just not right.Lastly, I pondered the way he taught when he didn’t know what levels meant in his school…when he looked at his students and imagined what was possible, instead of setting his expectations based on the label they carried to class. It’s a trap; we all know it. Sometimes my best writers are the CP students that are blended in with the Adv in our writing course. How do we work around leveling students in high school?At the end of the article he said, “I go to school and feed off the energy and youthful optimism of students and the dedication of the best teachers. I regain my balance and optimism and leave rejuvenated.” Thanks for helping me regain my balance every time we meet.I look forward to reading your responses to this article.