I posted this here a week ago. I feel like reposting it here every week for the next year until we all knock some sense into our heads. When are we going to get how damaging reading class novels is for our students, for our esprit de corps, for our sense of community and for the inclusion of all the kids in the room, so that our classes don’t split down racial and economic lines?
THESE are the two ways that in my opinion are the best way to do a reading class:
1. Students read by themselves. This is the best in terms of gains. We do this during Free Choice Reading.
2.Students use the Reading Options to read stuff they created together. This is a real winner and a part of the powerful “Star Sequence for Teaching a Non-targeted Language Class”.
Reading class novels is not the way to teach reading in world languages.
Here is something from a comment Robert Harrell made here last month about how C.S. Lewis said that the Narnia books – which are a culture – were created from images. It’s a repost from a few weeks ago bc I feel so strongly about the damage class novels do to kids:
…some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument; then collected information about child psychology and decided what age-group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out “allegories” to embody them. This is pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images: a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling….
My reaction to what Lewis says above is that it is a powerful quote about the power of images to create things that are real to readers, written by a truly powerful author. We should take a page out of Lewis’ playbook instead of writing class novels to address word lists as the TPRSers are doing now, which sadly seems to be an even more-used teaching technique (class novels) than ever before in TPRS, complete with “teacher’s guides” now that really make the process different and infinitely more boring from the kind of thing Lewis describes above.
When are we going to just work with images and, following the Star Sequence, read what the kids create instead of those boring-ass novels? Fine, do it in level 3 but making kids read those class novels in levels 1 and 2 is not the best move for novice readers because of what the research says. Unfortunately, teachers still do it not just because they are out of touch with the research but also because they either don’t care or are not aware of the dangerous splitting off of the mainly white kids who can read from the rest of the class caused by the class novels. By doing that they perpetuate the embedded problem of racism in our nation’s classrooms.
When in our hell state now in America are we going to finally get away from white privilege? When are teachers going to take responsibility for doing more than just teaching the material?
The Problem with CI
Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and
