on Cutting Childrens' Reading into Tiny Pieces for Them
“But in school ONE of our requirements in the teaching of reading is to teach the skills of reading. One of the goals of the reading assigned inside and outside of school is to get the students to stop and think about what they are reading (ask questions, make inferences, make connections, understand the author’s purpose and possible bias). As older readers, we do all of this naturally. Most younger readers have not made these skills automatic. They are just enjoying the story ...they simply cannot enjoy reading until they have been given the tools & strategies in which to do so.”
Does anybody really do this in the way described? I admit to making inferences and connections, and to coming to understand the author’s mind, but (absent heavy science or philosophy) not to “stopping and thinking” in order to do so. Does a mature reader really stop dead in the middle of a story to ask himself, “What do I think Sasha will do next? What would I do in her situation? How do I know this?” No, but educationists assume that requiring kids to artificially produce the kinds of synthesis that a mature reader produces organically will somehow jump-start the process. But ‘younger readers’ have become fluent ‘older readers’ for centuries without this kind of mental dissection. What kids who don’t comprehend are missing is not “tools & strategies”, but experience and context.
It’s as if we observed that children were unhealthy from sitting and eating junk food, and then instead of providing wholesome, delicious fresh food to nourish them and train their palates, and then sending them outside to run around, we gave them little doses of questionable processed foods and vitamins designed by experts, kept them inside, and then lectured them on incomprehensible “food pyramids” that change every few years. Oh, wait….
I read an article recently by a professor at an ivy-league who described decreasing ability in his students to understand a particular movie he showed every year. I wish I remember which film classic it was, but the point was that this movie hinged on understanding that the things characters said were not necessarily the things they were thinking, and ‘making connections’ between successive vignettes in order to grasp the overall point. Just the kind of ‘critical thinking’ that teachers hope to inculcate through their ‘reading strategies’. But what this professor found was that young adults were getting steadily worse at sussing out the characters’ true motivations, and failing to get the point of the movie at all. Were these well-educated students lacking in ‘tools & strategies’? No. Divorced from the past of their own culture more than any generation before them, and fed from infancy on a diet of obvious and spoon-fed storytelling, they lack common reference points for any thought produced before they were five years old, and have no experience in grappling with beautiful and sophisticated literature.
Sigh. I had rather have my daughter spend half an hour reading about Peter Rabbit’s “soporific lettuces” than filling out a vocabulary worksheet any night of the week.
Does anybody really do this in the way described? I admit to making inferences and connections, and to coming to understand the author’s mind, but (absent heavy science or philosophy) not to “stopping and thinking” in order to do so. Does a mature reader really stop dead in the middle of a story to ask himself, “What do I think Sasha will do next? What would I do in her situation? How do I know this?” No, but educationists assume that requiring kids to artificially produce the kinds of synthesis that a mature reader produces organically will somehow jump-start the process. But ‘younger readers’ have become fluent ‘older readers’ for centuries without this kind of mental dissection. What kids who don’t comprehend are missing is not “tools & strategies”, but experience and context.
It’s as if we observed that children were unhealthy from sitting and eating junk food, and then instead of providing wholesome, delicious fresh food to nourish them and train their palates, and then sending them outside to run around, we gave them little doses of questionable processed foods and vitamins designed by experts, kept them inside, and then lectured them on incomprehensible “food pyramids” that change every few years. Oh, wait….
I read an article recently by a professor at an ivy-league who described decreasing ability in his students to understand a particular movie he showed every year. I wish I remember which film classic it was, but the point was that this movie hinged on understanding that the things characters said were not necessarily the things they were thinking, and ‘making connections’ between successive vignettes in order to grasp the overall point. Just the kind of ‘critical thinking’ that teachers hope to inculcate through their ‘reading strategies’. But what this professor found was that young adults were getting steadily worse at sussing out the characters’ true motivations, and failing to get the point of the movie at all. Were these well-educated students lacking in ‘tools & strategies’? No. Divorced from the past of their own culture more than any generation before them, and fed from infancy on a diet of obvious and spoon-fed storytelling, they lack common reference points for any thought produced before they were five years old, and have no experience in grappling with beautiful and sophisticated literature.
Sigh. I had rather have my daughter spend half an hour reading about Peter Rabbit’s “soporific lettuces” than filling out a vocabulary worksheet any night of the week.