Summer Reading: Bring back the pleasure
Sent to the Wall Street Journal, June 25
Summer Reading for Parents (June 25) shows how the common core is pushing publishers and parents in the wrong direction. None of these fads, all featured in the WSJ article, is supported by research, experience, or common sense: reward stickers, restricting children to reading at “their level," and a de-emphasis of fiction.
Rewarding reading can send the message that reading is so unpleasant that bribes are necessary. The rewards also focus children more on what they need to remember to do to get prizes than the pleasure of reading.
Restricting children to reading at a certain level makes the incorrect assumption that readers must know nearly every word to understand and enjoy texts. John Holt tells this story:
"… One day, in one of our many free periods, (one of my students) was reading at her desk. From a glimpse of the illustrations I thought I knew what the book was. I said to myself, "It can't be," and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, she was reading Moby Dick. When I came close to her desk she looked up. I said, " Are you really reading that?" She said she was! I said, "Do you like it?" She said, "Oh, yes, it's neat!" I said, "Don't you find parts of it rather heavy going?" She answered, "Oh, sure, but I just skip over those parts and go on to the next good part."
Holt continues: "This is exactly what reading should be and in school so seldom is- an exciting, joyous adventure. Find something, dive into it, take the good parts, skip the bad parts, get what you can out of it, go on to something else. How different is our mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of understanding that can be dug out of a book."
Nonfiction and other kinds of "light reading" form the bridge between "conversational" anSKrashen: Summer Reading: Bring back the pleasure: