I teach my students lots of stuff — how to write clearly, how to read closely, and how to care about their world.
But this year, here are the two most important things I’m teaching.
1. To accomplish something big, you have to work hard to get it.
You can’t just dream it. You can’t just hope that it’ll happen. Rather, you must work hard every day — not just sometimes, not just when you feel like it.
2. You have to honor the commitments you make with people.
You can’t say one thing then do another. Never should you hide behind an excuse that “things came up.” Care about people who care about you.
Even worse, Tau analyzed all the SOTUs going back to 1934, and Obama’s addresses scored among the lowest on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. (In contrast, President John F. Kennedy’s speeches required college-level reading skills.)
While political blogs debate the significance of Obama’s relatively simplistic prose, I am wondering about a different question: If Obama’s speech is so easy to read, then why did seniors at my school have such trouble understanding it?
A quick answer, of course, is that our students have poor reading skills. Indeed, it’s altogether possible that some of our seniors read at an eighth grade level. I don’t dispute that we need to build our students’ reading skills.
(Short aside: I don’t like how adults put down young people’s poor reading skills yet do very little — if any — reading themselves. End of rant.)
But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Instead, my hunch is that our students struggled with the text because of their lack of background knowledge concerning current events, the federal government, and politics.
After all, it’s much easier to read something when you already know something about the topic you’re reading about.
I am reminded of Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide (my favorite teaching book), and his emphasis on building students’ background knowledge as a crucial component of teaching reading. Mr. Gallagher tells a story of teaching about 9/11 and realizing that a number of students thought al-Qaeda was a person. His response, the Article of the Week (which I launched last year at my school and which two of my colleagues are improving), aims to build students’ schema so that they can approach new texts.
Our students’ struggle with the State of the Union address fuels my passion to learn how to teach reading well. It’s much more than teaching reading strategies. It’s about making sure students don’t go into a text cold. It’s about encouraging curiosity and questions. And it’s about showing students how to attack a text rather than feebly slogging through word by word.
My decision this semester to focus my Kindle project on voluntary reading (rather than teacher-assigned reading) is starting to pay off.
Out of my Advisory class of 18, 10 students are reading on Kindles. It’s fun to watch. My hope is to get a class set of Kindles so every student can try one.
My favorite thing to do is to talk with students about their reading. Which books do they choose, and why? What do they like about their books? What questions are they grappling with in life, and how does reading help them answer those questions?
When given choice, students like reading, and often, they select books long considered dry or tedious. Yes, they choose classics!
Today, I checked in with a student who just recently borrowed a Kindle. I asked him what he was reading. He replied, “Animal Farm. It’s kind of funny.”
My student didn’t know that I’d taught the novel for several years, that I thought it was only an OK book, and that most students endured it just to get to the engaging mock trial project we did at the end of the unit.
He didn’t care about all that. He is reading Animal Farm, and he likes it.
Although this is just a guess, I think that the Kindle has something to do with his selection. The Kindle does an excellent job at eradicating negative peer pressure. Nobody knows what you’re reading. Nobody knows if you’re reading fast or slowly. Nobody cares if your book has a colorful cover.
It’s just you and the author’s world. And right now, my student is enjoying a little George Orwell.
Here’s a Google Docs tip that has eluded me. It’s pretty neat.
Most of the time, there’s no need to print out Google Docs. In fact, one of the best features of Google Docs is that it decreases printing and paper waste.
But sometimes, I have to print out my students’ documents. Here’s an excellent tip if you need to print multiple Google Docs at the same time.
All you have to do is click on the documents you want to print and then download them from Google Docs as a zip file. Then, once you’ve extracted them on your desktop, you can print the documents without opening Adobe Reader.
Here’s the YouTube video (@epsbtips) that explains the tip.
I hope you find this tip helpful. Now I just wish that it were easier for students to use Google Cloud Print to print their documents from their home to a school printer.
Here’s a secret: Teenagers like to read. They really do.
It’s just not cool enough, especially in public.
I mean, how uncool is it to be 14 years old riding the bus with a paperback in your hands? All your friends have iPhones and iPods and various other high-status accessories.
That’s part of the reason teenagers prefer Kindles over physical books. High-tech devices bring status.
The problem is, the Kindle isn’t high-tech enough. The iPad and Kindle Fire win out there. But the Kindle is superior for reading.
Therefore, the Kindle needs a little bit extra. That’s where Octovo sleeves come in.
Available for the Kindle Keyboard, these polyurethane sleeves ($9.75) come in six sharp colors: orange, blue, yellow, pink, gray, and black. They tell the world, loud and clear, “Yeah, I’m a reader. Do you have a problem with that?”
You might think this is silly, but it really isn’t. Until a revolution occurs in our country that propels reading to be more significant in teenagers’ lives than music, it’s crucial to make reading as tantalizing and high-status as possible.
I teach my students lots of stuff — how to write clearly, how to read closely, and how to care about their world.
