The holiday season is here, which means your TV will likely be inundated with commercials prompting you to buy the latest gadgets.
Amazon no doubt will encourage you to buy Kindle Fire HD or the Kindle Paperwhite. But I am not moved (too much). My heart still goes out for the Kindle Keyboard: no fancy videos or pictures, built-in text-to-speech, and a full-on keyboard for highlights and annotations.
Plus, the Kindle Keyboard had a really good commercial for the holidays:
This commercial aired three years ago, when the Kindle Keyboard was the latest version, and when the Kindle Fire didn’t exist yet. Even though the ad is old, it understands what happens when we connect a kid’s curiosity to the world of books.
Annotation purists tell us to just say no to highlighters. If you let kids use highlighters, then they’ll just color up the whole page.
You mean, like this?
Yes, Annotation Purist, that’s exactly what you mean.
It’s true that there’s too much color among novice highlighters. Sometimes I ask students, “When do you highlight something?” Answer: “When it’s important.”
Ah, so everything is important.
Distinguishing what’s important vs. what’s not is a crucial skill in reading. It gets to the heart of other critical skills: summarizing, identifying author’s purpose, and identifying main claim.
And it’s not easy for most students. It takes a lot of practice.
The teachers I coach do a great job letting students know that highlighters should be used only for high-level annotation. Instead of assuming that students know what that means, teachers model when to use a pen and when to break out a highlighter.
There’s nothing wrong with a little color — if it’s just a little bit. I mean, interior decorators often suggest painting an accent wall to counteract the rest of a white dove / Muskoka Trail room.
If it’s used in a targeted way, color can help students and their peers to capture the gist of an article. If done well, highlighting complements written annotations and shows the relationship between the more important vs. less important aspects of an article.
Just thought I’d show you a few pics of the latest Kindle, Kindle #87. It’s from Mary (Parkersburg, IA), a sustaining donor, and it looks good. Here it is right next to its cover.
See how classy the $69 Kindle is? Amazon has done a great job keeping everything nice and simple. My students love how small and light this Kindle is. It gets out of the way while you read. There’s no need for a bulky device. If I were using Kindles for novel study, where students needed to annotate, I would opt for a different version (like the Paperwhite), but the whole point of the Kindle Classroom Project is to read, read, read, so the $69 Kindle is perfect.
Now comes a picture of the Kindle once it’s inside its handsome case.
I like this cover — it’s from mCover. Unfortunately, the covers are currently sold out, but I’m hopeful that the company gets more in stock so that generous donors and I can purchase some from my students’ Amazon Wishlist! 🙂 I used to purchase various covers, but the mCover (in blue) is simple and sturdy, and the students approve. Also, it’s better when all the Kindles look the same, so there isn’t student grabbiness or latent jealousy.
And here’s just one more photo, of the Kindle nicely tucked away in its case, ready to get into the hands of a student next Monday.
Simple, sleek, durable. Kindle #87 is going to be safe, and a student is going to be happy. Thanks, Mary, for your generous donation of another Kindle. It will be cared for and read with joy and gratitude!
I taught for 10 years before really figuring out how truly important and crucial reading is.
Since then, I’ve been a bit obsessed.
I’ve found that students who like to read and who are pretty good at it are much better students, have more empathy, hate school less, are calmer and more centered, and are genuinely interested in the world and interesting as people.
I’ve also found that many “reluctant” or “struggling” readers, especially boys, who publicly cry out their hatred for reading, are sometimes secret readers and writers.
Matt de la Pena, a popular author of young adult fiction, wrote a beautiful piece a few weeks ago that captured perfectly why I believe reading is important.
Entitled “Sometimes the ‘Tough Teen’ is Quietly Writing Stories,” the article begins with an anecdote in which Mr. de la Pena visits a junior high school and is warned that a troublemaker named Joshua may interrupt his presentation. Instead, the boy pays attention when Mr. de la Pena says:
I was nearly held back in second grade because I “couldn’t read,” which shattered my confidence. For a long time after that experience I viewed myself as unintelligent — and the most difficult definition to break free from, I told the students, is self-definition.
After finishing his talk, Mr. de la Pena is ready to travel to his next school presentation, but Joshua approaches him and shares that he was born in prison, was held back in school twice, likes to read, and has 30 pages of original writing in his locker — would Mr. de la Pena like to see it?
From this incident, Mr. de la Pena reflects:
This is not an isolated case. A surprising number of teens I meet in rougher schools around the country find refuge in novels and creative writing. It’s not always the usual suspects either, the high achievers. Sometimes it’s the second-string point guard on the basketball squad. Or the girl bused in from a group home. Or the kid who’s twice been suspended for fighting. The one constant I find? Many of these teens — especially the ones from working-class families — do their reading and creating in secret.
It’s unfortunate that all this reading has to be done in secret — that “guys who read books — especially for pleasure — [are] soft.” It’s sad that schools and classrooms aren’t safe places for boys of color or working-class backgrounds to share their reading lives.
After all, as Mr. de la Pena argues, reading is a journey of “becoming whole.” Later in the piece, he shares how a college professor gave him The Color Purple, which transformed his life.
[W]hen I turned the last page I found myself on the verge of tears. I was shocked. How could black and white on a page make me feel so emotional? I was a tough kid from a tougher family. I hadn’t shed a tear since elementary school. And here I was, choked up. From a book.
Why did Mr. de la Pena — and so many other young men of color — have to wait until college to find a transformative book? Too many ninth graders admit not having finished a book since the fifth grade. If that’s bad, here’s something worse: many of those same students say the same thing when they graduate four years later.
Mr. de la Pena’s piece reminds me that good reading instruction in high schools isn’t enough. It’s not enough to give students short nonfiction pieces to read closely. It’s not enough to teach students strategies of proficient readers.
If we care about students and their developing academic and personal identities, we need to put more books in front of them. We need to build schools where reading is a cultural norm, where it’s what everyone does. If that happens, then kids like Joshua won’t have to read in secret and hide their writing in their lockers.
The holiday season is here, which means your TV will likely be inundated with commercials prompting you to buy the latest gadgets.
