THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 11, 1995 TAG: 9505100012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Another View
SOURCE: By JOY HAKIM
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
The latest U.S. Department of Education study shows, once again, that our children are not reading much, nor are they comprehending the little they do read. And in Virginia the results are even more disastrous than in most other states. When our economy demanded primarily assembly-line workers, farmers and shopkeepers, it didn't matter if you were a sophisticated reader or not. In the Information Age it does. Why are we doing so poorly? Secretary of Education Richard Riley blames television. But there is more to it than that. Perhaps this tale will be instructive:
I was a brand new fifth-grade teacher in a big inner-city school - eager and a bit scared. But my students were terrific and the year began well. On the first day we opened our reading books, read a good story, talked about it and its words, did some writing and went on to other things.
The second day we read another story. And so it went, day after day. We were having fun with our reading.
Then, some weeks after school began, my supervisor appeared. She seemed pleased. I was in control and had no problems to report. But as she started to leave I did have a question. ``Where do I get the next reading book?'' I asked. ``We've almost finished with this one.''
``Finished the reading book?'' She could barely get the words out. ``How in the world have you been teaching reading?''
She sat down and explained patiently to this neophyte how to do it. Clearly, I had been playing around. Didn't I know how to teach? I had deprived my students of their due. I believed her.
And so I began teaching properly. We now spent a full week on each short story, reading a few pages a day and then doing all the exercises suggested in the teacher's guide. You can guess what happened. Reading, which had been the highlight of the day, now was boring. The stories were lost. We were reading and analyzing paragraphs. Before the first week was over, the kids were climbing the walls. By the end of the second week I was there with them.
It began to occur to me that there might not be any other fifth-grade reading texts. I was right. We do a whole lot of talking about the importance of reading, but our schools spend hardly any money on books.
Richmond spends $7,161 annually on each of its schoolchildren. How much of that is for books? The Department of Education doesn't ask school districts to tell it, so we don't know. But in New York City, which also allocates more than $7,000 annually for each public-school student, the amount spent on classroom supplies - that includes books, paper and pencils - is less than $44 a year.
The story is much the same nationally. About $2 billion a year goes for all classroom supplies, including books. That may sound like a lot, but it isn't. Pet supplies cost us $30 billion annually.
Now, I admit to a personal interest in this subject. When I left the classroom I became a writer. I was an editorial writer at The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk. Then I decided to combine my interests - in writing and teaching - and write a children's history. The one-volume book that I intended turned into a 10-volume storyteller's history. The books have been well-received.
It's essential that our children learn history and the allied social studies. They need to know who they are and from where they've come. Democracies are fragile institutions; they demand informed citizens. And so we all should care that our children understand their government. But I had another motive when I began writing history for children: What I really intended was to teach reading - critical reading. We hardly do that in our schools.
Which is amazing, because we talk about it a whole lot.
We teach reading as a literary skill. And while being able to read ``Romeo and Juliet'' will enhance your life and broaden your perspectives, it isn't likely to prepare you for the kind of reading the Information Age demands. Today, most of our adult reading is nonfiction. That's the kind of reading our 21st-century children will have to do skillfully. And we don't teach them how. Nor do we give them much practice.
I visit a lot of classrooms, and when I tell social studies teachers that they need to focus on the teaching of reading, they often look at me quizzically. They haven't been trained to do so.
Yet when it comes to critical reading, history shines. Hardly anything approaches it in its demands for analysis and thinking. Besides that, history is a natural with children; it's filled with adventures, battles, heroes and villains. They all just happen to be true.
But how do we teach history in most schools? With dull textbooks that are litanies of facts demanding memory and little thought. We focus on routine teacher's-guide exercises with only a small amount of time, if any, allotted to probing the underlying and very difficult questions that history asks.
It doesn't work. It's dull. It turns children off. I know first-hand that they can handle challenging thoughts. ``Your book made me think,'' wrote one of my young readers. ``That is what I meant it to do,'' I wrote back.
Studies show us that our high-school graduates know little or no history. As for critical reading? The Department of Education tells us that our children are falling down the charts in that skills.
What's the solution? Make every teacher, in every subject, a reading teacher. Buy books for our schools: good books that engage young minds and hearts; books that can compete with television. (For the most part, trade books are better than textbooks.) Trust children to read and think without needing an excess of explanations. Help them learn research skills. And then have them write critical papers about their reading and their thoughts. It will work. I visit schools all the time. I've seen it happen. MEMO: Ms. Hakim lives in Virginia Beach.
by CNB