Reading

I
love to read. I think it is becoming a lost skill. Too boring I keep hearing. In another post I will talk
above how I acquired my passionate love of reading. Before that I want to share
with you a couple of paragraphs from an amazing book I am reading. A colleague
recommended it. The book is Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire – Methods and
Madness Inside Room 56 by Rafe Esquith. I sure wish I would have had
this book 41 years ago when I started teaching and coaching. It is a must read
for teachers, coaches, and parents. I am thinking about buying some copies for our
local school board. I wonder if Arne Duncan has read this?

"Teaching
our children to read well and helping them develop a love of reading should be
our top priorities. People seem to understand this. Millions are spent on books
and other reading material, celebrities make public service announcements, and
thousands of hours are spent training teachers. The spin-doctors at various
publishing companies tell us that our students are doing better, but honest
people know this is simply not the case. Concerned teachers have learned not to
bother raising their voices, because powerful textbook companies have carefully
prepared answers to anyone who points that the emperor has no clothes. Young
teachers are afraid of being crushed by bureaucrats whose only real mission is to
keep selling their product. As testing services compete to rake in millions of
dollars, nervous school districts anxiously await the latest results. And year
after year, most children do not become passionate lifelong learners."

"It’s
complicated. There is a lot of finger pointing. But to borrow a phrase from
another big fat book that won a Pulitzer Prize, our children are victims of a
sort of “confederacy of dunces.” Powerful forces of mediocrity have combined to
prevent perfectly competent children from learning to love reading, these forces
include television, video games, poor teaching, poverty, the breakup of the
family, and a general lack of adult guidance."