I won't pretend to know what happens in other school systems, but I can tell you that in New York City public schools, this is absolutely not true. The districts that are regarded as the "best" (i.e. they report the best testing results - more about that later) aim the vast majority of their efforts and resources at the kids in the middle of the bell curve because that way they maximize their numbers in a one-size-fits-all approach. Back in the 1990s, when I was organizing other special-ed parents to help protect services, our most fierce allies were the parents of kids in the TAG programs. Why? Because those kids weren't being challenged any more effectively than my kids were being served. And that was long before the corporate-style by-the-numbers checklisting that NCLB dumped on kids. If you find anyone - anywhere in the US - who thinks the school system is working as well as it should be, please send them my way. I have a lovely bridge to sell them. Improving them requires us to look at the schools to see what is wrong with them. I see three main areas of difficulty - 1) Environmental, 2) Approach, 3) Expectations. 1) Environmental - Back when Rudy Crew was chancellor of the NYC schools, my wife was teaching in Mott Haven in the Bronx. Mott Haven is part of what was then and probably still is the poorest congressional district in the entire country. Jonathan Kozol wrote a book about Mott Haven at that time called Amazing Grace - Raising Children in the Inner City. Something like 90% of the kids he met there suffered from asthma, and in the two years he lived there researching the book, he developed asthma, which he'd never had before. A few blocks from the school where my wife taught, there was a memorial to a man named Moondog, who'd been killed shielding an expectant mother from gunfire during a street firefight. Of the several hundred students in her school, every single one was on free breakfast and lunch except one, and he was on subsidized breakfast and lunch. When schools were closed, these kids didn't eat much. One day, when she came back from lunch, she found several DEA agents staked out in her classroom, monitoring the abandoned houses across the street. Another time, she saw paramedics coming out of those houses with a young child who was dead. Yet another time, as she was leaving school early, she walked smack into a major drug bust - several men being marched out at gunpoint. One night in an interview on a local cable news channel, Crew said that what people don't realize is the wide range of social problems the schools are called upon to deal with. Breakfast and lunch in places like Mott Haven; monitoring immunizations; dealing with Children's Services on a regular basis for issues ranging from truancy to neglect to domestic violence (my wife once testified in Family Court as ACS was taking custody of a young girl with autism who had been repeatedly beaten by her mother's boyfriend); stemming teen pregnancy and STDs; dealing with children of homeless families. Nice backdrop for learning. Great for teacher morale. The next layer of the environment comes when politicians decide that schools should be run like corporations. Principals are now wholly responsible for their schools' budgets, including teacher salaries, and are paid annual bonuses for coming in under budget. Thus, teachers are no longer prized for ability or experience, but for coming cheap. Push out the old (if you can) and bring in the new. Teacher training? Strictly on the cheap. Then, on top of THAT, Washington decides that all teachers have to be "accountable" and the only way to do that is via more rigorous testing - enter, Stage Right, NCLB. Of course, with more rigorous testing comes more rigorous administration to document it (read: cost in both dollars and time). Then, on top of THAT, Washington decides that certain basics have to be taught, because our math and science accomplishments are circling the drain. Enter, Stage Left, the Common Core. Of course, with more rigorous course content requirements come more rigorous administration to document its development and implementation (read: cost in both dollars and time). As they say in Brooklyn, "Are you ****ing kidding me?!" 2) Approach. As I mentioned before, the tendency is to take a one-size-fits-all approach. It's the only way to rationally implement any top-down effort, and, as noted above, everything in education over the past quarter century has been top-down. OSFA only addresses the center of the bell curve, and because we are dealing with an incredible disparity of children (economically, racially, culturally, linguistically, cognitively) that center gets more and more narrow as the OSFA grows more and more broad. At some point, it becomes "one-size-fits-nobody". I think we may already be there. 3) Expectations. True story. Back in my parent-activist days, the local school district my children attended was hiring a new superintendent. Each candidate was asked the same questions, and one question was, "What would you do to engage the students of the district?" His answer: "At the beginning of the school year, I would send out printed postcards to every student in the district telling them they're special." Imagine my surprise when the school board didn't hire him! The whole "self-esteem" thing is proof of how we, as a species, seem to have lost the ability to approach things rationally. As the parent of a learning-disabled child, I know all about self-esteem issues and how serious they can be. But the notion somehow got elevated to a mantra, and so anything that made a child feel good about himself was considered good and whatever made him feel badly about himself was bad. Homogenous groups - in which children of similar abilities were grouped together for reading and math - were a staple of my early education. The problem wasn't the groupings themselves, but the way in which the various groups were labeled (Group 1, Group 2 and Group 3, from best to worst) and the fact that the groups were sometimes used as a disciplinary device (a child who misbehaved repeatedly in Group One might well end up in Group Three as punishment - I speak from experience). But, no, we trashed the whole concept. Over the years, we trashed a lot of things in the name of self-esteem (of course, we then trashed the trashing, bringing back rigorous testing and to hell with self-esteem). And now I get to [MENTION=55557]NeonFraction[/MENTION]'s notion that making reading "easier" will somehow make more kids read. This assumes that classics are harder to read than fantasy, which I don't buy. Assuming that we are talking about ages 13-18, it comes down more to personal taste than anything else. It's still true that the only way to introduce students to classics (and I take it as axiomatic that we regard them as classics because we see an inherent value in them that transcends other works) is to have them read them. As has been pointed out earlier in this thread, many works that are considered classics are easily readable and understandable by the age group at issue, so arguments about struggling with Middle English are just red herrings. NeonFraction seems to take offense at the fact that some kids are more willing readers than others, and therefore will do better in English Lit than others. My answer is, so they do. We don't have a problem with the fact that some kids are better at Algebra and Geometry than others (of course, our national proficiency in math seems to be sinking like a stone, which suggests that perhaps we let kids off a little too easily - self-esteem trumps all once again). The answer to all this? Well, I'd start by shutting down all talk shows. Or at least prohibit anyone from claiming that there are "simple" solutions. Given my bare-bones outline above (which only begins to scratch the surface of the problem), nothing is simple. And I haven't even touched on the problems in other locales, such as the drive to teach creationism, et al. I also haven't touched on the roles a declining economy and declining national expectations play in the educational process. In 1961, the world witnessed the single most effective adult literacy campaign in history. The previous September, Fidel Castro announced at the United Nations that he would end adult illiteracy in Cuba. At the time, illiteracy rates in Cuba's rural areas topped 40%, and it hovered over 10% in the cities. And he did it. It took a national mobilization effort (interrupted by an invasion attempt), and they closed the schools for eight months to mobilize every teacher in the country as well as a good many students. But in the end, they reduced adult illiteracy to something like 4%. Of course, this only reflected rudimentary literacy, and there was a sustained effort over the next several years to bring the population up to high school reading levels that likewise was extremely effective. By contrast, in the mid-1960s, UNESCO spent over $30 million on adult literacy campaigns in 11 countries and got zero results. The Cubans learned that there were three elements that were necessary for an effective education program - you had to know what it was you wanted the students to learn, you had to care about the students, and the students had to have a vested interest in learning. Would the Cuban effort succeed in the US? Not in the manner it did in Cuba, for a variety of reasons. But the three elements ring true and could be adapted. First, it can't be done nationally. Federal funding to support education does not mean that the feds should control the process. Any basic course content required as a condition for funding should be stated in one paragraph, max. Any documentation required should likewise be limited to one paragraph. But any further intrusion into local schools would violate the second principle. Second, get the corporate concepts out of the classroom. Nowhere in the three principles do you see anything about cost containment. Right now, we probably spend a lot more on administrative crap than we do on the students, which is another violation of the second principle. To the extent that schools have to provide social services - and they do - those funding streams should not run through education budgets and education officials should not be responsible for them. Staffing at schools to coordinate those services - health, ACS, etc - should be outside the educational organization structure. Third, students have to be engaged. This does not mean making it easier or even more fun for them to learn (again, we are talking about 13-18 year olds, here, where there needs to be a certain expectation of maturity). It does mean giving them support when they struggle with learning, whether through one-on-one instruction, alternative methods or addressing issues beyond the classroom. It means engaging them as people and taking a real interest in the kind of people they are and who they are becoming. The works we consider "classics" often address those very issues. Maybe we should talk about that. How can A Separate Peace, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or The Old Man and the Sea NOT speak to most teens? We also need to challenge them to look beyond who they think they are and limiting attitudes. To Kill A Mockingbird, Little Women, An Enemy of the People, The Cherry Orchard and The Ox Bow Incident are all excellent and thoroughly readable and get to the heart of such issues. Will some kids resist? Sure. Kids do that. And a few you'll never reach. But I bet you'd reach far more than you are right now.
I've read 12 of them. Plus a little bit of Dune, but I was reading that when I was a teenager. It was a bit heavy going so I stopped and took it back to the library. I've also seen a stage production of Hamlet. I think that's how the author intended for his work to be seen rather than read from a book, so that should count to
I was too lazy to actually count but I was surprised at how many of them I've actually read or on my list of books to read. I'd say about 2/3 of the list maybe... So much good literature out there...
I've read 21 to completion and I've read the first volume of the Sherlock Holmes series. Some of the books on there I've started but just could not finish. I had a list like this years ago from high school. I've since lost it but whenever I'd find it, I could tick off more books. I'll printing this out and using it as a guide!
I don't make a habit of reading books before the advent of mass photography, so that rules out a fair few, although I have read Dracula and the Sherlock Holmes series. I've also read the Harry Potter series, To Kill a Mockingbird, Nineteen Eighty Four, His Dark Materials, The Hobbit, The Catcher in the Rye, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Winnie-the-Pooh, Animal Farm, The Da Vinci Code (I am ashamed to say), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Of Mice and Men, On the Road and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So that gives me 19.
I've read 18. Most of them were required reading in school. I'm not sure I like this list. It includes a lot of general fiction but not much science fiction or fantasy.
I read fellowship, but not TT or RotK. Not all of it. Done Lolita is a vulgar word? Anyway, I read it. Two awesome must reads. Done, next The PD version was taken down from amazon due to formatting issues. I want to get it. A long, long time ago. Working on this one now. Awesome book.
13. though i think i ended up miscounting one or two... so it may be more. I am seriously going to need to read Watership Down though since i have seen the movie -i want to see what it was inspired by.
