Our kids need Harry Potter

Last weekend, we drove nine hours to go camping at Disney World. We drove nine hours back yesterday, and, for much of this time, poor Sam had to listen to me read articles about the Common Core on his iphone.

Finally, at one point, he looked at me and said, "You're finding a lot of articles criticizing the core. Perhaps you should find articles for the other side. To balance things out a little."

Well, I didn't look for these articles, because I've already read many of them, but what I did instead, was turn to the core itself. We read over the standards (I've done this many times already), and really, essentially, the standards say, "We want your child to be able to read something, comprehend it, make use of it in his brain, and retell that information to others in a clear, useful format."

The language is so garbled and full of jargon, it is difficult to wade your way through the mire, but truly, that's really all it says. Again and again and again.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Right.

But is this idea new? School districts and states are scrambling to buy new curriculums, new software, new tests to meet these "new" standards. Because there must be a silver bullet, right? There has to be some program out there that will finally help us meet this new, elevated standards that are so good and new. There has to be a program out there that will teach our kids to read.

Let me pause in my sarcasm (sorry, I'm trying not to be cynical), to explain why I pulled my third grader out of school this year.

This is the year they began implementing the Common Core for language arts in our district. In the process, they bought two new programs: Daily CAFE, an organizational program to help the teachers organize reading time, and, The Daily Five.

I went to the third grade Open House. I watched my son's teacher roll her eyes about the new programs. I watched her explain that they didn't really understand how this was going to work, but they were going to do it anyway. I watched her list the steps in the writing process. Prewrite. Write. Rewrite. Peer Edit. Revise. Publish. As if there is a checklist writers of all types go through as we write. "Ah, let's see, prewriting done—check! Writing done—check! Now I will rewrite. Now I will share with my peers. Now I will revise. Now I will publish. Check!" I'm not even sure what the difference is between revising and rewriting. I've never distinguished between the two—and I never heard anyone do so during my two years in a master's program on writing. I listened to her use terms about the learning process I'm not convinced she understood herself because they were vague and a little meaningless.

Our district (and yours too, most likely) is rewriting the rules, rewriting the curriculum, rewriting teaching, rewriting our children's lives.

(Read this article for a great example of the impact this is having on our schools:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicholas-tampio/do-we-need-a-common-core_b_1497854.html  )

I was concerned after this open house, so I paid close attention to Calvin. He came home from school very unhappy each day. He was irritable, and he is my never-irritable child. He didn't have enough time to read about animals, to go outside, he complained. He didn't have enough time to fill his mind with information, which is what Calvin loves to do. Because at school, they weren't filling his mind with information. They were doing Daily CAFE. They were doing The Daily Five. They were giving him the skills he needs to meet this demand:
"We want your child to be able to read something, comprehend it, make use of it in his brain, and retell that information to others in a clear, useful format."

In this search for the silver bullet to meet these new standards, we are forgetting a fundamental part of education. You don't read something, comprehend it, make use of it and then retell it just to do it. It's the information you gain in the process that is important. Reading is a tool. Writing is a tool. These things are used in order to acquire specific information, and, for school children, that information better be interesting and important.

Calvin wants to learn about science. He loves science. So why not give him science with a focus, with a purpose, and in the process fulfill those requirements for the Common Core? I'm not sure, but that's not what is happening.

My darling friend posted a comment on my last post. She told the story of how reading Harry Potter with her third grader turned him into a reader and raised his reading scores in just two months. He is trudging his way through those books not because he wants to become a great reader, but because he wants to find out what is going to happen. He is captivated.

Imagine if he'd only read the part where Harry fights Voldemort at the end because the reading program was trying to teach cause and effect? What if he only read the part where Harry goes to Diagon Alley for the first time because the reading program is trying to teach him how to use adjectives? Would he have fallen in love with Harry Potter if Harry's story were abbreviated, short-changed, stolen from him altogether? Harry Potter is above his level, but he is a boy pushing his way through a difficult reading snowstorm because the destination is so enticing, not because someone is telling him he'd better do it or his test scores will plummet.

In Saffy's Angel, by Hilary McKay, Indigo does not like to read. He's a poor reader until he develops an intense love for polar exploration. He forces himself to read adult books about polar exploration because they are all he can get on the subject, and he cannot quench his thirst. He uses dictionaries and encyclopedias to make sense of what he is reading. He rereads those books again and again until he understands every word, because he loves the subject. Not because he wants to be a great reader. Because he wants to be a polar explorer one day, and books are the best way for him to learn about it.

If your child is struggling with reading in any way, or even if they are supposedly on grade level—who knows what that really means—find them a book they can fall in love with. I promise you, that book exists. You may not think it does, but it does. There are books on every subject you can imagine, old and new. I will help you find them or there are other great blogs that recommend books. One of my favorite books on reading is this:


How to Get Your Child to Love Reading by Esme Codell. The lists in there are awesome. Her ideas are awesome.

It doesn't really matter if the Common Core is good or bad. But it does matter, very desperately, how it is implemented. Schools are taking books away from children in order to fulfill these demands. School libraries are struggling, librarians are being fired and replaced by aides who have no training, but computer programs and Ipads aimed at helping the kids master the core are being bought up indiscriminately.

My friend's son did not need his school district's amazing new reading textbook to improve his scores. He needed Harry Potter.

A Little Bookroom

If you've ever doubted the power of books to save and make a life, read this:

My Father's Books by Luan Starova. 

At the very least, it will motivate you to make books more important in your life. Not just urging your kids to do their reading homework every night, but using books to define your own life, and letting them see that definition every day.

Here is a snippet from another favorite book of mine, a wonderful book of short stories, magical tales, originally published in the early 1900s. It's the introduction written by the author, Eleanor Farjeon, and I think of it every day when I find books EVERYWHERE in our house. In the bathroom. On the floor. On the couches. Under beds. In the room I affectionately call "The dungeon," where the bikes are stored and the dogs sleep (????). This passage from the introduction demonstrates the joyous (if messy) life of a family that loves to read.

"In the home of my childhood there was a room we called ‘The Little Bookroom’. True, every room in the house could have been called a bookroom. Our nurseries upstairs were full of books. Downstairs my father’s study was full of them.  They lined the dining-room walls, and overflowed into my mother’s sitting-room, and up into the bedrooms. It would have been more natural to live without clothes than without books. As unnatural not to read as not to eat.

Of all the rooms in the house, the Little Bookroom was yielded up to books as an untended garden is left to its flowers and weeds. There was no selection or sense of order here. In dining-room, study, and nursery, there was choice and arrangement; but the Little Bookroom gathered to itself a motley crew of strays and vagabonds, outcasts from the ordered shelves below, the overflow of parcels bought wholesale by my father in the sales-rooms. Mush trash, and more treasure. Riff-raff and gentlefolk and noblemen. A lottery, a lucky dip for a child who had never been forbidden to handle anything between covers. That dusty bookroom, whose windows were never opened, through whose panes the summer sun struck a dingy shaft where gold specks dance and shimmered, opened magic casements for me through which I looked out on other worlds and times than those I lived in: worlds filled with poetry and prose and fact and fantasy...

Crammed with all sorts of reading, the narrow shelves rose halfway up the walls; their tops piled with untidy layers that almost touched the ceiling. The heaps on the floor had to be climbed over, columns of books flanked the window, toppling at a touch. You tugged at a promising binding, and left a new surge of literature underfoot; and you dropped the book that had attracted you for something that came to the surface in teh upheaval. Here, in the Little Bookroom, I learned, like Charles Lamb, to read anything that can be called a book. The dust got up my nose and made my eyes smart, as I crouched on the floor or stood propped against a bookcase, physically uncomfortable and mentally lost. I was only conscious of the story I was reading, and my heart which was in the story as well." 

There's more to that wonderful introduction, but I will stop there.

Do we want our children to remember our nice, sparkly furniture or our super clean and organized shelves? 

I hope my children can say many things about me when I am gone and they are old. I'm sure they will say I was not a great cook, because I am not. I am terrible. I'm sure they will say I was not the best housekeeper, because I am not. I am terrible. (Sam came downstairs as I was writing this and asked me if I've washed the mattress cover Calvin threw up on last night. "No," I said. "Do you think we have to?" And I was serious. Sam said, that, um, yes. We probably should.) 

But I hope they will say, "Books were everywhere in my home. We ate, drank, and breathed books. Mom wanted us to know about the world, about good and bad, about the lives of others and the lives of incredible, imaginary people. She wanted us to expand our minds and our experiences, every, every minute. So our house was messy. But it was a Little Book-house. And, in the end, we were happy there."

Nonfiction and fiction mixed together in fabulous books

These four picture books are worth reading to your older children, and if they don't want you to read them out loud, leave them in the bathroom. Leave them on the kitchen table. Leave them on their beds. Leave them somewhere and your kids will have ten minutes of amazing art mixed with a great story and a real life individual who made a difference in this world!

For the Birds: the Life of Roger Tory Peterson by Peggy Thomas


Mama Miti by Donna Jo Napoli


Jose! Born to Dance by Susanna Reich


Abe Lincoln Tells a Joke: How Laughter Saved the President (and the country) by Kathleen Krull

When everything comes together...

Friday, I read aloud to Lucy's fifth grade classroom. They were mesmerized by these two books:


A Weave of Words by Robert San Souci


Lincoln Tells a Joke: How Laughter Saved the President (And the Country) by Kathleen Krull

They were mesmerized. They were mesmerized because A Weave of Words is a terribly exciting story. You have to find out what happens. It is awesome, and after that, they were mesmerized by the Abraham Lincoln book because they all knew that Abe Lincoln was honest, but did they know he was funny? And did they know he was funny and relied on his sense of humor in the most dire of circumstances? They didn't, and they loved finding it out.

It was truly awesome. Every ear in that classroom was glued to the words in those stories, even the ESL girl who came here from China only six months earlier.

That is the power of a good story.

Then fast-forward to Saturday. After a cello lesson, I talked with Lucy's teacher for a moment. He came from a home of seven children, not much money, but chock-full of books. Their dad read them Beowulf  out loud at the dinner table. For fun. And all seven children are brilliant. "Idiot Savants," he told me. Then he bemoaned the future of kids today. "None of my students read," he said. "None of them even own a book! And these are children of educated parents who should know better!" His wife is a high school English teacher and she is no longer allowed to have her children read novels like they used to. They now read passages from things. Non-fiction articles. Maybe one or two novels a year.

Not an hour later I was driving to pick Mary up from a rehearsal, musing on what I'd talked about with our cello teacher, and I heard this story on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/19/169798643/new-reading-standards-aim-to-prep-kids-for-college-but-at-what-cost

Listen to this story. It's not long. Eleven minutes. Or you can read the text. Even if your eyes roll to the back of your head when you hear the words Common Core. Even if you think this is just another passing educational craze. Read this article, because you are wrong. The Common Core is serious stuff, and it is completely changing what happens at school for our kids. (Unless you live in Texas, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska which didn't adopt the Core) And we need to know as parents what this means and what is changing in our schools.

Without question, the core will mean that fewer novels are read in school. There isn't the time anymore, teachers have so much to cover, and the emphasis isn't there, so any state, any school, any teacher serious about adopting the Common Core standards is going to assign fewer whole novels.

What does this mean?

It means that it will become an increasingly rare experience for children to fall into a book, read it from beginning to end, and leave hungry for more, like Lucy's class experienced on Friday.

It means that this must now happen at home if we want our kids to love reading. This reading MUST happen at home.

I say this as a frustrated parent. I homeschool my third grader and he reads upwards of two hundred pages a day of literature, social studies, science. He is reading books from every decade, nonfiction books on every subject, novels of every sort. He reads constantly, and I can see it in his comprehension and his writing and just the way he talks in general.

Then there's my first grader who's in the public schools. I've bemoaned before that he will come home from school having not cracked a book. I know that doesn't mean he doesn't read. I know there are words and sentences all around him all day long at school. But he's still not reading, and when he gets home, he's my least likely to crack a book.

But reading—reading—is different than just decoding and deciphering words. We all know this to be true, so why are we taking this away from kids? Why aren't we encouraging it more at home? How many books are in your shelves at home? How many books do your children own themselves? I went to Walmart today. It is very telling that the number of children's books in that store could fit on one/tenth of an aisle, but the movie/video game/technology section of the store takes up an entire corner. I complained about this to Sam, and he said, "It's demand, honey. If people were buying books, Walmart would have a huge section of books."

We could change that. We really could. If people started buying books with the same vigor they bought video games and movies, what would happen in our country? They are estimating now that about fifty-percent of children graduating from high school this year will have to take at least one remedial course in college to get them ready for freshman level courses.

Let's make sure our children do not fit into that fifty percent.



Even if you listen to this article and you agree with David Coleman

Transportation

I don't like the term Historical Fiction.

I majored in History for my undergraduate degree. And though I really do love history, love it, I have a tendency to cringe away from books termed: "Historical Fiction."

It's a term that immediately sounds dry to me. Like a lesson waiting to happen. It also sounds suspicious, because what will I be reading? Something real? Something not so real? How good was the author's research? And on and on the questions go.

But this book—

Between Shades of Gray

(which has the unfortunate distinction of sounding very much like another series of books...)

—changed that for me. Ruta Sepetys creates a vivid world for me, a world I believe in. That doesn't mean I believe Lithuania—or Siberian Prisoner of War Camps—looked just like this in the early 1900s, but I don't think Sepetys, who did extensive, careful research, wants me to think that either.

It doesn't really matter as long as I know this book is fiction. She's dug into the past to create a world, and it is an outstanding world, a world that makes my heart ache and hope—and please, please, read this book. Sam is reading this book and he is loving it. He's out of town right now at a work conference with his brothers and cousins. It's his chance to watch sports on TV (we don't do that here) and ESPN's Sports Center (we really don't do that here), and he told me the other night that rather than watch those things, he really just wanted to be in the quiet of his room reading Between Shades of Gray. 

You have to know Sam to know just how remarkable that is.

It's this book (as well as Sam's growing enjoyment of reading). You read even a few chapters and leave the pages a changed person, a grateful person, a more awake person to the world around you. You feel more passionately about what's important in life. You see truth—the truth about the resilience of mankind, the innate goodness of many, and the tyranny of the few, and for a moment, that truth shuts out all the voices that are telling you you're too fat, you're not rich enough, your home needs some new furniture, you aren't talented enough to do that thing, everyone around you is so much better at everything.

If by chance you've already read Between Shades of Gray, here are a few more books that do this for me. You have to tell yourself that these books are not Historical Fiction (unless you are head-over-heels for that term). You have to tell yourself that these books are fantasy, because that's what all fiction is. Fantasy. But some fantasy is richer and more meaningful than others.

The Fire Horse Girl by Kay Honeyman


The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen (not really historical fiction, but I'm including it)

The Berlin Boxing Club by Robert Sharenow


Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein


To Destroy You is no Loss: the odyssey of a Cambodian family by JoAn Criddle


If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. I'm in the mood right now for fantastical historical fiction! (All of these books I would say are okay for kids twelve and up, but read them first and make your own decision for what you'll recommend for your kids!)

Expanding

These picture books will expand you and your children. They will make you think. You will finish the book in a different place from when you began.

You will never be the same. I hope. Please give them a try!

Infinity and Me by Kate Hosford



Little Bird by Germano Zullo



Abe Lincoln's Dream by Lane Smith



House Held Up By Trees by Ted Kooser


Jimmy the Greatest! by Jairo Buitrago



The Emily Sonnets: The Life of Emily Dickinson




And this is not a picture book. It's a YA Biography of the Bronte sisters, but I found it truly fascinating. If you love Jane Eyre (I do) or Wuthering Heights (I do not), you will definitely find this interesting, and it was such a quick read, I read it in a night.

The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne by Catherine Reef