Today a reader, tomorrow a leader (Margaret Fuller)

Currently reading

It's really as simple as that. Read and you shall prosper.

My best successes came on the heels of failures (Barbara Corcoran)

Photo by Alex Zamora on Unsplash

A recent report in Morning Brew indicated that reading and maths scores among high school students in the U.S. have dropped to their lowest levels in 20 years, per new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The downwards trend was evident before covid-19 happened, but it's continued apace since then.

The following are some excerpts from the news article discussing this situation:

“Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,” said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. “These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.”

“The news is not good,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the assessment. “We are not seeing the progress we need to regain the ground our students lost during the pandemic.”

While the pandemic had an outsize impact on student achievement, experts said falling scores are part of a longer arc in education that cannot be attributed solely to COVID-19, school closures and related issues such as heightened absenteeism. Educators said potential underlying factors include children’s increased screen time, shortened attention spans and a decline in reading longer-form writing both in and out of school.

This rings true for New Zealand as well. Anecdotally, this trend has been apparent to me and my English department colleagues for a while. Interesting that it is now backed up by research.

As I've written about recently, I've noticed, for the first time, students flat giving up. Because the task seems impossible, they don't believe in themselves. Their absence rate is also a real factor. 

This is a real worry, and I think school leaders need to be proactive now to consider courses wherein students can gain some confidence via success.

To paraphrase Soldner from above: we need to act now in a concerted and focused way to arrest this decline. 

Or else... 

Take what I say in a different way and it's easy to say that this is all confusion (Yes)

See the big picture (like Ansel Adams)

It's a two week study break from school for us lucky enough to live in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

That means a couple of quick holiday posts in Baggy Trousers along the way as there are always jobs and projects to take care of at home during that time.

While working to get 90% of the population immunised, NZ continues to pursue an elimination strategy with the Covid-19 pandemic and the Delta strain. It's worth noting that one Covid infected guy has resulted in infections climbing to well over 1,000 in Auckland, so this is a good strategy to my mind.

Who knows what state we'll be in by the end of this study break. Hopefully more kiwis get the jab (more on this in Wozza's Place's next post).

We live with the prospect of lockdowns if there are outbreaks before we meet that 90% target so I asked my staff to take everything with them for the study break. Another full lockdown is a distinct possibility.

In the meantime, here's some reading to provoke some thoughts. It's a piece that intrigued me recently.

The article centres on reading habits to retire, and some better strategies to try. Enjoy! 

Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation! (Thomas Oppong)

Photo by Rubén García on Unsplash

It's our duty to read; a responsibility, really. Without reading = poverty of thought.

In our staffroom at school, we talk a lot about reading. What we're reading, where we read, how to teach our students reading, when we are reading, our favourite books, book club books and events...

But we don't often touch on why we read.

Thomas Oppong wrote an interesting piece that I have bookmarked to read in my leisure. His claim is that reading rewires parts of our brain. 

He cites Maryanne Wolf's explanation in her book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain:

Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. . . . Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be reshaped by experience.

This is all important for educators as reading involves several brain functions, including visual and auditory processes, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and more.

It's why we teach our students to read and encourage them to keep up the habit for life.

As an adult, I crave that mental stimulation. I'm proud to say, I'm a reader!

Want another reason it's a good idea to read? Reading every day can slow down late-life cognitive decline and keeps the brain healthier (according to Oppong).

Okay, off to continue reading more of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I took a speed reading course and we read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It concerns Russia (Woody Allen)

The Guardian is awesome.

I considered just having that as my post but I guess I should expand on that simple sentence.

From time to time they run a story about tablets and education.

Being The Guardian though, it's a balanced view and not an alarmist hand wringing exercise.

I particularly liked the suggestion that reading is increasing if anything but as I delved into these statistics I realised that there's nothing much conclusive there, one way or another.

Interesting article though, if you get a chance.

A student recently showed me a suggested reading list for Scholarship English. It was an interesting list with the usual suspects (Brontes, Austen, Dickens, Vonnegut and so on) but standing out like a beacon was the name Haruki Murakami.  

Definitely, he stretches boundaries. I'm currently reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. It's pretty straight forward compared to some of his other novels; these things are relative yunnerstan. And short too. Having finished the three books that make up 19Q4 recently this one is like a short story.

I do love his writing. Here's a pretty much random bit (which isn't meant to be taken literally btw):

At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.

A master class of flair!

I have to sing about the book I read (Talking Heads)

Read this (it's rill cool)!

It's extremely well written, very funny, and very relevant. Go on - you won't regret it. 

The basic idea is that our brains are becoming/have become rewired by the demands of email and social media and addicted to the dopamine rush that accompanies our new emails/Txts so that we are becoming/have become less inclined to read books (and read tortured sentences like that last one).

We want the next hit from our phone or email. Our attention sp...sorry - just had to answer an email...where was I?

I'm sure the irony of signing up for an email newsletter at the end of the article is deliberate!

Currently I'm reading Murakami's 1Q84. It's a beast - three books collected into one volume. I love his stuff. This one is as surreal as he gets. Nothing is what it seems. It's freaky and reminding me of Brunel's film about dreams.

Try this sentence: The scene outside the window suggested that the world had settled in a place somewhere between "being miserable" and "lacking in joy", and consisted of an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped organisms.

Wow!

Anyway - blogging about this and reading that article (go on - READ IT!!) has made me want to go and, um, read some more. So, see ya!

Why don't you go do the same?

Up tight thoughts into the state of my mind (The Phoenix Foundation)

The joy of reading!

I've always loved to read stuff (comics, books, magazines, newspapers mainly)

It came as a bit of a shock to read a blogpost recently about how teachers kill the joy of reading and find out I may be guilty of this crime.

The blogger (Mark Barnes) highlighted 6 ways we kill reading.

Here they are:

1 Clinging to the classroom novel - it eliminates choice. Guilty!
2 The don't-read-ahead directive. Mark -  why would a teacher ever tell a child to stop reading–especially when he chooses to do so outside of class? Not Guilty!
3 Telling kids what they can't read (as I said - comics, graphic novels - whatever gets you going - it's alright with me - so Not Guilty!
4 Not reading in class daily. Mark - Readers read daily; it’s this simple. Guilty!
5 Assigning worksheets and book reports. Mmm himm - Guilty!
6 Not celebrating the joy of reading. Not in an overt way so - Guilty again.

That makes four out of six guilty verdicts. 

According to Mark I'm killing the joy of reading. I need to stop because I love reading.