Tag Archives: reading

Two More Things about Teaching

Two More Things about Teaching

 

There are two more things that I think need said about teaching as we arrive at the middle of the 2020s. The first centers around the subject I teach, English, but more specifically reading skills. The second is student achievement, not just in English, but in academics in general. These come from observations, both from myself and others who teach and others who teach English.

Student achievement in reading, and in writing as it follows closely with reading, is declining at a rapid pace. I started noticing it just before I left teaching for a few years back in 2013 and saw what I have now concluded as the continuing trend in reading when I returned to the classroom in 2023. Students are not reading as well in the classroom, but also outside of the classroom. It is rare that students read anything aside from social media posts on a voluntary basis outside of the classroom. Our classroom curriculum has done almost nothing to remedy this either as most schools no longer issue textbooks nor have classroom sets of good novels to use. Aside from when I taught Advanced Placement English and International Baccalaureate English, most reading done by students consists of short stories, at best, and very short articles at the least. These are usually available in easier formats where students are not pushed to learn higher levels of vocabulary or handle sentence complexity as what was once taught. Students are mainly required to answer multiple-choice questions or short answers of no more than a couple of sentences when using these texts.

Worse yet, their ability to read is measured by computerized programs that allegedly test students reading skills to place them into remedial reading classes called RTI interventions. The focus is not on whether a student can read, understand, and grapple with a text with any complexity, but rather on data from these programs that supposedly show whether a student has progressed with building the skills necessary to read. The reading passages in these programs are supposed to be high interest to students, yet most students find them boring or even condescending. Three times per year, students are subjected to having to complete a reading diagnostic using these computer based programs that consists of multiple choice questions and short answer questions involving no higher level thinking skills and that lack the ability for a student to bring in their prior knowledge of what is being read.

The teachers, as well as their students, are then subjected to being evaluated on the data from these programs. The data is more important than the learning that is supposed to be occurring in our classrooms. The data is flawed from the start though. The data does not measure the true ability of the student to interact with a text. Student interaction with a text is more than the ability to answer multiple choice questions or write one to two sentences to respond to a question. Students should be challenged to engage with a text and formulate their own answers which they can defend and which utilize higher level thinking skills.

In short, these programs are only helping to exacerbate the problem and continue to perpetuate students not wanting to read either within or outside of the classroom. Their concern with data has replaced actual thought. Let me say that again in a different way. Data collection has replaced actual thought when it comes to what is important in schools and that is dumbing down our students and, in turn, our society.

The remedy is simple, tried, and true. Students must be imbued with the desire to read at a young age. They must be encouraged to read even before they have the skills to read. How?

First is that they need to be read to by caregivers, parents, grandparents, guardians, teachers, other adults, and yes, over conservative types, drag queens. Students must see adults reading quality literature, popular fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, nonfiction, and whatever good reading there is to be read. Ideally in the form of published, paper-based books, but even e-readers will suffice. Children will want to read first because they see others reading.

Once they have developed some reading skills, then read along with them. That reading along can be another person or, if necessary, an audiobook of the same one they hold in their hands and read. Hearing the words while seeing them helps to develop reading skills. Children can learn pronunciations and even some context clue skills when they hear as well as read a text.

Yet, this cannot be done in isolation. There must be someone, parent or teacher, to be there to discuss what is being read with our students. Not necessarily to tell them what something they read means, but to talk with them about what they read, asking them questions about what they read, and helping them build a connection with what they read based on their experiences, observations, or thoughts. This builds understanding of a text on an intimate level and that leads to the reader not only seeing words on a page but also being able to recall and connect with a text and make meaning from what they have read.

None of this can be measured through a computer-based reading program. It must be measured on a student-by-student, text-by-text basis with human interactions. It is not teaching for performance on a test nor even always for an essay being written, but for the gaining of knowledge in some way from the reading of a text. That is a foundational core for education. Reading for understanding and being able to articulate and inculcate that understanding long after the reading is done.

That brings me to my next point, that of academic achievement. One of the primary reasons why students, particularly students in the United States, are falling behind students in other nations is that education is not valued here in the United States like it is in other countries nor like it once was valued here in the United States. It has less to do with curriculum than it does with how parents and our society views education. We talk a good game about wanting to increase student achievement, but then we fall back on data centered, mandatory, standardized testing thinking that will actually measure student achievement. It doesn’t measure anything except how well a student can take a test or how well our schools have done in preparing students on how to take a test.

Yet even that doesn’t matter when the students don’t come to school or don’t come prepared to learn. A recent article in NEA Today (May 2025) shows that the rate of chronic absenteeism in schools went from 16.2% in 2018-2019 to 28% in 2022-2023 (NEA Today 15). The article concludes by saying that the “majority of schools still had a chronic absence rate of 20 percent or higher” (NEA Today 15).

 These are not pandemic numbers. These are pre-pandemic and post-pandemic numbers. We cannot expect our students to improve their achievement levels if they don’t show up for school. Chronic absenteeism is when a student misses at least “10 percent or more school days over a school year—or about 18 days” (NEA Today 15). Yes, students get sick and should be kept away from school if they are contagious. However, chronic absenteeism usually goes beyond student illnesses. Parent(s) or guardian(s) who don’t care if their child goes to school are the problem here. Much like as adults we need to go to work to earn a living, students need to go to school to earn knowledge. They cannot learn, even in this age of technology, if they are not there and if they do not make up the work they miss when they are not there.

But I will take this a step further. Students who come to school must also be prepared to learn when they are there. So many students come to school without paper, pencils, pens, and other school supplies necessary for them to learn. While sometimes schools can afford to supply these or even teachers have them in their rooms, that supply is not guaranteed nor should it be expected that schools or teachers supply students with these things. And additionally, students must come with an attitude for learning. While school has a social component to it, students must be taught by their parent(s)/guardian(s) that their primary job while at school is to learn. That means no phone out during class, not having their school supplied computers logged into video games and not leaving class unnecessarily. That means not disrupting class or interrupting a lesson or discussion. It means treating school like a job, a job to gain as much knowledge as possible in order to do whatever it is that they aspire to do once they graduate. Just as adults have to focus on their jobs while at work, students must focus on their learning while at school during those times when they are in class. Showing up means showing up prepared and focused on learning, not just being a warm body sitting at a desk.

Improving reading skills and overall student achievement is easy. It just seems to be the implementation of what is needed is lacking.

 

Works Cited

“Chronic Absenteeism Is Still Too High”. NEA Today. May 2025, pp. 15.

It’s Time to Desegregate English Classrooms

“I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it…. No, I do not weep at world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”—Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow, 1928.

Can you feel the strength and soul of the author in this quote? I hope so, because Zora Neale Hurston, along with her contemporaries of the Harlem Renaissance and her modern contemporaries of today are exactly what is needed in the reading curriculum of our schools. Yet, Zora Neale Hurston is often overlooked at best. When, or rather if, the Harlem Renaissance is taught, it is but a blip on the radar in most English classes in this country. The same rings true for most authors who are not white. They may appear in brief cameos in our English classrooms, but that’s about it. Instead, our students read primarily dead white writers from the supposed “canon” of English literature. Talk about a travesty of an education. It is nothing more than academic white privilege when writers of color are ignored or minimized rather than taught.

Now, before anyone misunderstands me, I feel it is important to read the classics. There are lessons to be learned from the great writers of the “canon” of literature. I am not advocating the abolition of reading Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Twain, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or the like. They need to be read and the historical context of when they write must be taught alongside of their works of literature for they are inter-related and a piece of our collective history as a human race.
However, the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Sojourner Truth, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, James Weldon Johnson, Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and countless others need to be taught as well. Not glanced over, but actually taught to our students. Yes, this list includes writers who are Black, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, and Asian. That’s the point.

Of these authors of color, I want to single out the authors who are Black, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement and the necessity of our schools helping to give our Black students, and indeed reminding the Black community as well of their vital heritage and culture, role models from the Black community instead of making them read only white authors all of the time.
I cannot count the number of times I have spoken with students who are Black and they have never heard of Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or Zora Neale Hurston. It is appalling, but not surprising. I taught middle and high school English in Florida for about 12 years. I literally taught about 35 miles from Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville and there were students, and a few teachers, who had never heard of her. That is egregious!

It is imperative that students see and read authors who look like them in order for them to see the richness of their cultural heritage instead of only the cultural heritage of white authors of European descent. I propose that all school districts come up with a curriculum that requires the reading and study of authors of color alongside the traditional canon of literature. While it will not solve the racial issues we have as a country, it will help to desegregate the literature read and foster communication and understanding through literature by having students read authors from across cultural and ethnic lines.

Additionally, when students read authors who look like them and share similar cultural experiences as they do, it encourages reading, boosts self-esteem/self-image, and provides positive role models for them. All of those, in turn, help students achieve better in school and in life. In addition, when students who are not normally exposed to other cultures read authors from differing cultures, it enhances understanding and empathy, promotes tolerance, and helps society as a whole.

I know this because I witnessed it on a small scale when I taught middle and high school English in schools that varied from having a homogeneous student body to ones having a more diverse student body. While it did not eliminate racial or cultural issues, it did alleviate them. I also saw the faces of students who read, for the first time, a book by an author from their cultural/racial background. It was like a light appeared for them. They saw how an author who looked like them could write and tell a story that mattered. In many cases, I would deliberately take books from authors of varying cultures and present them to students based on common themes. The discussions my classes had were amazing as they made connections between the books, their lives, and the lives of their classmates. Students learned so much about one another as well as themselves, and the literature. That is real learning. That is what we need to be doing in our schools.