Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms

I've been coming back to the the same question throughout this semester: what is the purpose of the study of English? I agree with Randy Bomer that is about more than preparing kids for college. We can't do school just to get students ready for more school. What about life after all that? What is the purpose of teaching reading and writing in school if students will not do those kinds of reading and writing in their real lives? If our purpose is to help students build independent literate lives, then the way we "do English" absolutely has to look different.

Starting with the whole-class novel. I have to admit that there are novels that I believe are so amazing and life-changing that I think all kids need to read them. But really? This question about what your reading life will be like once you are out of college struck me (p.71). I stopped reading outside of school once I got to high school and college. I stopped thinking of myself as a reader, and I didn't really have a reading life. My school reading certainly didn't support my own reading life outside of school or even ask me to think about such a life. But isn't that what we want--for kids to see themselves as readers and writers? We need "a curriculum that actually aims directly for these goals rather than hoping for them as a magical outcome of doing something completely different" (p.71). That makes so much sense, so why don't we teach that way?

Katherine Bomer often says that we must teach the writer, not the writing. I think that Randy Bomer is saying much the same thing about reading: teach the reader, not the reading. We have spent too much time in classroom teaching texts, teaching the reading of a certain text. But we have often neglected to teach the reader how to make his or her thinking explicit and how to take those mental actions from one text to the next. I like that these are not strategies that students "put on" their reading, but ways to recognize and refine what they already do when they interact with texts.

It makes so much sense that readers will not get better at reading by holding books in their hands that are too hard for them. It sounds like common sense, but schools subject students to this kind of reading instruction all the time. We absolutely have to cut out the experiences that are hurting kids. I'm not sure why some teachers feel like the more difficult the text, the better it is.

I like the idea of beginning the school year with listening to students talk about their literate lives and investigating their reading and writing lives. I also like  the teaching of conversation (and think it's necessary, especially if talk is such a central part of the classroom).

My last post was about Appleman's Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading, and she has a similar argument that all readers struggle depending on the text and that readers need to have explicit instruction in reading in the context of literature instruction. I feel like Dr. Bomer fills in the pieces that seemed to be missing in Appleman's book, yet I think they had very different purposes and goals for their writing. One way that Dr. Bomer differs from Appleman is in his warning to teachers about including too many activities around reading, too many low-quality assignments. I think Dr. Bomer may feel that a text message conversation between Romeo and Juliet may be one such assignment.

I have also been guilty of being "activity-driven." It's hard to part with the "assignment mania" (p.123) when each lesson plan demands that students demonstrate the day's learning objective. My APs constantly asked us, "How do you know the kids got it?" We feel pressure to have students show what they learned, to produce tangible proof of their learning. But I agree that we need to reduce that clutter around reading. I am wondering, though, about assessment of reading aside from the notebook. I suppose the types of writing in chapter 9 could be assessed, but I would like a bit more on what to do with the unpleasant reality of grades and assessment.

Some favorite snippets:
"Banning literacy from the school day is a bad idea" (p.13). Ha, ha! yet, we do this all the time.
"I want students, through their literacy, to...be able to critique the world as it is, so that they can also imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities" (p.8).